into the US Navy's frequently forgotten Pacific operations during the mid-nineteenth century. Built in California, the Saginaw saw early service on the Far China Station. She protected American interests against an irregular piratical force in Asia and participated in the Taiping Rebellion. Returning to rhe West Coast after the outbreak of the Civil War, the gunboat and her crew kept the West Coast safe from the threat of privateers, foiled plots to attack the Mare Navy Yard, and patrolled southward to suppress potential Confederate agent activity there. After the Civil War, USS Saginaw was ordered to the newly purchased territory of Alaska. The ship spent much of the time conducting survey work bur also took part in the retribution on the Kake-Kon tribe, seen as warlike and troublesome by the American Government. After only a year in Alaska, the Saginaw was sent to Midway Island to establish a naval station. Here the warship supported dredging operations for deepening the channel into the harbor. During her trip back to San Francisco, the Saginaw steamed too close to Kure Island, where she wrecked on the coral reef of the atoll. The survival story of the officers and men, including the 1,500mile small-boat voyage taken by five of the crew to notify authorities, is riveting. The last part of rhe book deals with rhe discovery of the wreck by the author and a team of NOAA archaeologists. The documentation of the remains and the artifacts completes the ship's story. Anyone interested in the US Navy's early Pacific Ocean operations and the federal government's interaction with the region's cultures would do well to read this book. ROBERT BROWNING, PttD Dumfries, Virginia
Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World's First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present by Leon Fink (University ofNorth Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2011, 288pp, illus, no res, biblio, index, ISBN 978-0-8078-3450-3; $34.95hc) Initially I approached this book with a mixture of apprehension and anticipation. The thought crossed my mind that this might be another derivative diatribe from the Left, the "woulda-shoulda-coulda" story that labor historians so often tell. Yer I was eager to read 54
this book, too, because it promised to shed new light on the lives of twentieth-century commercial seafarers, a grossly under-studied topic when one considers the massive scholarship on mariners in the Age of Sail. To my relief, this is not the same old story of labor unions, but an original, engaging, witty, and, yes, important study of seafarers and their struggle for improved working conditions from 1812 to the present day. With time to think about it, I am a bit shamefaced about my initial concerns regarding this work. Leon Fink is an eminent scholar with impeccable academic credentials and editor of the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. Is he left-wing? Most assuredly, but he doesn't let that get in the way of solid scholarship and good writing. Furthermore, as an historian who specializes in the "new labor history" and as a proponent of comparative history, he possesses unique and powerful credentials to consider seafaring labor within a broad international context. While academically rigorous, he also writes with grace, humor, and wit, and deftly skewers the academic jargon so many maritime historians use these days that limits their audience to other academics only. The scope of the book is broad in terms of both rime and space. Fink traces maritime labor problems from impressment in rhe Age of Sail right through the STCW (Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping) licensing requirements of today. Geographically, he starts in the AngloAmerican Atlantic world and expands to consider global shipping issues. A salient point made early in this work and carried throughout is that Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations essentially excused the maritime industry from his free-market views because he regarded it as central to the strategic welfare of the nation-state. His handling of impressment is less convincing, bur it does address the important issue of the narionsrare's control over rhe bodies and labor of its citizens. Given that Fink's academic roots are in rhe Progressive Era, it should be little surprise that this section of the book is his strongest and most nuanced, dealing with important issues such as reformers like Samuel Plimsoll. The later chapters on the twentieth century also provide useful insights into how seafarers organized internationally, gradually overcoming boundaries of race and
nationality. After the Second World War the heavily unionized merchant fleets of the West offered high wages and increasingly lucrative fringe benefits. As Fink argues, they were able to do so because the unions fostered close relations with governments that need strong merchant fleets for strategic reasons and, therefore, protected and subsidized commercial fleets. As the deregulation movements led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher swept through the United States and Britain, shipping companies and labor unions found themselves our in the cold; companies folded, and union membership shrank. The irony is that Reagan and Thatcher invoked free-marker principles based on their understanding of Adam Smith-minus the special status for the merchant marine. By 1990, with most subsidies and protection stripped away, globalization had internationalized the shipping industry, with Flag of Convenience (FOC) ships from Liberia, Panama, and similar nations dominating the world's sea lanes. These vessels operated with largely Asian crews, who worked for very low wages and endured poor working conditions on the largely unregulated FOC ships. Globalization thus seems to have crushed the commercial fleets of the traditional western maritime nations. But Fink finds that labor was able to globalize in this instance, too. In the last chapter he traces the efforts of the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) to organize seafarers around the world, from developed nations and the third world. The ITF was remarkably successful; by 2008 it was able to expand its agreements to cover almost three quarters of all seafarers on the planet, creating a truly global trade unionism for seafarers, a rare success story for organized labor in the twenty-first century. In sum, this is truly an important book, and a well-written one. Labor and maritime historians alike should read it to understand the broad sweep of maritime labor relations in the last 200 years. General readers will find that his straight-forward prose often reads like an article in the Atlantic Monthly rather than an academic monograph. He also engages maritime literature to flesh our his arguments, including the novels of Joseph Conrad, Claude McKay, and the playwright Eugene O'Neill. The SEA HISTORY 136, AUTUMN 2011