Until the Very Last Nail: English Seafaring and Wage Litigation in Seventeenth-Century Livorno

Abstract

We still do not know much about sailors’ wage contracts in the early modern age. Agreements between employers and hired workers were almost always settled orally and consequently have left scant documentary traces. In the port of Livorno, an important Mediterranean crossroads, work-related lawsuits were often quickly resolved by a judge or private arbitrators without producing written documents. Nevertheless, the Tuscan judicial and notarial archives do permit us to have some idea of the world of maritime wages. Formal judgments were sometimes inevitable, either because of the seriousness of the issue or the differences of opinion regarding the relevant legal criteria. The various nationalities of the petitioners and the problems in coordinating different laws and customs aggravated conflicts and resulted in the search for solutions offering greater official guarantees. This chapter reviews Tuscan documentary sources regarding maritime wage lawsuits while also trying to define the case record of the disputes, at least concerning English seafaring and wage litigation in the second half of the seventeenth century.

I would like to thank Lisa Lillie and Noor Giovanni Mazhar for the translation of this essay.