“Think globally, act locally.” The sentiment expressed by this once popular bumper sticker inspired generations of idealistic college students to protest working conditions in Asian sweatshops that produced the athletic apparel worn by local sports stars. Leon Fink's Sweatshops at Sea, with its cover illustration of the “black gang” at work in the stokehold of an ocean liner, seems to promise an exposé of abusive working conditions onboard, but—as the author admits on page 2—“the seafarers themselves are as often the objects as the subjects of the story.” Instead, the book's subject is better indicated by its subtitle, Merchant Seamen in the World's First Globalized Industry, From 1812 to the Present; that is, this is a book about the governance of industrial relations at sea over the last 200 years. For the nineteenth century, “Britannia ruled the waves.” Thereafter, as “flags of convenience” multiplied, the seafaring industry became truly global.

This is “engaged scholarship”; history written with a purpose: “what happens on the world's waters is likely to tell us a great deal about the possibilities of humane governance in a globalized world economy” (6). Shipping was the first major United States industry to be “outsourced”—initially to the United Kingdom, then to multinational corporations—and the United States Seamen's Act of 1915, sponsored by Senator “Fighting Bob” La Follette, was the nation's first serious legislative response to globalization's impact on the United States workplace. Somewhat surprisingly, given the current concerns about declining labor conditions worldwide, Fink concludes on a positive note: “a transnational regulatory regime …, combining the powers of government and international agencies, labor unions, and employer associations …suggests a hopeful, however imperfect, model of governance” (201–202).

The course that Fink charts to that more-or-less happy ending is covered in three stages. Part I, “Mastered and Commanded” (with a tip of the hat to Patrick O'Brian's popular Aubrey-Maturin novels), begins with the War of 1812—from the maritime point of view a war fought over a labor issue, the impressment of United States citizens to serve on British vessels. A decade later, labor in United States waters intersected another sensitive national issue when Southern states began to adopt Negro Seamen's Acts in response to fears of slave insurrections coordinated by skilled and mobile black seamen. From the African-American point of view, “the sea often represented a realm of relative freedom” (50), similar to the opportunity later offered by another form of transportation, the railroad, which empowered African-American Pullman porters. Although Fink denies that his book is “social history,” he includes an insightful, if selective, digression on the antebellum law and literature of seafaring, with references ranging from James Fenimore Cooper to Edward Everett Hale.

Part II, “Strategies of Reform,” centers on the parliamentary campaign of the English gentleman-reformer, Samuel Plimsoll, who literally left his mark on every sailing vessel, signaling the turning of the tide against classical liberalism and in the direction of what A.V. Dicey called “collectivism”—and in the process establishing the precedent of obstruction as an effective parliamentary tactic. Plimsoll had his imitators abroad. Indeed, Fink awards the title of the “Plimsoll of Australia” twice, first to Sam Smith (70), then to Robert Storrie Guthrie (153).

The title of Part III, “A World Fit for Seafarers?” restates David Lloyd George's promise to World War I veterans with a question mark. Rather too casually, Fink takes employer organization for granted, focusing instead on the rise of the instruments of the regulatory state and the tortuous struggle within the seafarer unions, torn between international organization and nationalist protectionism—“acting locally” with a vengeance. By the early twenty-first century, the vectors of capital, labor, and government had combined to produce a model of labor regulation that resembled “social service agencies rather than democratic, worker-centered unions” (6).

Little is made of seamen's direct industrial action (the workers as subjects rather than objects), and it is striking that Fink fails even to mention the fact that the word commonly used to describe a concerted stoppage of work in any industry was borrowed from the practice of discontented eighteenth-century sailors to lower or “strike” the sails. Also, perhaps because his attention is distracted by leading United States Supreme Court decisions, Fink fails to notice the decision in Alaska Packers' Association v. Domenico, 117 F. 99 (Cir. Ct. App., 9th Cir. 1902), familiar to all first-year law students, that performance of obligations under an existing contract cannot form the consideration for a later promise to pay a greater amount – a case that arose from a dispute between an employer association and maritime laborers. Finally, I was somewhat mystified by Fink's failure to explain his passing reference to “the dreaded ‘fink’ books” in footnote 62 (233).