Download or read book Seafaring Labour written by Eric W. Sager and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1996 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sager argues that sailors were not misfits or outcasts but were divorced from society only by virtue of their occupation. The wooden ships were small communities at sea, fragments of normal society where workers lived, struggled, and often died. With the coming of the age of steam, the sailor became part of a new division of labour and a new social hierarchy at sea. Sager shows that the sailor was as integral to the transition to industrial capitalism as any land worker.