As the main artery of international commerce, merchant shipping was the world's first globalised industry, often serving as a vanguard for issues touching on labour recruiting, the employment relationship, and regulatory enforcement that crossed national borders. In Sweatshops at Sea, historian Leon Fink examines the evolution of laws and labour relations governing ordinary seamen over the past two centuries.

The merchant marine offers an ideal setting for examining the changing regulatory regimes applied to workers by the United States, Great Britain, and, ultimately, an organised world community. Fink explores both how political and economic ends are reflected in maritime labour regulations and how agents of reform--including governments, trade unions, and global standard-setting authorities--grappled with the problems of applying land-based, national principles and regulations of labour discipline and management to the sea-going labour force. With the rise of powerful nation-states in a global marketplace in the nineteenth century, recruitment and regulation of a mercantile labour force emerged as a high priority and as a vexing problem for Western powers. The history of exploitation, reform, and the evolving international governance of sea labour offers a compelling precedent in an age of more universal globalisation of production and services.