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Capitalism and Mobility in the North Atlantic

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Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism

Part of the book series: Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology ((CGHA))

Abstract

Conventional narratives of capitalism have identified cores and peripheries, metropoles and colonies where power and wealth is unevenly distributed across regions, which are nonetheless tied together through an expanding network of capital. The North Atlantic often remains at the margins in these accounts. We question this marginality by identifying two major forms of mobility within the network, migratory and diasporic, and discuss their consequences for understanding the spread and consolidation of capitalism in the region. We suggest that seasonal mobility connected to trade and the exploitation of resources as well as more permanent movements such as emigration/immigration and displacement of communities can be seen as a condition, consequence and obstacle for capitalism.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Mark Leone for inviting us to write this chapter and make recent research in the North Atlantic more widely known. We would also like to thank Natascha Mehler and Ragnar Edvardsson for kindly providing us with photographs from their research and allowing us to publish them.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Archaeology, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland

    Gavin Lucas

  2. Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland

    Ágústa Edwald

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Correspondence to Gavin Lucas .

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  1. University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

    Mark P. Leone

  2. Washington, District of Columbia, USA

    Jocelyn E. Knauf

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Lucas, G., Edwald, Á. (2015). Capitalism and Mobility in the North Atlantic. In: Leone, M., Knauf, J. (eds) Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12760-6_10

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