The rapid development of commercial capitalism in the eighteenth century transformed political, social and cultural structures of life in early modern France and its colonies. It wove together an increasingly global world by speeding goods and people across oceans. This dissertation examines the social consequences of capitalist deterritorialization in the first French Empire. The ship stands as a key technology that propelled the emergence of France as a commercial power in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the ocean is most often represented as the gap between points on sweeping maps that trace the travel of sugar, indigo, calicos and captive people. For historians of the slave trade, the Middle Passage has often held a paradoxical status, an origin point for diasporic communities amid an abyss of human loss. In contrast, maritime historians have illuminated the ship as a site of traditional workshop relations, or as a nursery anti-capitalist and anti-state radicalism. This dissertation brings new archival material to historiographic debates about commerce, labor, and slavery to reassess these visions of oceanic social worlds. It exposes the ship as a central site of capitalist spatial and social formation in the eighteenth century, while challenging conceptualizations of capitalist space as an untextured web of connection. By placing Africans at the forefront of the study, it reveals deep continuities in the commodification of all social bonds at sea. African captives, forced into the Middle Passage, composed the majority of people on these long-distance voyages, and their encounter with capitalism exposes in the barest terms the aspirations of early modern capitalists and the gravitational pull of the market, as it subsumed and redefined social bonds. This close look at capitalist social formation at sea reveals a world formed through the fusion of human and economic bonds and propelled by the threat of social and physical annihilation.

The first chapters illuminate the processes by which women, men and children ordered their social worlds at sea. Addressing the captives held aboard ship in chapter one, and crewmen and officers in chapter two, this section discusses rites, labor and trade as practices of social ordering aboard ship. These chapters reveal the social meanings that adhered to claims of economic possession and the processes by which people at sea forged bonds of belonging. Childbirth and the accompanying rites, as well as breastfeeding and childcare, surface as significant social engines among women aboard slaving ships, whereas the unusual isolation of men, captive and free, forced alternative strategies to secure care and life-giving necessities. The final two chapters turn to points of contact between social groups. In chapter three, I trace the rise of the market as a force of social ordering and the falling away of religion and other institutions and practices as avenues of solidarity at sea. My final chapter takes as its starting point the predominance of death at sea and the problem of ordering the dead in oceanic graves. It demonstrates that death grounded this seaborne social world, even as it ravaged communities aboard ship.