The building of the Dutch Atlantic empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries required massive amounts of labor, from the shipyards and loading docks of the Dutch Republic to commercial farms in New Netherland, from the fortresses in Dutch Brazil and on the West-African coast to the Caribbean plantation economies. The transportation of hundreds of thousands of Africans to work as slaves in the Americas was the most striking feature of this transoceanic labor system, but in many settings these enslaved laborers encountered, or even worked side by side, wage laborers. The central aim of this research project is to examine how the interaction of legally ?free? wage laborers, indentured laborers and the enslaved affected notions and practices of work and social control, as well as forms of solidarity across social and racial boundaries. This will add to our understanding of one of the great paradoxes of early modern history: the puzzling fact that the same nations that were central to the development of enlightenment discourse on freedom (England, France, the Dutch Republic), also stood at the center of commercial empires that operated on the basis of the massive use of semi-forced, forced and enslaved labor.