The friend of Havelock Wilson, the founder of the National Union of Seamen, who once told him that true unity among seamen would never be achieved because seamen were like “a rope of sand”, washed away with every tide, would no longer be considered a sage. It was not only Wilson who, during his career as trade unionist, proved beyond any doubt that the “rope of sand” could indeed hold together. The seamen, too, had shown long before the rise of the new unions at the end of the nineteenth century that they possessed more cohesive power than Havelock's friend was prepared to credit them with – at least, if British employers are to be believed. One of the first occasions on which British employers appealed to the Combination Act of 1799 was during a labour dispute in December 1799, when coal merchants (through the intermediary of the Mayor of London) urged the Home Secretary to take action against an alleged combination of seamen in Shields. The Coal Trade Committee of 1800 blamed combinations of seamen for the high wages, which had reached an unprecedented level.

The emergence of wage labour in Europe has traditionally been seen as a transition from peasant agriculture to employment in urban industries involving permanent migration from rural areas to the cities. In this context migration was often depicted as a flight from the land forced by enclosure or by famine. This particular form of proletarianization-cumurbanization was indeed of major historical significance. Recently, how-ever, many historians have tried to shift the emphasis in another direction. According to one such scholar, Charles Tilly, European demographic growth from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century was caused predominantly by the proletarianization outside the cities which was induced by the modernization of agriculture and, above all, by proto-industry. Migration also plays an important role in this model. Firstly, early modern European proletarianization led to net migration losses of European proletarians who left for white settlement colonies, as in the cases of Spain, England and southern Germany. Secondly, proletarianization had major mobilizing effects on the rural population by way of short-distance and temporary or seasonal migration, followed by long-distance migration during the nineteenth century. As a rule, proto-industry caused indirect proletarianization through self-employment which brought the work to the labourers rather than causing migration.