Looking for work: a labor history of the Atlantic coast.

Abstract

This study demonstrates how the recent history of the Atlantic Coast has been written mainly as an account of a fragmented series of so called «external» interventions and their mainly negative consequences for the coastal economy, ecology, and its population. Although these descriptions and explanations consider the effects of these «interventions» on the lives of the coastal people, they represent the position of the various interveners. This approach is its inability to deal with the different ways in which the coastal people have tried to come to terms with the interventions. To pay attention to people's perspectives on (coastal) history, we require a different methodology that avoids viewing coastal history as one specific movement of forces or stream of events. To demonstrate one of the basic features of coastal economic development its instability and the uncertainties that come with economic ups and downs and the ways in which the local population has dealt and continues to deal with this, I present the multifaceted labor history of Santiago Rivas.