South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.

and that constituted by the Afro-Asian sailors. Ballantyne rightly emphasises the lateral connections between colonies, rather than simply fixating on colonial links to Britain. As he says, such ‘horizontal’ connections have been underplayed in the historiography, because they transgress the boundaries of metropolitan-focussed imperial history or studies framed within the boundaries of individual colonies. He might have added that anti-colonial nationalist historians have largely been equally reluctant to think outside the framework of metropolis–colony linkages and of national boundaries.

      In sum, then, what I am proposing is that it is helpful to think of the British Empire as a set of overlapping webs, and for our purposes three of these are crucial: the webs of the shipping companies, of British diasporic labour and of Indian Ocean seafarers. The web metaphor enables us not only to capture how existing patterns constrained and directed certain flows of activity, but also to escape simple hydraulic models of domination and resistance. I will outline some of the features of these webs and attempt to show how African, Asian and British sailors shaped their world in interaction with one another and with the constraints and opportunities presented to them by imperial organisation.

      The first layer of the web that I wish to explore is that created by the British Empire’s shipping companies. The transition from sail to steam was not instantaneous. Although the first steamship to go from Britain to India around the Cape was as early as 1825, the original steam technology, with its paddle wheels and vast consumption of coal, was not a really viable basis for tackling the vast distances of the mid-Indian Ocean (Roff, 2000). It was only after ships using screw propellers and efficient engines had been fully developed that, around 1880, the sailing ship began to really give way to the steamship on a huge scale. Throughout the period from then to the Second World War, over half the tonnage of ships in the world consisted of British merchant marine vessels – the adoptively, but enthusiastically, British mariner Joseph Conrad (2004:159) recalled in later life that the ‘red duster’ flag of the United Kingdom’s merchant fleet ‘prevailed to such an extent that one always experienced a slight shock in seeing some other combination of colour blow out at peak or flagpole of any chance encounter in deep water’. This fleet was pivotal in holding together the global economy. Throughout the period, virtually all intercontinental transport of goods and passengers rested on it. Between 1850 and 1913 global per capita output rose by 90 per cent, but transnational trade grew sixteenfold (total carrying capacity grew by 279 per cent, but the greater speed of steamships meant that they could make far more voyages than a sailing ship in the same time) (Fischer & Panting, 1995).

      It is also important to note that the relationship among shipping employees, capital and the British state was not one in which class and racial hierarchies were simply congruent. Small but significant pockets of Asian ship-owning capital existed under the empire. The young lawyer M. K. Gandhi was first brought to South Africa to represent the interests of the Natal-based steamship owners Dada Abdulla, part of a fairly substantial stratum of steamship owners from India that formed in this period. By 1939, 23 per cent of coastal shipping in India was locally owned (Desai, 1939:17). By the late 19th century the sultan of Zanzibar, the king of Burma, the Thai authorities and the Sultan of Oman had all bought steamships. The successful Straits Steamship Company was controlled by Singapore Chinese capital (MacKenzie, 2004:120). As such companies often employed British captains and engineers, this produced some complex reversals of imperial racial hierarchy. The Syrian-American traveller Ameen Rihani gave this rendition of the comments of the master of a ship on which he sailed, a Captain Hay, who was employed by a Parsi-owned company based in Aden:

      I was Captain of a Transatlantic liner before the war, and here I am now on one of Kawasji’s tubs getting barely one-fifth of what I used to get from an English company, What’s to be done? Kawasji’s few rupees are better than idleness in Liverpool (Rihani, 1930:175).

      The second web layer was that of the African, Asian and Caribbean mariners who played a major part in providing the labour that kept the steamships running. This was especially the case in the Indian Ocean, where South Asian, Arab, Somali, East African, Chinese and Malayan sailors were indispensable to the viability of the British merchant fleet. Syed Ali would, in his day, have been described by the British – and possibly by his colleagues and himself – as a ‘lascar’. Technically, a lascar was specifically a seaman from India. But the inevitable mixture of sailors of varying nationalities in all ports meant that it was often used to describe all Asian and East African seamen (although generally not West Africans and Caribbeans).

      In understanding where the crews of the steamship era came from, it is important to recognise the flows between the world of the steamship and the worlds that both preceded it and existed alongside it. Bose (2006) has shown how the economy of the modern British Empire was largely dependent for its penetration into the Afro-Asian world on the retail networks of Asian traders. In the same way, it may be suggested that initially there was a great deal of reliance by British ships on the existence of a pool of Afro-Asian seafarers. Although, for reasons to be explained, increasingly seamen were recruited from inland areas, men from communities with a tradition of seafaring participated in both sectors and moved between them in pursuit of their personal objectives. As late as 1939 over a hundred ocean-going dhows were operating out of Kuwait, and only the hostility of post-war African nationalist regimes to Indian and Arab commerce and the availability of cheap motorised technology seem to have brought this centuries-old trade to a final end (Villiers, 1969). Ewald (2000) highlights the persistence of dhow-borne African slavery in the north-west Indian Ocean into the 20th century, and the flow of ex-slaves into dock labour in the ports of that region and into steamship work. By the 1870s Africans were working on steamships out of Aden and in the same period members of an African community based in Bombay were working on steamships, many of them being freed slaves left in India by British patrol ships. ‘Seedis’, as the Africans were known, became especially predominant in the stokeholds of the P&O, the largest of the British Indian Ocean shipping companies, in the late 19th century. In his classic account of his voyage as a crewman on a dhow travelling from southern Arabia in 1938 and 1939, the Australian sailor and author Alan Villiers (1969:75–77) provides a suggestive anecdote. On board was a Seyyid (a descendant of the Prophet) from Mukalla in the Hadhramaut of southern Arabia, travelling as a passenger and following his commercial interests in East Africa. The Seyyid had not only spent eight years working in the stokeholds of British ships, but had also been an automobile worker in Detroit. Villiers discovered that although the Seyyid did not speak English, he had a good command of Polish, the prevailing language in the Detroit industrial suburb of Hamtramck, where he had lived. The story suggests both how the boundaries of dhow and steamship worlds were quite porous and how a sailor might be able to move along the networks of the web from a proletarian position across the sea to end his career in his home in a position of relative economic socio-strength.

      Although southern African historians are well aware of the pre-colonial trade route connections with the east coast dhow trade in the region, it tends to be assumed that by the late 19th century this was no longer a factor. While the dhow trade never seems to have extended to the coast of present-day South Africa, it did reach the southern limit of Mozambique in the late 19th century. When the Durban mariner Alex Anderson (1925:18) sailed to the Mozambique coast in 1869, he found ‘large Arab dhows’ in port, which still made voyages directly across the Indian Ocean to India. Anderson (1925:20–21) also found dates, palm wine and Indian prints on sale, commodities likely to have been transported by dhows.

      It is possible to identify a number of major ‘nodes’ where Indian Ocean seafarers were recruited to British steamships. Firstly, there were seafarers who primarily worked out of the three great subcontinental ports of Calcutta, Bombay and Karachi, although originating from a very wide range of localities on the Indian subcontinent (and beyond it). Secondly, Aden and, to a much lesser extent, Mogadishu were the centres for Arabian and Somali sailors and for sailors from the Swahili coast of East Africa. Finally, Malay and Chinese sailors came through Singapore. Indian sailors were supposed to sign distinct ‘articles’ (employment contracts) when they were recruited in India that differed from those under which sailors were taken on in Aden or Singapore, but regional demarcation was not so strict in practice. British officials were often too ignorant to assess the origins of sailors in foreign ports; for example, many Indian seamen signed on as ‘Malay’ in Singapore to take advantage of better pay or