South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.

statistics on the size of this workforce are hard to pin down. An often-cited statistic is that in 1914 ‘lascars’ constituted 17.5 per cent of all sailors on British-registered ships, something over 50,000 men (Dixon, 1980:265). In 1935 the number of Indian seamen was put at 59,000, the fourth-highest number for any country compared to Britain, which had just under 153,000 seamen (Desai, 1939). However, east of Suez the proportion was undoubtedly much higher than this, and one has to be sceptical about how accurate the figures are in such a complex realm. Dinkar Desai, a lawyer and writer involved with the trade unions in Bombay, pointed out in 1939 that, given the fluctuating nature of employment in the maritime industries, the actual number of people who were sporadically employed in maritime industries was much greater. He convincingly suggested that there were 140,000 seamen in Calcutta, 70,000 in Bombay and 25,000 in Karachi (Desai, 1939:18–20). (I have not found plausible figures for sailors in other parts of Asia or in Africa.)

      Labour on steamships was divided into three ‘departments’: the engine room, the deck and the saloon. The engine room housed the great furnaces that produced the energy to power the ship. The main types of labourers here were the ‘trimmers’ who brought the coal forward from the bunkers in which it was kept, and the firemen who shovelled the fuel into the furnaces and ensured that they burned at the right temperatures. The engine room was an industrial hell. Trimmers and firemen were in constant danger of being burned by the furnaces; crushed by sliding coal; choked by dust, smoke and fumes; or overcome by heat exhaustion. Deckhands were chiefly occupied with the maintenance problems posed by a metal ship at sea – they were constantly scraping, cleaning and painting. They also had to perform much of the work of loading and unloading cargo. The saloon crew, very small on a merchantman, but huge on a liner, worked as waiters, cooks, cabin cleaning staff and the like. As in other colonial enterprises, labour recruitment was highly ethnicised, with a ‘common sense’ developing among employers as to which groups were ‘good’ at which jobs and local social networks being tapped for recruitment. Thus, in ships sailing out of India, typically the saloon staff were from Goa and Calcutta and from among Christians of the Madras presidency, and the firemen and trimmers were Punjabis, Sylhetis or people of other East Bengal districts, as well as some Pathans, Kashmiris and members of the ‘Seedi’ communities. Deckhands comprised a large proportion of Muslims from the Malabar coast, and Hindus from the Surat and adjoining districts (Hood, 1903; Desai, 1939; Colaco, 1955). It seems that people from inland communities in India often kept a foothold in agriculture in their home villages and worked as migrant labourers in a pattern not very different from that in southern Africa.

      How did the ‘lascars’ understand their own political identitities? There is a strong tendency for labour historians to look for signs of insurgency, but this is not equally useful at all historical junctures. Certainly, by the end of the 1930s sailors were caught up in the anti-colonial sentiment sweeping the world. But this should not be projected back in time. The initial appeal of African and Asian workers for shipowners was that they were not highly mobilised. Moreover, there are indications that at least some sailors had a certain faith in imperial justice, which made their anger when it failed all the more bitter. Consider the following case. In February 1927 two seamen from Bombay, Abdul Gani and Patrick Fitzgerald, the former of Punjabi origins and the latter the son of an Indian mother and a Liverpudlian father, wrote impassioned letters from Antwerp complaining that they had been illegally excluded from entering Britain at London as crew on the SS Australind. Their letters suggest a profound sense of moral outrage at the challenge to their identity as British. Gani pointed out that he served out of British ports in the Great War and had all his discharges.¹¹ Fitzgerald was mortified:

      I cannot see why they would not let me land as I am a British Subject born in Calcutta on 20 September 1902 and my father is an European and had served in the British navy during the war who also is in Liverpool … and who is a member of the Buffalo Lodge …. Sir, I think it will be hard for me to stay here and find a job as we are dark people, and I am a respectable man and never been destitute … where(as) in England I could get a ship and find employment soon.¹²

      The two men were allowed to come temporarily to Britain, but their appeal speaks of a more than instrumental relationship to British identity. Lascars were very active agents in the world, but not at all times actively anti-colonial agents.

      Finally, there was the social web of the British seafarers’ labour diaspora, in which I would include the maritime workers of Australasia. In the 19th century British sailors lived truly appalling lives. Between 1830 and 1900 one out of every five British mariners died at sea – perhaps a quarter of them from drowning and the rest from the effects of disease, exposure or malnutrition. Ships were often loaded to unsafe levels. The possibility of being fully compensated by insurance for their losses tended to make owners indifferent to the dangers involved. Yet under the 1870 Merchant Shipping Act, sailors could be imprisoned if they refused to go to sea because they thought their vessel was unseaworthy. Most sailors did not live to the age of 45 (Jones, 2006:12–23). In port, the situation in which sailors were paid in advance laid them open to swindling by ‘crimps’ – unscrupulous boardinghouse keepers (Jones, 2006:121).

      Before the 1880s British marine officers exercised very effective control over their labour force. W. Caius Crutchley, who went to sea as an apprentice in 1863, experienced ‘the power of the master mariner’ as an ‘absolute despotism’ that was, however, fully accepted by the crew: ‘There was seldom any attempt made to obtain redress for ill treatment at sea’ (Crutchley, 1912:16). Crutchley’s book, like many other accounts of British shipping of the mid-to-late 19th century, is full of references to captains and mates who used their fists on sailors, beat ships’ boys with ropes’ ends and locked up disciplinary offenders in irons, on bread-and-water diets. In the 1870s Crutchley (1912:158), now a first mate, made use of these methods himself, recalling that in Cape Town ‘on sailing day it was no uncommon thing to be obliged to go uptown in a hansom cab, find your men half drunk, and then sit on them in the cab until you could get them safely on board and in irons until they were sober’. The social relations of this world were, however, seldom challenged by British sailors.

      I now want to examine how these interacting webs generated a certain kind of racialised politics in the maritime world, which lasted throughout our period. I would argue that British labour had a strong initiating role in this phenomenon. I do not think that to make such an argument implies a naturalisation of racism. British sailors were indeed confronted by an economic threat, for there is no doubt that many employers did want to replace them with the cheap labour of people of colour. But the combination of an awareness of this with strong unions that were almost exclusively white and the prevalence of a virulent racial discourse in this period did produce politics that was undeniably racist in response. Labour historians who want to deny the racism central to British trade unionism in at least the era before the First World War come uncomfortably close to the argument of the Australian publicist Keith Windschuttle (2004), who claims to his own satisfaction that the White Australia policy was not racist, because the trade unionists who supported it were motivated by economic considerations.

      In the 1880s there was evidence of a new unwillingness by British seamen to accept their conditions. This needs to be placed in the context of broader changes in British politics and society. The admission of the upper stratum of the male working class to the franchise in 1867 and its further broadening in 1884, the elaboration by Gladstone of a combative radical liberal ideology, the firming of the position of craft unionism and the rise of agrarian radicalism in Scotland and Ireland all militated towards a situation where questioning the legitimacy of established forms of authority became more possible for subordinate social groups. The 1880s saw J. Havelock Wilson found the organisation later known as the National Seamen’s and Firemen’s Union (NSFU), the first effective national trade union in its sector. Although Wilson’s extreme patriotism and his penchant in his later life for cozy arrangements with management have made him something of a butt of mockery for labour historians, he was in his day an extremely effective leader. In 1888–89 the famous shift to the New Unionism occurred in Britain, when previously unorganised categories of supposedly unskilled workers – the dock workers and sailors to the fore among them – engaged in landmark strike actions. The next year saw the success of Samuel Plimsoll’s long-running parliamentary campaign for the regulation of the loading of ships, and in 1891 Wilson got into