South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.

the political context became more and more characterised by forms of working class self-assertion, with the consolidation of the trade union movement, the Labour Party’s breakthrough to significant parliamentary representation in 1906 and the massive syndicalist-led strikes of 1911–12, in which sailors and dock workers played major parts (Wilson, 1925).

      Ship’s officers and owners had a palpable sense that their power over British sailors had been undermined. In the early 1890s, during his last years at sea, Captain Crutchley (1912:320) felt that the ‘after-effects of the strikes’ had generated a ‘dangerous spirit of insubordination’. Thomas Wilson Sewell, the respected chief engineer of the SS Majestic, noted during the same period the ‘falling off in good men’ in the crews that could be found for steamships (New York Times, 14 April 1890 cited in Fox, 2004:323). By the beginning of the 20th century captains were commonly portraying British sailors as completely unmanageable. In 1903 an experienced officer, Captain W. H. Hood, published a book entitled The Blight of Insubordination, deploring the current behaviour of British seamen. In his rambling, but quite well-documented text, Hood (1903:39), raging against the seamen, wrote that ‘in a merchant ship commonly enough voyages start with a crew who are at once both insubordinate and mutinous’. For Hood the rot had been encouraged by the weakening of the skipper’s authority through recent reforms of marine law, soft-hearted magistrates and undisciplined trade unionism. Many other officers felt similarly. In August 1904 Robert S. Riley wrote in the Marine Engineer that on leaving port, the ship’s engineer was not surprised to find his men ‘half drunk and altogether unruly’ (cited in Fox, 2004:324). The Nautical Magazine noted in May 1909 that although few engineers would acknowledge this, they were afraid of violence from their men (Fox, 2004:124). Labour relations were further complicated by political tensions between predominantly Scottish Protestant engineer officers and stokers who were often Irish Catholics (Fox, 2004:324).

      The crisis in authority relations within the British maritime world produced a new interest among captains and shipowners in the possibility of employing the labour of African and Asian sailors, who were seen as a cheap and tractable substitute for demanding and uncooperative British sailors. Ultimately, it was the difference in access to political participation between British sailors and colonised subjects that made this possible. The unenfranchised lascars did not have the access to political resources that the newly empowered British and Australian seamen were acquiring. This provided the basis for massive wage differentials. As late as 1939, for example, a British fireman received £10, 2 shillings and 6 pence a month, whereas a fireman from Bombay received £2, 2 shillings and 6 pence, and a fireman from Calcutta £1, 14 shillings and 6 pence (Desai, 1939:93). In addition, employers could simply crowd more workers into the same space: the relevant British legislation until nearly the end of our period provided for 120 cubic feet of accommodation for each British sailor, as opposed to 72 cubic feet for each lascar (Desai, 1939:97). Employers could also more easily get away with skimping on the feeding of lascars, with the result that these sailors experienced serious malnutrition problems.

      The introduction of a new workforce coincided with and was made easier by the triumph of steam over sail on the oceans of the world, a development that was, in a sense, the industrialisation of the sea. The work of a seaman on a sailing ship can be thought of as artisanal: to climb the masts and set the sails required agility, expertise and the initiative to meet unexpected problems. For all its dangers and hardships, it was a way of life in which sailors could, and did, take pride. For instance, Herman Melville, in his autobiographical novel based on his first ocean voyage in 1839, wrote of the ‘delight’ he took in furling the sails in a ‘hard blow’, of the feeling of ‘mastering the rebellious canvas’ and of the ‘estimation’ in which a ship’s company held the knowledge of a truly experienced sailor who was ‘an artist in the rigging’ (Melville, 1986:173–75, 182). On the other hand, the work of the steamship had a grimmer character; the craft of the sailor largely disappeared. What this meant was that the skills that sailing-ship men took years to learn were replaced with skills that could be acquired fairly quickly and had relatively little specific connection with seamanship (Fox, 2004). This undermined the esprit de corps that was the hallmark of sailing-ship life; it was noted that men on steamships, unlike their predecessors, did not sing at their work (Fox, 2004:318). It also made them easier to replace with new workers.

      Ship’s officers and other marine experts who were opposed to the introduction of Asian and African sailors elaborated a discourse as to why it was crucial to prevent the replacement of British sailors by Asians on British ships. Prominent among their claims were that Asian and African sailors were poorly skilled and that they could not cope in a crisis at sea. Such issues were thrashed out in a public political controversy in Britain in 1896 at the hearings of a parliamentary committee looking into the manning of British ships. In their evidence to the committee, a number of captains, as well as company nautical experts, gave evidence for the abilities of the ‘lascars’. Captain Almond, inspector of the P&O line, for example, testified that his company employed lascars because they were as efficient as European crews and more so as firemen in hot latitudes, and that ‘under no circumstances of wind or weather’ had he known lascar crews to fail him (Hood, 1903:7). The committee went on to accept the worth of the lascar as a sailor.

      A major theme in the controversies of the era was the sailor’s relation to alcohol. The Liverpool Courier of 2 July 1902, for example, carried a letter describing a scene in a South African port where three ships lay alongside one another, with a British, Chinese and Indian crew, respectively. Two-thirds of the British crew ended up in jail, while the other two ships sailed on time. The plausibility of such tales is hard to deny. Of course, British sailors had drunk from time immemorial, but the combination of drink and political radicalism and the possibility of drawing labour from cultures in which drinking was prohibited or disapproved of were likely to sway employers’ approaches to hiring. The next ten years saw a series of parliamentary enquiries and initiatives on maritime questions.

      J. Havelock Wilson and his union consistently stood for policies of racial exclusion. This was sometimes explicit, as when Wilson’s enforcer, Edward Tupper, led a race riot against the Chinese community in Cardiff in 1911, of which he later openly boasted in his autobiography (Tupper, 1938:13–48). More subtly, Wilson was able to deploy formal rhetorics of equality and good management for inegalitarian purposes. He campaigned for the space allocated to lascars and British seamen, and the money spent on their feeding by employers to be equalised – laudable measures on the surface. But Wilson’s call was clearly based on the assumption that if employers’ savings in hiring sailors from the colonies were reduced, they would give preference in hiring to British employees. Similarly, he advocated a language test for sailors, supposedly to ensure that, for safety reasons, they could understand their officers, but in fact with a view to finding another mechanism to exclude African and Asian sailors from the labour market.¹³ In reality, officers and sailors generally communicated quite effectively in a range of creole languages, especially an Urdu-based tongue known as Lascari-Bat. Manuals in this language were widely available from the 1890s onward (‘Malem Sahib’, 1892; Valenti, 1896; Harrison, 1905) and were extensively utilised by officers in the P&O and other lines (Valenti, 1896:2).

      The 1919 race riots in British ports seem to have been precipitated largely by socio-economic tensions between African and Asian workers who had entered the maritime labour market and settled during the war, and returning white servicemen. While the NSFU cannot be charged with instigating them (as it could in the case of the 1911 events), it certainly did not do much to restrain its members from instigating racial attacks either (Jenkinson, 1987). In 1921 the NSFU demanded the repatriation of Arab sailors from British ports. In the following year the NSFU won the introduction of the PC5 card system under which a sailor had to get union approval for employment, which adversely affected Asian and African sailors, because local NSFU branches varied in their willingness to grant membership. When in 1925 the Home Office issued the Special Restrictions (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, an actually illegal fiat requiring African and Asian seamen to register with the police, the NSFU supported this measure (Hirson & Vivian, 1992:41).

      Australasia tends to be somewhat absent from all the existing accounts of Indian Ocean labour. But the action of the labour movement there in closing the maritime labour market to Asian and African seamen had important