Shipping Lords and Coolie Stokers: Class, Race, and Maritime Capitalism in the Early 20th Century

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

When eighty-seven passengers and crew died in the shipwreck of the Royal Mail Ship Egypt in 1922, the accident gave rise to a racist international press campaign against the employment of Indian seafarers who had been the majority of the ships crew. This was not unusual at a time when a fifth of the British mercantile marines workforce was recruited from the subcontinent. The book combines the extensive press coverage and judicial records of this accident with a plethora of archival, literary, technical, and linguistic sources to reveal the pervasiveness of a genteel racism in the board rooms of British shipping imperialism. It explains the business logic driving the pervasive use of irrational racist ideology for structuring the maritime labour market and for implementing racialized modalities of labour management on the worlds most glamorous steamship liners. It also discusses the scope for agency of maritime workers under a racialized labour regime in an age of imperialismissues that are no less relevant in our own time of postcolonial capitalism.

Author Bio

Ravi Ahuja is Professor of Modern Indian History at the University of Gttingen and has previously taught at SOAS in London and in Heidelberg. He is a social historian of South Asia in the 18th through 20th centuries. He has extensively published on the history of labour, of war, and of infrastructure. His books include Pathways of Empire: Circulation, Public Works and Social Space in Colonial Orissaand Working Lives and Worker Militancy: The Politics of Labour in Colonial India. He co-edited the path-breaking collection The World in World Wars. Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives from the South.