Merchant Seafarers on British Ships

Le résumé fourni par la source

This chapter throws light on a moment when colonial seafaring labour and emerging national interests in India and Australia collided with the frame of empire. Spatial requirements on merchant ships illuminate the bigger question of merchant seafarers’ labour within the British Empire where shipping laws – driven by the interests of free traders – allowed British shipowners to employ crews of different nationalities under differentiated terms and conditions. ‘Lascar’ was a special category of maritime labour reserved for Indian seafarers offering them the worst terms of employment, which scholars have called the maritime equivalent of ‘coolie’. In a merchant service which replicated the Navy&s;s hierarchy of command and discipline, senior officers were always British. While Indian seafarers’ petitioned against metropolitan control of their conditions and demanded recognition of their own economic and career interests, Australian seafarers were also seeking to secure protections for their labour and resist Britain&s;s control of maritime law. Both confronted imperial power in their engagement with shipowners. Based on evidence presented to a Royal Commission of poor conditions on British ships, safety hazards and appalling living conditions, Australian Labor Party parliamentarians pressed for separate legislation to apply to ships trading on the Australian coast. Weaving together Indian and Australian seafarers’ actions until seafarer militancy peaked with the outbreak of war in 1939, this chapter constructs a legal history of the British Empire that is also a history of resistance. In the legal history of empire lies a history of activism and organisation, resistance and reformulation, in a shifting intersection of race, nation, class and labour.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.