This microhistory of a shipping accident reveals how racialized labor management fuelled maritime capitalism in the age of imperialist globalization
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 ship’s crew.
This was not unusual at a time when a fifth of the British mercantile marine’s 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 world’s most glamorous steamship liners.
It also discusses the scope for “agency” of maritime workers under a racialized labour regime in an age of imperialism—issues that are no less relevant in our own time of postcolonial capitalism.Ravi Ahuja is Professor of Modern Indian History at the University of Göttingen 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.
