Mariner, renegade and castaway: Chris Braithwaite, seamen’s organiser and Pan-Africanist

Abstract

The author explores the political life in Britain of black Barbadian Chris Braithwaite (c.1885-1944, also known as 'Chris Jones', a hitherto overlooked, yet outstanding figure in the history of the twentieth-century Black and Red Atlantic. As leader of the Colonial Seamen's Association and an important 'class struggle Pan-Africanist', he was the lynchpin of an anti-colonial maritime network in interwar London. Through his work in the Communist party in the early 1930s and then in the International African Friends of Ethiopia and the International African Service Bureau, led by George Padmore and C. L. R. James, Braithwaite's talents as organiser, speaker and writer came to the fore.

Maritime Labour, Circulations of Struggle, and Constructions of Transnational Subaltern Agency: The Spatial Politics of the 1939 Indian Seafarers’ Strikes

“…By the mid‐1930s, however, organisations had emerged in Britain such as the Colonial Seamen’s Association (CSA) which combined a broad anti‐colonial perspective with struggles over the labour conditions of seafarers from racialised minorities (Featherstone 2019; Høgsbjerg 2011; Tabili 1994). Organisations such as the CSA were part of the contested relations between anti‐colonial movements, the left, and labour politics which shaped the response to the onset of the Second World War.…”

“…While the Act did not have explicit provisions relating to labour, the British National Union of Seamen (NUS) used it strategically to attempt to exclude seafarers of colour from the tramp shipping labour market (Featherstone 2019). Surat Ali was secretary of the organisation, and the Barbadian Chris Braithwaite aka Jones was the president (Høgsbjerg 2011). This built on Ali’s longer trajectory of involvement in union organising related to Indian seafarers that in turn was related to earlier histories of organising which had links to key Communist figures such as Shapurji Saklatvala (see Callaghan 1993:99−100; Edmonds 2020:19−20; Griffin 2018; Sherwood 2004).…”

Maritime labour, transnational political trajectories and decolonization from below: the opposition to the 1935 British Shipping Assistance Act

“…Opposition to the act reflected both how the different trajectories that crossed colonial and metropolitan spaces affected British port cities and how they explicitly challenged the unequal terms on which such transnational geographies of maritime labour were constructed and envisioned. In fact, the political organizing that arose from the ways in which the lives of 'colonial seafarers' touched on metropolitan and colonial spaces demarcated the conflicts (Høgsbjerg 2013;Tabili 1994). The political spaces that such struggles created and the transnational imaginaries they forged were important in challenging colonial politics through spatially stretched relations and alliances.…”

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This article uses a discussion of struggles over attempts by the National Union of Seamen to exclude seafarers from the maritime labour market in the interwar period to contribute to debates at the intersection of maritime spaces and transnational labour geographies (cf. Balachandran 2012;Høgsbjerg 2013). By focusing on struggles engendered by the British Shipping (Assistance) Act of 1935, I explore some of the transnational dynamics through which racialized forms of trade unionism were contested.

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Communist made at sea and in port: Maritime class relations during the Second World War

“…By 1932, the SMM had one thousand members and black activists such as Barbadian seafarer Chris Braithwaite brought together African, Arab and Asian seamen to establish the Colonial Seamen's Association (CSA) in 1935. 98 The CSA sought to bring all black workers into the NUS, despite its racism, to defeat ship owners' and governments' divide and rule tactics. 99 British seamen's rank-and-file committees, descendants of the SMM, re-emerged at the end of the Second World War, and may have influenced Andersen in his militant efforts to improve shipboard conditions.…”