Sweatshops at Sea

Frigren

Scandinavian Journal of History

2017

This article analyses the career paths of Swedish and Finnish sailors from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. The article shows that, for the most of the men, the seaman's occupation was just a passing phase before taking up a job on shore, but many of them also created a longlasting and advancing career by going to sea. There was not necessarily, however, a clear distinction between job opportunities at sea and those on shore in those days: men worked both at sea and on shore. We therefore argue that an individual's advancement in a maritime career was a context-specific socio-economic phenomenon. In Scandinavia, work on board ships was dependent on features that characterized the division of labour in a predominantly agricultural domestic economy on land and emerging industrialization during the turn of the century. Here we present an analysis of the career paths of almost 60,000 men recruited to serve on Swedish and Finnish merchant vessels from the 1840s to late 1940s.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Poor Man’s Goldmine?

Frigren

Scandinavian Journal of History

2017

The Journal of Transport History

“…Notably, they continued to provide for the imprisonment of sailors for desertion, long after incarceration for breach of labour contracts had been abolished for other classes of British workers in 1875. 27 On the other hand, there was a distinct legal shift towards diminishing the injustices inflicted on sailors, especially from the time of the reforms associated with Samuel Plimsoll in the 1870s, and then with the political pressure created by the rise of maritime trade unionism at the end of the 1880s. Natal was obliged to allow both officers and crew of British ships access to the courts to exercise the complex and evolving rights each enjoyed under this legislation.…”

Section: Harry Smith's Private Empirementioning

confidence: 99%

“…A survey of some 54,000 British and Canadian seamen, who sailed from St John, New Brunswick, between 1863 and 1914, shows that at least twenty-three per cent deserted at a port of call, and forty-nine per cent of those who went to New York deserted there. 64 And even though Asian seamen were the victims of a rising tide of racial ideology in the British settler colonies and the US turn of the century, they also proved very difficult to control. According to Vivek Bald, in New York during the 1910s, each year hundreds of Indian seamen were 'successfully jumping ship and disappearing into the crowded waterfronts of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island'.…”

Section: Regulating British Seamen and 'Lascars'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Oceanic Mobility and Settler-Colonial Power: Policing the Global Maritime Labour Force in Durban Harbour C. 1890–1910

Hyslop

2015

Recent scholarship on seafarers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has tended to emphasise the mobility and diverse geographical origins of the global steamship workforce. This article, while sharing that perspective, cautions that a more nuanced view is called for, which also recognises the limits of their mobility. In doing so, it suggests, more broadly, that the period before the First World War cannot be thought of simply as an ‘Age of Acceleration’, but also needs to be seen as a period in which new kinds of limitation to mobility emerged. In the British colonial port of Durban, although there was in this period a vast increase in shipping activity, seamen were subject to an intense regime of restriction. An immigration bureaucracy initially created to exclude Indian immigrants, also shut out sailors of all nationalities and races. A particular precipitant of this policy was the hostility of Natal officials to the crews of ‘cattleboats’, ships bringing livestock to southern Africa from the Mediterranean, Argentina, Australia, the US and elsewhere. Across the globe, immigration controls in this period were in general less intense than they became after 1914, but in some places, such as Durban, new forms of limitation on mobility were being tried out. The article also highlights the vast worldwide system of labour documentation operated by the British merchant marine through Shipping Offices and Consuls in almost every significant port. Mobility in the British Empire was radically differentiated, with numerous centres of power making their own claims to control movement.

International Journal of Maritime History

“…The British example was followed in other countries around the North Sea, and efforts to forge cooperation among seamen's unions across national lines soon started. 51 These new national and international associations of seamen were all based in port cities rather than in maritime communities in villages or small towns.…”

Section: Internal Transformations and Outside Forces C1850 To The Fmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local and global: Seafaring communities in the North Sea area, c. 1600–2000

Davids¹

2015

A seafaring community is a village, a small town or a neighbourhood where a substantial part of the population earns its livelihood wholly or partly by work at sea or is directly dependent on seafaring. A seafaring community can arise because an established population at a particular locality increasingly takes up seafaring, or it can be created by the settlement of a sizeable number of seafaring immigrants. The former type of community might be called 'endogenous', the latter one 'exogenous'. This essay analyses in what respect seafaring communities of these two types (or mixtures between them) in the North Sea area changed over time and in what ways these changes were connected to larger, transnational processes or to local conditions. It examines three periods of great transformation: the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; the period between about 1850 and the First World War; and the last decades of the twentieth century.The story of endogenous seafaring communities in the North Sea area differed from the story of exogenous communities in many ways. While seafaring communities in villages and small towns vanished in one region and emerged in another, social differentiation within communities increased as well, with shipmasters organising separately from common seamen; eventually, this type of seafaring community disappeared in the late twentieth century. Seafaring communities in big port cities, by contrast, thanks to immigration, continued to exist, although this category, too, has seen shifts in geography in the last 150 years, notably from Amsterdam and London to Rotterdam and Hamburg; moreover, the origin of immigrant seamen vastly changed. This article offers several explanations for these changes and variations.