Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

‘Industrious’ Chinese and British ‘Scoundrels’: Stereotypes of Asian and British Seamen in the 1908 Issues of The Seaman

Introduction: Competition on the Labour Market

‘A Carnival of Calumny’1—that was how The Seaman, the journal of the National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union, described the situation facing its readers in the early twentieth century. The journal was dominated by a campaign claiming that Chinese seamen, who earned lower wages than European seafarers, were the main reason why British seamen were being ‘driven to the workhouse’ (Fig. 1). At the same time, officials of the Shipping Federation, the union’s antagonist, pitted the ‘industrious’2 Chinese against British ‘drunkard[s] and scoundrel[s]’,3 arguing that British seamen were at a disadvantage because of their alleged poor work ethic.

Continue reading ‘Industrious’ Chinese and British ‘Scoundrels’: Stereotypes of Asian and British Seamen in the 1908 Issues of The Seaman
  1. ‘A Carnival of Calumny: The Refuse of Labour’, The Seaman, 7/1 (May 1908), 2. []
  2. ‘Checking the Chinese: Some Consideration for British Sailors’, The Seaman, 4/1 (Feb. 1908), 3. []
  3. ‘A Carnival of Calumny’, 2. []

The Changing Face of Factory Regimes in South Asia: The Great Indian Peninsula Railway Workshops in Parel, Bombay, between 1879 and 1939

In 1879, Bombay (today Mumbai) saw the opening of the workshops of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company (GIPR) in Parel, the single largest industrial complex in the city at the time. On a site of roughly sixty acres it employed thousands of workers to maintain the locomotives and wagons that facilitated passenger travel and the exchange of mail between the centres of British rule on the subcontinent, as well as the transport of goods, especially cotton, to and from the city’s harbour. This circulation of people, information, and commodities was dependent on the smooth running of the trains, which in turn could only be assured if the staff employed at the workshops kept them in proper condition.1

Continue reading The Changing Face of Factory Regimes in South Asia: The Great Indian Peninsula Railway Workshops in Parel, Bombay, between 1879 and 1939
  1. Questions of maintenance have recently attracted more attention from historians, who acknowledge its centrality despite its invisibility to most observers. See e.g. Martin Meiske, ‘How to Commemorate Railways at 200? Unearthing Histories of Maintenance, Global Material Flows, and Colonialism’, German Historical Institute London Blog, 31 July 2025. []

The End of the Guilds in Syria

In the Ottoman cities of what was later to become the state of Syria, premodern guilds survived well into the 1920s. By that time, too, the infant trade union movement was beginning to take shape. Three laws shaped the transition from craft guilds to trade unions as the dominant institutions for organizing labourers in Syria. The first was the law on craft associations of 1912, issued after a group of modernist Ottoman army officers, called the Young Turks, had toppled Sultan Abdülhamid II in a revolution in 1908; the second law, on professional associations, was issued in 1935 during the French Mandate over Syria; and the third was the Labour Code, one of the very first laws issued after Syria gained independence from France in 1946. Three states—three laws. While my PhD project focuses on this period of change and the relationship between these two very different forms of organization, guilds and trade unions, the aim of my visit to the National Archives in London was to find out more about the period just before that—about the late nineteenth century and the profound changes the Ottoman guilds underwent in the wake of the capitalist penetration of the regional economy.

Continue reading The End of the Guilds in Syria

Socialism and Slavery within the British and German Socialist Labour Movements, 1830–1890

I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the workingmen at Manchester and in all Europe are called to endure in this crisis. It has been often and studiously represented that the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely to obtain the favor of Europe. Through the actions of our disloyal citizens the workingmen of Europe have been subjected to a severe trial, for the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt.1

With these words, among others, the American President Lincoln addressed a famous letter to the workers of Manchester in January 1863. What had happened? Manchester and Lancashire suffered from the Cotton Famine from 1862 onwards, which made many workers unemployed and drove them into poverty. Supporting the Confederate States in the American Civil War, as many merchants and members of the upper classes did, could therefore have been an obvious way for the workers to get back to work and earn a crust. Yet under difficult conditions, workers continued to support the northern states and the struggle to end slavery. In Manchester city centre today, a large statue commemorates this contact between sections of the British working class and the American president.

Continue reading Socialism and Slavery within the British and German Socialist Labour Movements, 1830–1890
  1. Abraham Lincoln, ‘To the Workingmen of Manchester, England’, Jan. 19, 1863, in Roy P. Basler, (ed.), The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, 1953), vi, 63–5, at 64. []