Panel
2. From Oceanic Crossroads: Empires, Networks and Histories
Until the 1950s, Chinese seamen working on Western steamships had been the most numerous of Asian maritime labor, and part of a new industrial working class in Chinese history. Largely recruited in Hong Kong and Singapore, they consisted of diasporic coastal groups predominantly Cantonese and Hainanese. In migration studies, they have been recognized for founding Europe’s earliest Chinatowns and contributing to Allied war efforts, but have escaped analysis as labor. In the historiography of Chinese labor, sailors have been overlooked because of the focus on factory workers on land. While it is impossible to fully recover the voices of Chinese seafarers, piecing together encounters in British archives – deportations, desertions, war casualties, intermarriages, red scares – helps discover their centrality to the dominance of European shipping and the racializing logics underwriting its power. Beginning in the mid-1800s, the shift to coal-fueled steamships radically increased the number and types of maritime labor required. Shipowners often placed Chinese groups, regardless of skill, on the lower rung as firemen and cooks, paying them a fraction of wages entitled to Europeans. Meanwhile, white trade unions, officials, and police tried to keep Chinese sailors off-shore, perceiving a threat to white jobs, women, and morals. The Chinese nationalist government also participated in their wartime recruitment and had consuls monitor them ashore. Marginalized as “coolies,” Chinese seamen offer a case of an ocean-based industry dependent on engaging as much as racializing global labor, another facet of the “Chinese question” (Ngai 2021) intertwined with political economy.
Shelly Chan
University of California - Santa Cruz, United States