‘Ghostlike’ seafarers and sailing ship nostalgia: the figure of the steamship lascar in the British imagination, c. 1880–1960

Abstract

This article investigates British imaginations of the Asian and African seamen, known as lascars, during the steamship era and its immediate aftermath. The role of these seafarers was much debated by shipowners, marine officers, politicians, civil servants, trade unionists and others in Britain in these years. In this debate, lascar identity was a highly ‘slippery’ and contested one. There was a complicated relationship between ideologies and material interests in discourse about their role, with shipping companies and captains tending to support employment of lascars, and racial ideologues, British trade unionists and the Board of Trade opposing, or at least striving to limit, their inclusion in the labour force. Representations of the British sailor and the ‘lascar’ tended to be interdependent. The social agency of lascars shaped the way they were represented. The article proposes a periodisation of these struggles. It is suggested that an intense battle over the role of lascars at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth tended to produce a dominantly anti-lascar ideology. However, this did not actually result in an effective reduction in the role of the Indian seafarers in the British Merchant Navy. Changes in racial ideology and the political conjuncture led to a shift in policy towards the Asian and African seamen in the 1940s. But by then the end of the steamship and the coming of Indian independence were bringing the period of the ‘lascar’ presence on British ships to an end.