The Rime of the Globalised Mariner: In Six Parts (with Bonus Tracks from a Chorus of Greek Shippers)

Abstract

This article borrows the form and metre of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner to describe and analyse the social situation of the globalised mariner. The shipping industry is characterised by complex global value chains and an outsourced, casualised labour force. The paper aims to be a piece of ‘public sociology’ and (in seeking to appeal in as vivid a manner as possible) is written in a style that Wright Mills called ‘sociological poetry’, attempting a pastiche of perhaps the best known poem in English. The auditor in the poem is a late-modern consumer and the narration is shared between the mariner, an inspector of shipping and (to remind the reader and the auditor of the mariner’s partisanship) a Chorus of Greek Shippers. The narrative covers deficiencies in seafarer training, reductions in crew numbers, the consequent long hours and seafarer fatigue, and the failure of global governance of the industry.