‘Lascars’ or ‘Seafarers’? Interdisciplinary challenges and understanding twenty-first
century Britishness
Dr Georgie Wemyss
In previous ethnographic research in east London I have demonstrated how, to
varying levels of sophistication, dominant discourses about Britain and Britishness
consistently assert particular narratives of Britain’s past whilst suppressing alternative
histories, especially about the British Empire and related histories of white violence. I
name this pivotal element of the dominant discourse the ‘Invisible Empire’. When it
does acknowledge colonialism, it is as a constituent of a discourse of merchants and
the spread of civilisation that works to suffocate competing memories. The absence of
these histories also works to obscure the colonial genealogies of the homogenizing
‘ethnic’ or ‘religious’ categories that have dominated twenty first century discourses
and policies of multiculturalism. Exposing the silences in nationalist narratives and
understanding the practices of modern ‘multiculturalism’ demands an
interdisciplinary approach that mobilizes a broad range of ethnographic, sociological,
political and historical research and intellectual trends that challenge scholarship
framed by nationalist visions and Eurocentrism.
In my research these fields include postcolonial history, geography, anthropology and
sociology that analyse the metropole and colonies as an analytic whole the connected
histories that challenged the dominance of ‘area studies’, transnational histories that
focus on movements, flows and circulation across national borders as well as parallel
processes of exclusion and cosmopolitan social theories that take the world as the unit
of the analysis. Working across these disciplines engenders both a continual tension
between doubts about intellectual rigour where historical depth may be sacrificed to
sociological breadth ( or vice versa) and the excitement that comes when the research
of different disciplines is synthesized into a new way of seeing or understanding
modern‘British culture’.
This paper will discuss these tensions and the problem of translation in the context of
the work that I am currently engaged with that focuses on the experiences of Indian
seafarers on British ships in the nineteenth and twentieth century in order to
understand processes of exclusion in twenty first century Britain. The transnational
lives of Indian seamen and relationship to modern politics of citizenship and
belonging, can only be understood from the interdisciplinary perspectives referred to
above. I use the example of the political activities of Indian merchant seamen on
British ships and in British ports in the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
century, culminating in successful strikes at the outbreak of the Second World War.
The strikes were a turning point, which Gopalan Balachandran (2005) has argued,
transformed their status from ‘coolies’ to ‘workers’. Classified as ‘lascars’ in racially
discriminatory shipping legislation (Merchant Shipping Acts), Indian seamen were
denied employment rights won by European crew members. They were subjects of
the British Empire, forced to spend extended periods at British ports but were
prevented from legally settling or working in Britain. Their illegal settlement has
therefore rendered them invisible in many local historical narratives. The research is
examining individual and collective modes of resistance by Indian seafarers in the
context of shifting political, economic and cultural struggles in South Asia and Britain
in the run up to war, it therefore seeks to examine global colonial processes of
connection and exclusion. It investigates how, in 1939-40, despite the imprisonment
of almost 400 Indian crew members in British jails, un-unionised Indian seamen
forced concessions from their employers through strikes in the British docks of
London, Glasgow, Liverpool and Southampton as well as at Empire ports in Burma,
Australia and South Africa. In understanding the employer and government reactions
to the strikes, the research draws on the colonial constructions of racial ‘types’ in
British India. The meanings of the word ‘lascar’ in different languages and contexts
(English, Bengali, French in colonial and post colonial India and Britain) becomes
central to the discussion since it is used both define and to exclude. The significance
of the mobility of Indian seafarers between Britain and South Asia and across the
extent of the British Empire, to political contests of this period is also explored.
The paper will discuss the challenges of working through the connections and
disconnections within and between branches anthropology, history, sociology and
cultural studies to understand the processes whereby the Invisible Empire continues to
be central to dominant discourses about Britain and Britishness. The silencing of the
Indian seafarers’ successful and powerful industrial action in dominant narratives
about WW2, the salience of these histories of working class struggles for equal rights
to twenty-first century British multiculturalism and the significance of these
processes of exclusion on contemporary politics of belonging are investigated.