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Laleh Khalili is a professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter and the author or editor of 7 books including Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020) and The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (MACK, 2024).  

For issue #106 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from Khalili's, The Corporeal Life of Seafaring. In the following extract, she explains how colonial structures entrenched in the life of a seafarer often lead to racially segmented work, vulnerable to exploitation from capitalist masters. 

In his study of British colonialism in the Indian Ocean, maritime historian Frank Broeze calls seafarers the “muscles of empire, ” without whose stamina and strength the “British merchant fleet in the Indian Ocean would have ground to a complete standstill. ” Broeze’s label is no metaphor: the work of seaborne trade depends in fundamental ways on the embodied, visceral, muscled work of the seafarers. But these muscles are at once powerful and vulnerable. They are exposed to illness and the elements, but are also inseparable from potentially mutinous, intransigent subjectivities. For these reasons – vulnerability, mutiny – maritime technologies have been from the very start intended not just to extend but to replace human muscles at sea.

In the age of sail, ships were overmanned for this dual reason. Steamships then required even larger numbers of workers: hauling and shovelling coal and maintaining the engine required people working below deck around the clock. But much changed with mechanisation and the invention of tank ships at the turn of the twentieth century. Tankers stored fuel and other liquids in large voids in the hold of the ship, rather than in barrels or other containers; their use of fuel oil and automated piping systems removed the necessity of multiple shifts of firemen and trimmers. The arrival of multi-modal freight containers and container ships in the mid-twentieth century accelerated this trend towards fewer bodies on board. These mechanised vessels required fewer seafarers to operate them, and fewer stevedores on the docks to load and unload them.

When port authorities in London and Liverpool attempted to break workers’ strikes in the 1960s, they brought in consultants from the global management firm McKinsey & Company to advise them. McKinsey suggested that “expensive labour can be replaced with cheaper capital equipment. ” Worker intransigence, unmentioned in the report, was its pervasive subtext; automation was a solution to unruly dockers. This, McKinsey reasoned, was a strategy proven in another maritime transport sector, namely the tanker industry. “The distribution of petroleum products is highly automated, ” they wrote. “The combined use of supertankers, high-speed automatic pumps, and large-capacity inland pipelines result in an extremely efficient integrated transport system. ” McKinsey boasted that replacing humans with machines had saved the oil industry up to thirty percent of its earnings – a staggering amount of money. Flags of convenience further reduced minimum manning requirements.

Aboard ship, work for seafarers – many previously accustomed to hard agricultural or factory work – can often be backbreaking, constant, and tedious. Though many tasks have been mechanised on today’s containerships, tankers, ro/ros (roll-on/roll-off vehicle carriers), and bulk vessels (which carry unboxed cargo such as coal, ore, or grain), labour is still repetitive and stressful, especially when arriving at or departing ports. Often seafarers are required to do tasks on arrival that should, under more labour-friendly bargaining agreements, have been performed by dockers. Where labour is cheaper than automated equipment, lithe and capable seafarers still perform tasks that would otherwise be assigned to machines.

Marcus Rediker describes the labour aboard sailing ships as involving perpetual shadow work including “overhauling the rigging, coiling ropes, repairing and oiling gear, changing and mending sail canvas, tarring ropes, cleaning the guns, painting, swabbing and holystoning of the deck, and checking the cargo. ”36 Similarly, Alan Villiers’s account of Kuwaiti sailing dhows in the early twentieth century depicts endless tasks to keep the vessel sea-worthy, much of it involving the maintenance of the sails, the ropes, and the wooden hull of the boat.

Steamships demanded an endless litany of drudgery and danger, in particular for firemen and stokers hauling coal to the engine-room and heaving it into the engines. These workers were called, in the anglophone world, “the black gang” because their skins were coated perpetually in coal soot. In the Indian Ocean, men of “the black gang” were recruited from Aden, Somalia, or Sylhet; in the racial determinism of the time, they were thought better able to stand the heat in the stokehold. Interestingly, though such racist presumptions presented a rationale for hiring South Asian, Adeni, and Somali seafarers to work in the hellish bowels of the ship, colonial categories also had a hand in assigning seafarers to this thankless job. A census of seafarers just before the First World War shows that “22% of all Irish seafarers were firemen or trimmers compared with 14.6% of English and Welsh” sailors. The “black gang” embodied colonial and racial categories even as it described properties of working with coal.

In his account of lascar labour, scholar G. Balachandran describes work in the stokehold in horrifying detail:

"Scalding hot workplaces where temperatures could exceed 60oC especially in the Red Sea, engine rooms have with good reason been described as ‘hell holes’ [...] Burning, scalding, and heat asphyxiation were the common lot of engine-room crews particularly in the Mediterranean and in tropical waters where firemen had often to douse themselves with buckets of water before opening the furnace door and after shutting it. […] To the dangers of accidental death in the engine room one may add that of being crushed by sudden shifts in heaving masses of coal. […] Coal bunkers could be at a considerable distance from the engine room on large vessels, with depleting coal stocks further increasing the distance as the voyage progressed. Trimmers developed permanent bruises (or ‘badges’) on the side of their shoulders from knocking repeatedly against narrow, heaving walkways whilst attempting to balance themselves against the roll and pitch of the vessel as they wheeled coal from the bunkers to the engine room."

The trimmers, the lowest paid men on the ship, literally bore the marks of their work on their bodies as badges.

Excerpted from The Corporeal Life of Seafaring by Laleh Khalili, published by MACK (2024). Used with permission. All rights reserved. 

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