South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.
the Indian Ocean. Australia was a major destination for British shipping, representing perhaps a tenth of all British seaborne trade at the end of the 19th century. Although the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 drastically shortened the trip between Britain and Asia, it did not reduce the distance of the journey between Britain and Australia to anything like the same proportion – and Suez had its negative side in the form of high fees and congestion. The result was that a very large proportion of British trade and passenger traffic to the Antipodes continued to use the Cape route, sustaining Cape Town and Durban as significant ports. In addition, because of the inadequacy of inland communications in Australia, coastal shipping came to constitute a massive and strategically crucial sector in the Australian economy (Blainey, 2001). In the mid-19th century a substantial number of Chinese sailors were employed in this sector. But in 1878 the recently formed Federated Seamen’s Union of Australasia struck against the employment of these men by the Australasian Steam Navigation Company and won, thus starting to establish a principle of racial exclusion in the local shipping industry (Broeze, 1998:204–5). In 1888 local mass movements in Melbourne and Sydney based in the labour organisations prevented the landing of ships carrying Chinese immigrants or manned with Chinese crews (Rolls, 1992:454– 508), a key moment in the development of the White Australia policy that became such a crucial institution of the new pan-Australian state in the first half of the 20th century. The unions not only succeeded in totally pushing Asian sailors out of the local maritime labour market, but also continued to agitate with partial success for the exclusion of Asians from intercontinental ships calling at Australian ports. And this was true even in the radical left of the labour movement. In his definitive history of Australian communism, Stuart McIntyre (1998) shows that the party, which became quite dominant in Australian sailors’ and wharfmen’s unions, while formally opposing the idea of White Australia, in practice viewed and treated Asian labour as a threat to the existing unions.
Despite the emergence of significant trade unionism among the seamen of the major Indian ports in the interwar years and a major infusion of social radicalism into British seamen’s politics in the 1920s, there was little sense of any major change in the racial politics of the Indian Ocean workforce in the interwar period. In 1925 there was an international strike of British seamen against an attempt by shipowners to impose a wage cut. Havelock Wilson, still at the helm of the NSFU, opposed the action, which was driven by the communist-led National Minority Movement and a breakaway union led by the radical Labour Party politician Manny Shinwell. This dramatic strike gave rise to major demonstrations in the port cities of South Africa, New Zealand and Australia, and paralysed the imperial transport network (Hirson & Vivian, 1992). In Australia, the strike coincided with a vicious struggle between the local labour movement and Prime Minister S. M. Bruce, who was attempting to deport two seamen’s union leaders and change the legislative framework for the maritime industries. But for all its radicalism, the strike did not move outside the framework of racial protectionism. In fact, because of the exclusion of Indian seamen from the British unions, those same unions immediately had to cast lascars in the role of strike-breakers. In Durban, the local labour activist H. H. Kemp, who had been elected leader of the local strike committee, told an approving rally that he favoured the expulsion of all ‘Asiatics’ from South Africa and that if, as was then rumoured, lascars were brought from Bombay, he would join the white citizens of Durban in throwing them into the sea (Hirson & Vivian, 1992:49). The political tensions provoked by the story of lascar recruitment for the South African ports were considerable, with both the Natal Indian Congress and the Times of India warning that such a move would be inflammatory, and Prime Minister Hertzog issuing a statement implying that such lascars would be deported should they arrive (Hirson & Vivian, 1992:49–50). In Australia, the local unions framed their conflict with Bruce in terms of their suspicions that he was conspiring with British shipping interests to reintroduce Asian labour into the Australian industry. Bruce was indeed a recently appointed director of the P&O and strongly anti-labour, but in the end there was no change to Australian racial policy in respect of shipping. The seamen’s strike eventually broke. When it did, ships started moving again with crews drawn from white scabs, exhausted strikers – and lascars. The experience simply reinforced the racialisation of the politics of British seaborne trade unionism.
Trade unionism among seafarers in India began to gather momentum at the end of the First World War. But after an initial flare-up of conflict in 1920, the Indian-based union movement was rather quiet and ineffective in the interwar years. It suffered from high levels of fragmentation – separate unions clustering around each port – and factionalism – separate groupings being run by socialists, communists and different Indian National Congress groupings. In addition, sailors were under the thumb of the gat-serangs – recruiters who operated patronage networks that milked sailors for bribes in return for jobs. This system was one of the major grievances of unions and it dampened organisational possibilities by drawing sailors into patronage relationships that were inimical to the logic of unionism. Ethnic factors also played a part in limiting the appeal of the unions, with, for example, Goans tending to dominate the leadership of the Seamen’s Union of Bombay, one of the better-organised groupings. For much of the interwar period this did not eventuate in major mobilisation, but by the end of the 1930s a new militancy started to emerge. In 1938 the Seamen’s Union of Bombay launched a quite substantial strike protesting current hiring practices; this led to significant confrontations with the authorities in Bombay (Colaco, 1955). Within a week of the outbreak of war in 1939 strike action for higher wages on a massive scale spread among Indian seamen across the British Empire. The strikes apparently started in South Africa and then moved to Britain and elsewhere. British officials suspected communist involvement and, indeed, given the communist line at that juncture of opposing the British war effort, this may well have been a factor. However, it seems that the major impetus was that the sailors resented risking their lives for a pittance and were emboldened by the shaky political condition of the Raj. The strategic threat posed by such a strike in wartime galvanised the British cabinet to come down heavily on the shipowners. Wages more than doubled over the next few years and reforms of working conditions were undertaken (Balachandran, 2003:121–23).
Syed Ali’s maritime world no longer exists. The Second World War marked the end of his era, for the massive losses of merchant ships in the war and the building of huge numbers of new ships to meet the crisis saw steam finally give way to oil burners, with their smaller crews. While we are still invisibly reliant on the ocean transport of goods for much of what we consume, that transport system has been working in a very different way since the container ship revolution of the 1960s. And, of course, air became the major means of transport for passengers and high-value goods. Syed Ali was at sea in the last years of the British steamship empire.
For a South African historian, what must be striking about the politics of the steam empire is that it bears remarkable similarities to the history of the gold-mining industry in South Africa and thus perhaps casts a new light on the vexed question of the ‘exceptionalism’ of South Africa. In both cases, the introduction of a new technology in the late 19th century generated a demand for cheap unskilled labour. In both cases, employers turned to colonised subjects for this labour. In both cases, white enfranchised labour saw this situation as a threat to their established position and used their access to political power to resist it. However, this chapter also suggests a major difference. To a much greater extent than in the rigidly policed mining industry, the multivalent web of transoceanic connections made it possible for workers to slip around or through the grids employers and officials set up to contain them. ‘Lascars’ like Syed Ali were often able to move and find their own way along the webs that stretched across the oceans.
3
Chapter
The Interlocking Worlds of the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa and India 14
Pradip Kumar Datta
Internationalising national histories
The Anglo-Boer War was an international event. This statement may seem unstartling given the way global events, such as the invasion of Iraq or the attacks on New York and Washington DC on 11 September 2001, keep occurring today. The distinction of this war is that it is one of the first events of