Indefinite transits: mobility and confinement in the age of steam

Abstract

The increased regulation of mobility that accompanied its late nineteenth-century expansion and acceleration is widely recognized. Regulatory practices reached out to distant shores and on board ships, heightening uncertainties and reshaping meanings of voyage and transit, especially for non-white passengers and crews. Travel and mobility are common themes in historical and other literatures. But less is known about experiences of uncertain or thwarted arrivals, involuntary departures, and indefinite transit resulting from practices governing steam-age mobility. People in transit illuminate the conditional openings and closures in such tropes as mobility, transit, and destination. Few spaces embodied and actualized ‘transit’ better than ships, and this article focuses on the role of ships as vessels of confinement. In equal parts about passengers and crews, it explores experiences of nominally free persons uncertainly afloat in a world marked otherwise by assured or accelerated oceanic mobility in three contexts that illustrate physical, political, and cultural constraints on maritime mobility in the age of steam. They are the 1914 voyage of the Komagata-maru, British merchant vessels employing Indian crews, and wartime subjection and resistance of Chinese crews on British and Dutch vessels.

Bordering seafarers at sea and onshore

“…Indian seafarers resisted poor conditions and cruelty through deserting ships when possible while governments and shipping companies sought to prevent them from legally migrating to and settling in Britain or elsewhere in its white settler colonies (cf. Adams, 1987;Choudhury, 1993Choudhury, , 1995Visram, 2002;Fisher, 2004;Balachandran, 2012Balachandran, , 2016Manjrekar, 2019). In the following section, I explore the onshore bordering discourses and practices that sought to prevent their desertion, migration, and settlement.…”

“…Arguments that Indian crews were unsuited to colder climates were used to justify paying them less despite their working on north Atlantic routes (Visram, 2002 , pp. 55–56; Balachandran, 2016 ). As P&O grew, it became increasingly integral to the expanding empire, carrying its cargo, passengers, and government-subsidized mail between Indian, Asian, and Australian ports.…”

“…In the east of India, The British India Steam Navigation Company (BISN) employed the second-highest number of Indian crewmen whom they recruited inland from networks centered in Calcutta (Kolkata) (Ewald, 2013b , p. 278). Notably, 100% of lascar crews were common on routes east of the Cape of Good Hope, and by the 1880s P&O was “almost wholly dependent” on them (Balachandran, 2016 , p. 198).…”

Mooring Mobilities, Fixing Flows: Towards a Global Urban History of Port Cities in the Age of Steam

“…In these moments, ports acted as borders between sea and land. 123 Borders were also erected within port cities. The treaty ports in cities like Shanghai, Osaka, or Busan that were created through the 'Unequal Treaties" with European powers-in Korea soon Japan, too-are a good example for the simultaneity of entanglement and border demarcation.…”

‘Treated like Chinamen’: United States immigration restriction and white British subjects

“…52 In the age of telegraph communication, this process could take multiple days, during which time arrivals languished aboard steamers transformed into 'vessels of confinement'. 53 When the Niagara arrived in Vancouver on 4 July 1921, several hundred passengers waited three full days while officials worked 'to secure an allotment by wire'. 54 The following September, nine Australians were suspended in Seattle for four days, only to learn that the quota was full and the border closed.…”