Maritime labour, transnational political trajectories and decolonization from below: the opposition to the 1935 British Shipping Assistance Act

Abstract

This article uses a discussion of struggles over attempts by the National Union of Seamen to exclude seafarers from the maritime labour market in the inter‐war period to contribute to debates at the intersection of maritime spaces and transnational labour geographies (cf. Balachandran 2012; Høgsbjerg 2013). By focusing on struggles engendered by the British Shipping (Assistance) Act of 1935, I explore some of the transnational dynamics through which racialized forms of trade unionism were contested. I argue that the political trajectories, solidarities and organizing spaces constructed by the alliances formed to oppose the effects of the act shaped articulations of ‘decolonization from below’ (James 2015). In this way, engaging with the political trajectories and activities of activists from organizations like the Colonial Seamen's Association can reveal new ways of understanding the spatial politics of decolonization and new accounts of who or how such processes were articulated and contested. I conclude the article by arguing that engagement with these struggles can help assert the importance of forms of subaltern agency in shaping processes of decolonization.

Thinking problem‐space in studies of revolt and archival methods

“…Developing more agentive accounts on the behalf of the mutineers who occupy, often literally, a subaltern position. Featherstone's (2013Featherstone's ( , 2019 study of the Nore mutiny in 1797 and the mutinous actions of Black seafarers and soldiers repatriated to the Caribbean from Britain in 1919 highlights how previous contact with radical and anti-colonial societies in the first instance and experiences of race riots in the latter animated the mutineers. Davies (2013Davies ( , 2019 studies of the 1946 Royal Indian Navy mutiny similarly points to the influence that international connections with anti-colonial movements across the British empire and the nationalist movement in India had in informing the mutineers' actions.…”

Maritime Labour, Circulations of Struggle, and Constructions of Transnational Subaltern Agency: The Spatial Politics of the 1939 Indian Seafarers’ Strikes

“…By the mid‐1930s, however, organisations had emerged in Britain such as the Colonial Seamen’s Association (CSA) which combined a broad anti‐colonial perspective with struggles over the labour conditions of seafarers from racialised minorities (Featherstone 2019; Høgsbjerg 2011; Tabili 1994). Organisations such as the CSA were part of the contested relations between anti‐colonial movements, the left, and labour politics which shaped the response to the onset of the Second World War.…”

History and philosophy of geography I: Decolonising the discipline, diversifying archives and historicising radicalism

“…These works are inserted in the wider context of the rediscovery of radicalism and activism, including scholarship in historical geography analysing global networks of subaltern and decolonial solidarity ‘from below’ (Featherstone, 2019a: 539). Among these authors, Christopher Hill argues for reading archives of international post-war pacifist action against the establishment of nuclear devices (in Germany and Ghana) as alternative and nonviolent geopolitics explicitly associated with the notion of activism (Hill, 2019).…”