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Indefinite transits: mobility and confinement in the age of steam*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2016

G. Balachandran
G. Balachandran*
Affiliation:
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, P2/#513 Maison de la Paix, Chemin Eugène-Rigot 2, PO Box 136, CH-1211 Geneva, Switzerland E-mail: [email protected]
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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.

Keywords

Asian steamship crewsdesertionsgoverning mobilityKomagata-marumaritime travelracial exclusion
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , July 2016 , pp. 187 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

Research for this article was partly supported by a Swiss National Science Foundation grant (1214-066652). I wish to thank the organizers of the ‘Being in Transit’ symposium at Heidelberg in April 2013 for an opportunity to air some of these ideas, and Martin Dusinberre and Roland Wenzlhuemer for coordinating this special number. My thanks also to Frances Steel and the journal’s editors and referees for many helpful comments and suggestions.

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38 NAI, HP, 97–177A, ‘Note on the Budge-Budge riot’.

39 Dhan Singh, a member, described it as a ‘rations committee’: OIOC, L/PJ/6/1338, F. 5028, Komagata Maru inquiry committee, vol. 2, 28 October 1914. Josh, Tragedy of Komagata Maru, p. 71, refers to a ‘managing committee’: Tragedy of Komagata Maru.

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91 TNA, MT 9/4370, ‘Survey of the Chinese seamen situation in the United States’, 26 May 1943, para. 13; advertisement in the China Daily News, 22 May 1943. As Frances Steel notes in ‘Anglo-worlds in transit: connections and frictions across the Pacific’, pp. 251–70 in this issue, desertions by white seafarers were an established habit at US ports.

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96 TNA, MT 9/4370, ‘Note on “Chinese crew problems”’.

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