1. Cross, Gary S., Immigrant Workers in Industrial France: The Making of a New Laboring Class (Philadelphia, 1983), 42–43, 224–25;Google ScholarCastles, Stephen and Kosack, Godula, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe (Oxford, 1973);Google ScholarWolpe, Harold, “The Theory of Internal Colonialism: The South African Case,” in Beyond the Sociology of Development, ed. Oxaal, Ivar, Barnett, Tony, and Booth, David (London, 1975);Google ScholarMeillassoux, Claude, Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community (Cambridge, 1981);Google Scholar and Cell, John, The Highest Stage of White Supermacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, 1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Cronin, James, “Coping With Labour, 1918–1926,” in Cronin, James E. and Schneer, Jonathan, Social Conflict and the Political Order in Modern Britain (New Brunswick, N.J.: 1982), 113–45;Google Scholar see also Price, Richard, “Corporatism,” in Masters, Unions and Men: Work Control in Building and the Rise of Labour, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1984), 282–83;Google ScholarCronin, James, Labour and Society in Britain (London: 1984).Google Scholar On the imperial dimension of state-capital links, see Cain, P.J. and Hopkins, A.G., “Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas,” I, “The Old Colonial System, 1688–1850,” Economic History Review 39 (1986): 501–25;CrossRefGoogle Scholarand II, “The New Imperialism, 1850–1945,” Economic History Review 40 (1987): 1–26.Google Scholar

3. Holmes, Colin, John Bull's Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (London, 1988);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Kushner, Tony and Lunn, Kenneth, eds., Traditions of Intolerance: Historical Perspectives on Fascism and Race Discourse in Britain (Manchester, 1989).Google Scholar

4. For other examples, see Daunton, Martin, “Down the Pit: Work in the Great Northern and South Wales Coalfields, 1870–1914,” Economic History Review 34 (11 1981): 578–97;Google ScholarLynd, Robert S. and Lynd, Helen Merrell, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York, 1956; originally 1929);Google Scholar and Joyce, Patrick, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (New Brunswick, N.J., 1980).Google Scholar

5. Mackenzie, John, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984);Google Scholaridem, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986); and several contributions to Samuel, Raphael, ed., Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (London, 1989).Google Scholar

6. For the best articulation of this global process, see Wolpe, “Theory of Internal Colonialism”; Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money.

7. While the jury is still out on the overall economic benefits of British imperialism, the most recent study appears to corroborate John Hobson's assertion in 1902 that while the British taxpayer paid Out more than he (or, in rare cases, she) gained, individual enterprises and a minority of well-placed investors profited handsomely. Hobson, John, Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor, 1965), 38–39, 53;CrossRefGoogle ScholarDavis, Lance and Huttenback, Robert, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire (Cambridge, 1987).Google Scholar

8. For a fuller discussion, see Tabili, L., “We Ask for British Justice” (Ithaca, 1994). I use the term “Black” as it is used by current scholars of Black British history and the contemporary Black movement in Britain, to refer to colonized people of Asia as well as of Africa and the Caribbean. There is ample evidence of this usage in the 1920s and 1930s.Google Scholar

9. See Tabili, L., “A Maritime Race': Masculinity and the Racial Division of Labor Aboard British Merchant Ships,” in Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Anglo-American Seafaring, 1700–1918, ed. Creighton, Margaret and Norling, Lisa (Baltimore, forthcoming).Google Scholar

10. The long-term decline of British merchant shipping, irrespective of wage levels, is common knowledge, but for a detailed exploration of the immediate postwar situation, see Labour Research Department, Shipping, Studies in Labour and Capital 4 (London, 1923).

11. Public documents relating to the Elder Dempster agreements can be found at the Public Record Office (PRO) at Kew, in the Board of Trade Mercantile Marine Department papers, file MT9/2735, labeled, “Elder Dempster 1925–35.” Subsequent citations will be to this file or to its subnumbers, such as M.3580. Additional evidence is found in documents of the Home Office Aliens Department, HO45, also in the PRO.

12. Elder Dempster was a cargo liner firm with scheduled runs to Liverpool, not a tramp company. Thornton, R.H., British Shipping (Cambridge, 1939), 150.Google Scholar

13. Davies, Peter N., The Trade Makers: Elder Dempster in West Africa, 1852–1972 (London, 1973), 24–27, 162;Google ScholarPorter, Andrew, Victorian Shipping, Business and Imperial Policy: Donald Currie, the Castle Line and South Africa (New York, 1986), 263–74;Google Scholar and The Syren & Shipping [a maritime trade journal], July 2, 1919, 42; June 19, 1918, 655; June 6, 1917, 651. Mail subsidies were in themselves a form of state support.

14. Davies, Trade Makers, 74. Many of the West African men in Liverpool at the time of the 1919 riots had first arrived in the city well before the war, and many continued to work for Elder Dempster. See Home Office documents for 1919, HO45/11017 and the history in MT9/2735 M.3580.

15. Davies portrays Alfred Jones's mid-twentieth-century “Africanisation” of his staff as a blow for racial equality. Ibid., 340–41. It is more likely that Jones employed Africans because they saved him money. See, for instance, Federation of Nigeria, Report of an Enquiry into the Trade Dispute between the Elder Dempster Lines Ltd. and the Nigerian Union of Seamen (Lagos, 1959).Google Scholar

16. Thornton, British Shipping, 219.

17. Elder Dempster to the Home Office, January 20, 1927, MT9/2735 M.15067.

18. Davies to Home Office, January 11, 1933, report of a visit to Liverpool, p. 4. MT9/2735 M.3580.

19. The chief superintendent of Mercantile Marine Offices for London frankly hoped the plan would remove the market for cheap labor from the U.K. to the colonies. Cooper to shipowners, June 1, 1925; copy forwarded to the Board of Trade July 21, 1925, MT9/2735.

20. The justly notorious Coloured Alien Seamen Order was aimed at restricting the rights of Black British subjects as well, as careful examination of the relevant records reveals – but that is another story. See L. Tabili, “The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth Century Britain: The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925,” Journal of British Studies (forthcoming).

21. The revealing quotation appeared much later, in a letter dated January 11, 1933. Cooper (Home Office) to Board of Trade MT9/2735 M.3580. Originally with the London- based General Steam Navigation Company, Henry Tyrer also managed Unilever's United Africa Company before it became the Palm Line in 1950. Davies, Trade Makers, 5, 14, 92 ff., 101–04.

22. Legislation governing Asiatic articles was contained in clause 125 of the Merchant Shipping Acts, 1894 and the amended act of 1906.

23. Cooper's original letter to shipowners was dated June 11, 1925; he forwarded a copy to the Board of Trade on July 21, 1925. MT9/2735. Davies, chief inspector of the local Aliens Branch, also supported exempting Elder Dempster's crews.

24. Holt & Co., Royal Liver Buildings, to E. N. Cooper, June 16, 1925, MT9/2735.

25. There is a growing literature on the feminization of colonized people, especially men. See, among others, Patrick Brantlinger, “Africans and Victorians: The Geneology of the Myth of the Continent, Dark,” in Race, Writing and Difference, ed. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., (Chicago, 1985), 198;Google ScholarSinha, Mrinalini, “Gender and Imperialism: Colonial Policy and the Ideology of Moral Imperialism in Late Nineteenth Century Bengal,” in Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity, ed. Kimmel, Michael (Beverly Hills, 1987), 217–31;Google ScholarHall, Catherine, “The Economy of Intellectual Prestige: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and the Case of Governor Eyre,” Cultural Critique 12 (Spring 1989): 179–80, 188–89;Google Scholar and Chakravarti, Uma, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Nationalism, Orientalism, and a Script for the Past,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Sangari, Kumkum and Vaid, Sudesh (New Brunswick, N.J.: 1990), 47, 49.Google Scholar

26. Davidoff, Leonore, “Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick,” Feminist Studies 5 (Spring 1979): 87–141, esp. 88, 91, 130;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and DeGroot, Joanna, “‘Sex’ and ‘Race’: The Construction of Language and Image in the Nineteenth Century,” in Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Mendus, Susan and Randall, Jane (London, 1989), 89–128.Google Scholar On the gendering of citizenship, see Pedersen, Susan, “Gender, Welfare and Citizenship During the Great War,” American Historical Review 95 (10 1990): 983–1006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Mackenzie, John, “The Imperial Pioneer and Hunter and the British Masculine Stereotype in Late Victorian and Edwardian Times,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. Mangan, J.A. and Walvin, James (Manchester, 1986), 177, 180–82, 186;Google ScholarMangan, J.A., “The Grit of Our Forefathers: Invented Traditions, Propaganda and Imperialism,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. Mackenzie, John (Manchester, 1986), esp. 115, 120, 122;Google ScholarMohanty, Satya P., “Drawing the Color Line: Kipling and the Culture of Colonial Rule,” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. LaCapra, Dominick (Ithaca, 1991), 335–36.Google Scholar

28. On the policing function of the Home Office, see Morgan, Jane, Conflict and Order: The Police and Labour Disputes in England and Wales, 1900–1939 (Oxford, 1987).Google Scholar By September 1925 the Home Office was engaged in extensive preparations to break the impending Strike, General. Mowat, Charles Loch, Britain Between the Wars, 1918–1940 (London, 1956), 294.Google Scholar For a sanguine view of the Immigration Service, see Roche, T.W.E., The Key in the Lock: A History of Immigration Control in England from 1066 to the Present (London, 1969).Google Scholar

29. Cooper to the Home Office, February 17, 1921, HO45/11897/332087/20.

30. On colonial sex and race relations, see Inglis, Amirah, The White Women's Protection Ordinance: Sexual Anxiety and Politics in Papua (New York, 1975);Google ScholarStoler, Ann, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race and Morality in Colonial Asia,” in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, ed. Leonardo, Micaela di (Berkeley, 1991).Google Scholar

31. E.N.Cooper to the Home Office, January 4, 1926, H045/12314/476761/63.

32. Cooper to the Home Office, February 17, 1921, H045/11897/332087/23.

33. Cooper to the Home Office, March 16, 1922, HO45/11897/332087/60.

34. The Home Office repeated Cooper's arguments in a letter to the Colonial Office, January 18, 1926, HO45/12314/476761/63.

35. G.E.Baker and Hoskin, “Board of Trade Minute III,” August 4 and 6, 1925, MT9/2735.

36. Colonial Office to Board of Trade, September 17, 1927 and November 9, 1927, MT9/2735 M.4184.

37. Board of Trade minute by Hoskin, August 5, 1927; and Board of Trade minute, October 3, 1927, MT9/2735 M.4184.

38. Minute of Interdepartmental meeting at Mercantile Marine Office, June 23, 1927, MT9/2735. The term “bluff” was used by a Board of Trade legal adviser.

39. Ibid.

40. Elder Dempster to Board of Trade, December 24, 1927, MT9/2735 M.4184.

41. Ibid.

42. Board of Trade Minute, September 1, 1927, MT9/2735. The Kru or “Kroo” were a seafaring people of West Africa, but it is not at all clear that all the West African seamen in question were actually Kru. British authorities seem to have used the term somewhat indiscriminately.

43. Board of Trade to Elder Dempster, June 23, 1927, relaying offer from Sir Haldane Porter, Chief Inspector and architect of the Home Office Aliens Branch.

44. Home Office papers, September 1927, HO45/13392/493912/30.

45. Baker, Minute, January 28, 1927, MT9/2735 M.4184.

46. Board of Trade to Colonial Office, January 10, 1928; Elder Dempster to Board of Trade, April 17, 1927; Board of Trade to Colonial Office, May 9, 1928; Minute cited in “History of the Joint Agreement.” The procedure was described in Board of Trade Departmental Paper #491, “General Minutes to Superintendents,” issued July–September 1928, 230 ff., on “Coloured Seamen,” and marked, “should not be exhibited to the public in any way.” MT9/2735 M.3580. The Board of Trade later regretted they did not also extract compensation for Poor Relief from Elder Dempster in their bargain over the transfer clause. Board of Trade Minute, May 1932, MT9/2735.

47. Superintending Inspector, Liverpool, November 1929, MT9/2735 M.3580.

48. Minute of Interdepartmental meeting, June 23, 1927, MT9/2735.

49. Report from E. N. Cooper or Percy Fudge, Liverpool Immigration Office, MT9/2735 M.9553.

50. Cooper to Home Office, May 20, 1932, MT9/2735.

51. Joint meeting of the Board of Trade, Home Office, Colonial Office, March 24, 1933, MT9/2735.

52. Minute of meeting at the Home Office, September 10, 1935 (HO Gen 5/1/7), MT9/2735 M.15067.

53. The Chief Superintendent of Liverpool complained in 1932 that men were arriving armed with passports and that in any case the “Sierra Leone articles,” as he called them, were only used on “smaller boats,” few of which came to Liverpool. Bloomfield to the Board of Trade, May 31, 1932, MT9/2735.

54. Zarlia had been exempt from military service because he was engaged in “essential work” with the Liverpool Gas Company. MT9/2735 M.8521.

55. Garro-Jones to W.J. Hicks, May 14, 1928, Parl. Deb, 5th ser., vol. 217, cots. 673–74;May 16, 1928, ibid., cots. 1041–42;May 23, 1928, ibid., cots. 1906–07;June 21, 1928, ibid., vol. 218, cots. 1733–34.

56. Memorandum of Aliens and Nationality Committee meeting November 13, 1925, HO45/12314/476761/57.

57. Home Office to Colonial Office, December 19, 1925 and January 5, 1926, HO45/12314/476761/62 and /63.

58. E.N. Cooper to the Home Office, January 4, 1926, HO45/12314/476761/63.

59. Superintending Inspector, Liverpool, November 1929, MT9/2735 M.3580. In Autumn 1929 the Royal Mail Group, of which Elder Dempster was a part, collapsed, and the company was reorganized in January of 1932 as Elder Dempster Lines, Ltd. Davies, Trade Makers, 254–69.

60. “Proposed termination of the Elder Dempster Agreements,” December 19, 1934 (HO Gen. 5/1/4), MT9/2735 M.15067.

61. Arguing that possession of the “green card” deterred men from seeking British passports, they urged “the absence of such proof of his British nationality had enabled the Company on occasion to return men to the West Coast if they were not satisfactory.” Minute of meeting at the Home Office, September 10, 1935 (HO Gen 5/1/7), MT9/2735 M.15067.

62. Ibid.

63. Hunter and Pollard Report, India Office Economic and Overseas Department Collection #78, File 31929, 1929, 1940–1944, L/E/9/457, 46–47.

64. Ibid., Appendix on Liverpool, L/E/9/457, 15.

65. Federation of Nigeria, Report of an Enquiry, 5–6, 19, 40.

66. In other circumstances, Black seamen's resistance could take more confrontational and collective forms. See Tabili, We Ask for British Justice; Lane, Tony, The Merchant Seamen's War (Manchester, 1989), esp. chapter 7.Google Scholar

67. In Spring 1932 the Board of Trade responded to unemployment in the shipping industry with ruthless unilateral action. Their chosen remedy, deporting unemployed men to Africa wholesale, suggested they, no less than Elder Dempster, saw Black workers as no more than a source of labor power who had no business being in Britain unless they were at work. Since men's access to passports made them immune to deportation, the authorities decided to eliminate their passports. Bloomfield to Board of Trade, May 31, 1932, MT9/2735.

68. For discussions of corporatism, see Cronin, “Coping with Labour”; Price, “Corporatism”; and Cross, Immigrant Workers in Industrial France.

69. An introduction to the postwar history of Black migration to Britain can be found in Foot, Paul, Immigration and Race in British Politics (Harmondsworth, 1965);Google ScholarSivanandan, A., A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance (New York, 1983);Google Scholar and Gilroy, Paul, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London, 1987).Google Scholar

70. See Gary Cross, Immigrant Workers in Industrial France, 224–25, for a discussion of the self-defeating nature of government segregation efforts.