¹ The pioneering works in the field were anthropologist Little, Kenneth, Negroes in Britain: A Study of Racial Relations in English Society, introduction by Bloom, Leonard (1948; reprint, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972)Google Scholar; and the first work of Little's student, sociologist Banton, Michael, The Coloured Quarter: Negro Immigrants in an English City (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955)Google Scholar. Banton has authored numerous subsequent works on post-1945 British race relations, but this work remains the most important for historians. Also see Walvin, James, Black and White: The Negro in English Society, 1555–1945 (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Scobie, Edward, Black Britannia: The History of Blacks in Britain (Chicago: Johnson Publishers, 1972), 155–63Google Scholar; Fryer, Peter, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto, 1984)Google Scholar; Ramdin, Ron, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (London: Gower, 1987)Google Scholar; and Visram, Rozina, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: The History of Indians in Britain, 1700–1947 (London: Pluto, 1986)Google Scholar.

² Examples include Walvin, pp. 206–15; Banton, , The Coloured Quarter, p. 185Google Scholar; and Scobie, pp. 155–63. See a useful critique of monolithic notions of racism by Rich, Paul, in Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 4–5Google Scholar. I use the word “men” deliberately. For the most part these works have been written from a “gender-neutral” perspective that precludes implicit or explicit discussion of women, especially Black women. A notable exception was anthropologist Collins, Sydney, Coloured Minorities in Britain: Studies in British Race Relations Based on African, West Indian and Asian Immigrants (London: Lutterworth, 1957)Google Scholar. For recent efforts to restore Black women to this history, see Wilson, Amrit, Finding a Voice: Asian Women's Lives in Britain (London: Virago, 1978)Google Scholar; Bryan, Beverly, Dadzie, Stella, and Scafe, Suzanne, The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain (London: Virago, 1985)Google Scholar; and Visram. Also see Henriques, Fernando, Children of Conflict: A Study of Interracial Sex and Marriage (New York: Dutton, 1975)Google Scholar.

³ Recent examples include Holmes, Colin, John Bull's Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (London: Macmillan, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kushner, Tony and Lunn, Kenneth, eds., Traditions of Intolerance: Historical Perspectives on Fascism and Race Discourse in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989)Google Scholar. Earlier works include Holmes, Colin, ed., Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (London: Allen & Unwin, 1978)Google Scholar; Lunn, Kenneth, ed., Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society, 1870–1914 (London: Dawson & Sons, 1980), esp. p. 6Google Scholar.

⁴ For an articulation of the flawed epistemology and the political uses of “human nature” explanations, see Rose, Stephen, “‘It's Only Human Nature’: The Sociobiologists' Fairyland,” Race and Class 20, no. 3 (1979): 277–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rose, Stephen and Rose, Hilary, “Less than Human Nature: Biology and the New Right,” Race and Class 27, no. 3 (1986): 47–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ In spite of the distinctions among dictionary definitions of race, ethnicity, and culture, the imprecision in their usage is so prevalent in much of the literature that one is forced to conclude that “ethnicity” and “culture” are often coded stand-ins for racial difference. For a critique of this slippage, see Giraud, Michel, “The Distracted Look: Ethnocentrism, Xenophobia or Racism?” Dialectical Anthropology 12 (1988): 413–19Google Scholar; and Wallerstein, Immanuel, “The Construction of Peoplehood: Racism, Nationalism, Ethnicity,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Balibar, Etienne and Wallerstein, Immanuel (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 77–78Google Scholar. Douglas Lorimer dates the transition from cultural to biological notions of race to the late nineteenth century in his Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press/New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978)Google Scholar. See Hetherington, Penelope, British Paternalism and Africa, 1920–1940 (London: Frank Cass, 1978), pp. 76–83Google Scholar, for a discussion of the muddling of race, culture, language, morality, and intelligence in twentieth-century thought and its political implications. While her work concerns the period 1920–40, this muddling persists in current scholarship. Scientists were never unanimous about the biological bases for racial distinctions, and such interpretations have largely been repudiated since the Second World War. See Montagu, Ashley, Statement on Race: An Annotated Elaboration of the Four Statements on Race Issued by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Oganization, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar. For the history of scientific thought about race, see Stepan, Nancy, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (Macmillan, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stocking, George, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), esp. pp. 106–7, 228–29Google Scholar.

⁶ That the absence of such structural context impairs an analysis confined to attitudes and behavior is most apparent in Lunn, Kenneth, “Race Relations or Industrial Relations? Race and Labour in Britain, 1880–1950,” in Race and Labour in Twentieth Century Britain, ed. Lunn, Kenneth (London: Frank Cass, 1985), esp. pp. 10–17Google Scholar.

⁷ See Brown, George W., “Investigation of Coloured Colonial Seamen in Cardiff: April 13th–20th, 1935,” Keys: Official Organ of the League of Coloured Peoples 3, no. 2 (October–December 1935): 18–22Google Scholar; Little, pp. 85–89.

⁸ Kenneth Little wrote that the “police were under a complete misapprehension” about the legalities of the order (see p. 87); Typical is Peter Fryer's account, based solely on Brown's report in the Keys: “The local police, high-handedly and quite illegally, placed their own interpretation on the Aliens Order of 1920 and the Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925. In the eyes of the police, these measures automatically made every black seaman in Cardiff an alien, regardless of any documentary evidence a man might produce to prove he was British” (Fryer, , Staying Power, n. 1 above, p. 356Google Scholar). Ron Ramdin, who derived the bulk of his data from Little and union mascot Captain Edward Tupper, fell victim to the same interpretation, speaking of the “wilful misapplication” of the order and emphasizing the role of local police, pp. 75–77, 102, 113, 491–92. Also see Walvin, pp. 209–10. Only Scobie commented on the order's obviously racist intent (p. 161).

⁹ Scobie, p. 161. Lunn, Kenneth, “The Seamen's Union and “Foreign” Workers on British and Colonial Shipping, 1890–1939,” Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History 53, pt. 3 (Winter 1988): 5–13Google Scholar, states that both the order of 1920 and the Coloured Alien Seamen Order of 1925 were promulgated “largely as a result of persistent lobbying by the union” (p. 6); Holmes's, account in John Bull's Island (p. 154)Google Scholar is derived largely from Lunn's.

¹⁰ While the abuses connected with the Coloured Alien Seamen Order have been widely discussed in survey histories of Black people in Britain, the documents explaining its formulation only became available in 1969, and no one but Paul Rich has used them, in Race and Empire, pp. 112, 125–28, 130, 142. Rich's argument, that the Coloured Alien Seamen Order represented “a political imperative to tighten up governmental control within the metropolis as well as a wider economic and political response on the imperial plane” (p. 122), credits local and national officials and other elites with greater unanimity of action and purpose than detailed examination of the evidence suggests. This is consistent with his argument that a variety of consensus he terms “middle opinion” has guided British racial thought in the twentieth century (pp. 4–5 and passim).

¹¹ For an important discussion of the relationship between law and custom, and a consideration of the law not merely as an instrument of class domination, but also as a terrain of contestation, see the essay on “The Rule of Law,” in Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act, by Thompson, E. P. (New York: Pantheon, 1975), pp. 258–69Google Scholar.

¹² Gayle Rubin made the analogy between race and gender explicit in a classic essay: “Marx once asked, ‘What is a Negro slave? A man of the Black race. The one explanation is as good as another. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations …’ What is a domesticated woman? A female of the species. The one explanation is as good as another. A woman is a woman. She only becomes a domestic, a wife, a chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a human dictaphone in certain relations.” “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Reiter, Rayna (New York: Monthly Review, 1975), p. 158Google Scholar.

¹³ See, e.g., Said, Edward , Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978)Google Scholar; and articles by JanMohamed, Ginnie Abdul, Pratt, Mary Louise, Spivak, Gayatri, Carby, Hazel, Brantlinger, Patrick, and several others in Race, Writing and Difference, ed. Gates, Henry Louis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and, most recently, LaCapra, Dominick, ed., The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ H. Hoetink writes, “One and the same person may be considered white in the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico, and ‘coloured’ in Jamaica, Martinique or Curacao … the same person may be called a ‘Negro’ in Georgia.” See Hoetink's, Caribbean Race Relations: A Study of Two Variants, trans, from the Dutch by Hooykas, Eva M. (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1967), p. xiiGoogle Scholar. This is not to endorse an application of Hoetink's “phenotype” explanation, for a critique of which see Mintz, Sidney, “Groups, Group Boundaries and the Perception of ‘Race,’” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13, no. 4 (October 1971): 437–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Harrell-Bond, Barbara, Howard, Allen M., and Skinner, David E., Community Leadership and the Transformation of Freetown (1801–1976) (The Hague: Mouton, 1978), pp. 3–17, 304–6Google Scholar; VanOnselen, Charles, New Babylon: Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914 (London: Longman, 1982), 1:xvii and passimGoogle Scholar; Bodnar, John, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Wolf, Eric, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 361–62Google Scholar; Enloe, Cynthia, Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Societies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 104Google Scholar; Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Okamura, Jonathan, “Situational Ethnicity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 4 (October 1981): 452–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Robert Miles makes a cogent argument for the power relations implied in the social construction of racial difference in Racism and Migrant Labour (London: Routledge & Regan Paul, 1982), esp. pp. 9–21Google Scholar; while Ernest Krausz asserts that “physical differences which are visible” were still “socially denned”; see his Ethnic Minorities in Britain (London: McGibbon & Kee, 1971), p. 10Google Scholar. A fascinating analysis of the contingency of racial and ethnic categories, and of their manipulation both in law and by individuals, can be found in Dominguez, Virginia, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ On the simultaneous and interdependent construction of race, class, and gender, see Davidoff, Leonore, “Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick,” Feminist Studies 5, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 87–141CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, more recently, 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 Rendall, Jane (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 89–128Google Scholar. The pioneering work on social construction is Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Doubleday, 1966)Google Scholar. Recent and more extended treatments of the social construction of gender include Scott, Joan, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in her Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 28–50Google Scholar; Poovey, Mary, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ I use the term “Black” because it is used by scholars in the discipline; because it is preferred by contemporary Black Britons, who constitute an equally diverse population; and because the term “coloured” is anachronistic and sometimes offends. I capitalize “Black” to emphasize its categorical rather than descriptive function; while I refrain from capitalizing “white” because the term describes an equally diverse population whose ethnic and racial composition and boundaries have yet to be subjected to systematic scholarly scrutiny. Although I agree that racial differences can be attributed at least in part to the Manichean dichotomies ubiquitous in modern Western culture, it is still not sufficient to say that “Black” is merely “nonwhite” and that “white” is merely “non-Black.” On recent efforts to define “white” as a racial or ethnic category, see Stoler, Ann L., “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. and introduced by di Leonardo, Micaela (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 52–53 and passimGoogle Scholar; Gilroy, Paul, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 122–23Google Scholar. Gilroy himself is reading rather creatively from Hebdige, Dick, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), esp. pp. 62–67Google Scholar. For a recent American effort, see Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Cooper to his superiors in the Home Office Aliens Department, February 17, 1921, Records of the Home Office Aliens Department, Public Record Office (PRO), London HO45/11897/332087/20. A similarly diverse population can be found defined as “black” or “coloured” in, among many sources, Cardiff Immigration Officer S. A. Wilkes to the Home Office, April 1921, PRO HO45/11897/332087/24; Jones, David Caradog, The Economic Status of Coloured Families in the Port of Liverpool (Liverpool: University of Liverpool, Social Science Department, Statistics Division, 1940), p. 11Google Scholar; Reverend Groser, St. John B.et al., “Conditions of Life of the Coloured Population of Stepney,” 1942, Board of Trade Papers, PRO, MT9/3952, pp. 1–2Google Scholar; Silberman, Leo and Spice, Betty, Colour and Class in Six Liverpool Schools (Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool, 1950), p. 7Google Scholar. For an example of Indian seamen referring to themselves, if ruefully, as “black,” see “Inspection of Lascars' Food,” India Office Records (IOR), London, L/E/7/604 (1908).

¹⁹ Within Britain's Asian community today, moreover, there are those who identify with the Black movement broadly defined and those who wish to remain aloof from it and explicitly reject the label “Black” applied to themselves. See comments by Sherwood, Marika, in the Newsletter of the Association for the Study of African, Caribbean and Asian Culture and History in Britain, no. 3 (May 1992) p. 2Google Scholar. Changing terminology and the intensity of struggles around it seem to be only further evidence of the contingency of racial definitions.

²⁰ Scholars have debated whether economic disparities between colonizer and colonized are a product of economic backwardness, unequal exchange, systematic underdevelopment, or economic dependency. For a summary and critique of recent arguments, see Kay, Cristobal, ed., Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment (New York: Routledge, 1989), esp. pp. 124–96Google Scholar. The argument that seems to best fit the situation of the colonized workers examined here is that of Claude Meillassoux, who argues in Maidens, Meals and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)Google Scholar that the decline of the colonized economy stems from the systematic undercompensation of migrant and colonized labor. For a recent inquiry into who profited from British imperialism, see Davis, Lance and Huttenback, Robert, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Economics of British Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

²¹ See, among many others, Bolt, Christine, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971)Google Scholar; and Lorimer (n. 5 above), the pioneering works on Victorian racial thought; also see Hetherington (n. 5 above), esp. pp. 76–85; Ranger, Terence, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in Hobsbawm, and Ranger, , eds., pp. 211–62Google Scholar; Brantlingner, Patrick, “Africans and Victorians: The Geneology of the Myth of the Dark Continent,” in Gates, , ed., pp. 185–222, esp. p. 206Google Scholar; Spitzer, Leo, The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Response to Colonialism, 1870–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), pp. 185–222Google Scholar; Hall, Catherine, “The Economy of Intellectual Prestige: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and the Case of Governor Eyre,” Cultural Critique 12 (Spring 1989): 167–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Mackenzie, John, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Mackenzie, John, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and several contributions to Samuel, Raphael, ed., Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (London: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar; Rich, Race and Empire (n. 2 above), see also essays in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1982)Google Scholar. Other scholars dispute the relevance of Britain's history of imperialism, arguing instead that the English people are simply intolerant and xenophobic: “‘The legacy of Empire’ … represents little concrete research” (Kushner, and Lunn, , eds. [n. 3 above], p. 1)Google Scholar. I submit that both domestic and imperial relations were critical and that neither can be dismissed as irrelevant—indeed, they were part of the same system and, if recent scholarship is to be credited, involved some of the same personnel: see P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, “Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas,” pt. 2: “New Imperialism, 1850–1945,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 40, no. 1 (1987): 1–26Google Scholar; and Davis and Huttenback.

²³ Rich, Paul, “Imperial Decline and the Resurgence of English National Identity, 1918–1979,” in Kushner, and Lunn, , eds., pp. 33–52Google Scholar. John Darwin has argued, on the contrary, that the British ruling class was impervious to the symptoms of imminent imperial dissolution, stressing instead the “persistence of illusions of grandeur” in “Fear of Falling: British Politics and Imperial Decline since 1900,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 36 (1986): 41Google Scholar; also see Darwin, John, “Imperialism in Decline? Tendencies in British Imperial Policy between the Wars,” Historical Journal 23, no. 3 (1980): 657–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ The argument for “rough equality” is most forcefully made in Rediker, Marcus, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; while Eric Sager describes the transition from sail to steam as “industrialization as it occurred at sea,” in his Seafaring Men: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820–1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989), p. 10Google Scholar.

²⁵ For details, see Tabili, Laura, “A Maritime Race: Masculinity and the Racial Division of Labor on British Merchant Ships,” in Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Anglo-American Seafaring, 1700–1919, ed. Norling, Lisa and Creighton, Margaret (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, in press)Google Scholar. The long-term decline of British merchant shipping, irrespective of wage levels, is common knowledge, but for a detailed exploration of the situation in the 1920s, see Labour Research Department, Shipping, Studies in Labour and Capital, no. 4 (London: Labour Publishing Department, 1923)Google Scholar.

²⁶ Gainer, Bernard, The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905 (London: Heinemann, 1972)Google Scholar; Garrard, John, The English and Immigration: A Comparative Study of the Jewish Influx, 1880–1910 (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1971)Google Scholar; Feldman, David, “The Importance of Being English: Jewish Immigration and the Decay of Liberal England,” in Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800, ed. Feldman, David and Jones, Gareth Stedman (London: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar. On migration as an effect of late nineteenth-century industrialization, see Wolf (n. 14 above), pp. 354–83.

²⁷ See table 1 below. All of those listed as “Lascars” and an unknown proportion of those listed as “Foreign” or “British” were Black. Although the total workforce fluctuated around 200,000, since approximately one-third of men listed as “British” were officers who were usually white, the proportion of Black men in the rank and file would be approximately one-third.

²⁸ Cardiff Immigration Officer S. A. Wilkes to the Home Office, April 1921, PRO. HO45/11897/332087/24.

²⁹ These categories structured the tabulations under the Coloured Alien Seamen Order, sent to the India Office annually between 1925 and 1939 by the Home Office, IOR, found in L/E/9/953, L/E/9/954, and L/E/9/972.

³⁰ For relative wages as they stood in 1928, see figures presented to the House of Commons on June 15, Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th ser., vol. 218 (1928), cols. 1331–32. Seamen from the West Indies constituted a significant exception: the 1823 legislation establishing Asiatic articles exempted West Indians, who were declared to be “as much British seamen as any white man would be.” Hepple, Bob, Race, Jobs and the Law (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 63Google Scholar. Yet this status was much compromised in the twentieth century, culminating in the Coloured Alien Seamen Order. See also reference to “special arrangements with reference to non-white crews” between the National Union of Seamen and the Furness Withy company regarding Trinidadian seamen (NUS Executive Council Minutes, July 7, 1939, Modern Records Centre (MRC), University of Warwick, Coventry, Mss175/1/1/9, p. 4).

³¹ In the interwar period, Asiatic articles and the men who sailed under them were governed by the Indian Merchant Shipping Act of 1883, sec 29, and the British Merchant Shipping Acts of 1894, sec. 125; and 1906, sec. 12. The terms of these acts defined who was a “Lascar” and who was not and specified levels of rations and other minutia. See India Office Revenue no. 171, London, November 20, 1903, IOR, L/E/7/481; Colaco, A., ed., A History of the Seamen's Union, Bombay (Bombay: Pascoal Vaz, 1955), p. 58Google Scholar; in the papers of the International Transportworkers' Federation (ITF) MRC, Mss159/5/3/588. For a 1903 legal test and a 1918 clarification of who was to be considered a “Lascar,” see IOR, Economic and Overseas Department, L/E/9/936; also see Hepple, pp. 63–64. Contract labor systems designed to mobilize Indian labor for plantations, mines, and other colonial enterprises developed soon after the abolition of slavery in 1834, and were a continual source of contention, scandal, and, in their destinations, labor conflict on racial lines. See Tinker, Hugh, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1974), esp. pp. 41–43Google Scholar; and Tinker, Hugh, Separate and Unequal: India and the Indians in the British Commonwealth, 1920–1950 (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1976)Google Scholar. The terms “superexploitation” and “superprofits” refer to the extra profits to be gained from labor paid even less than regular waged workers who are simply exploited in the sense that their wages amount to less than the value their labor adds to the goods they produce. Meillassoux (n. 20 above) argues that migrant workers are often paid less than the cost of their reproduction: in this way the host economy effectively drains resources from the migrants' country of origin.

³² Employers could legally abridge this contract any time after the first three months, while crewmen had no legal grounds for quitting or any mechanism for recovery of wages due (Board of Trade minutes by A. S. Hoskin, August 5, 1929, and Board of Trade minutes October 3, 1927, PRO, MT9/2735.M4184).

³³ Home, W. E., Merchant Seamen: Their Diseases and Their Welfare Needs (New York: Dutton, 1922), p. 87Google Scholar.

³⁴ In 1959 the Elder Dempster company reported that an incentive for the “Africanisation” of their crews was the need to upgrade facilities if white crews were retained (Federation of Nigeria, Report of the Board of Enquiry into the Trade Dispute between the Elder Dempster Lines Ltd. and the Nigerian Union of Seamen [Lagos: Federal Government Printer, 1959], esp. pp. 31–34, 79–81, 118–24)Google Scholar.

³⁵ Kanekar, P. G., Seaman in Bombay: Report of an Enquiry into the Conditions of their Life and Work (Bombay: Servants of India, 1928), p. 17Google Scholar, MRC, Mss 159/5/3/587; Colaco, ed., pp. 87–88.

³⁶ Ghee is clarified butter, used in Indian cooking. See “Inspection of Lascars' Food,” India Office Economic and Overseas Department, file Revenue and Statistics (R&S) 54, 1908, IOR, L/E/7/604.

³⁷ See figures on Black seamen's mortality reported in the Seaman (March 20, 1914), p. 7; (May 15, 1914), and p. 2; also see Home, pp. 87, 94. For questions about individual cases, see House of Commons debates March 3 and 9, 1908, Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser. vol. 185 (1908)Google Scholar, cols. 493–508, 1115; and 6, 7, 22 and 23 April 1909, Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser., vol. 3 (1909), cols. 1131–32, 1253–54, 1786, 1869–70Google Scholar.

³⁸ To infer that all seamen shipping out of British ports in these years were union members would be erroneous. Yet European wages and conditions, even when employers successfully abridged them, as they often did, were still substantially better than those provided by Lascar articles.

³⁹ If the figures for Black populations in ports are fragmentary and incomplete, those for inland cities are simply nonexistent. The British census did not ask a question about race until 1991, and no scholar has yet attempted the empirical work necessary to establish the Black population of even a single British city, maritime or inland. But see Wilson, Carlton O., “A Hidden History: The Black Experience in Liverpool, England, 1919–1945” (Ph.D. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1991)Google Scholar; and my work in progress: “‘A Place of Refuge’: Black Workers and Interracial Settlements in Britain, 1900–1950.”

⁴⁰ On the extension of Lascar articles, see relevant documents in India Office Revenue Department, November 20, 1903, L/E/7/481; and India Office Economic and Overseas Department, file R&S 2435, 1925, IOR, L/E/9/936; Colaco, ed., p. 58; Behrens, Catherine Betty Abigail, Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office/Longman, 1955), p. 157Google Scholar. Because few Chinese were formally colonized by Britain, and perhaps because they had the alternative of the U.S. industry, where they served in considerable numbers, their experience in some ways resembled that of colonized Black people, but there were also significant differences that scholars have yet to thoroughly explore. Consequently, they occupy an ambiguous place in the work at hand, but one that seems to be necessary. On Chinese settlers in Britain, see Choo, Ng Kwee, The Chinese in London (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1968)Google Scholar; May, J. P., “The Chinese in Britain, 1860–1914,” in Holmes, , ed. (n. 3 above), pp. 111–24Google Scholar.

⁴¹ See table 1 below.

⁴² Labor relations in the maritime industries were historically turbulent and embittered to say the least. For a brief glimpse into a substantial literature, see Saville, John, “Trade Unionism and Free Labour: The Background to the Taff Vale Decision,” in Studies in Social History, ed. Flinn, Michael and Smout, T. C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 249–76Google Scholar; Ron Bean, “Employers' Associations in the Port of Liverpool,” and Alderman, Geoffrey, “The National Free Labour Associations: A Case Study of Organised Strikebreaking in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” both in International Review of Social History 21, pt. 3 (1976): 380–81, 309–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clegg, Hugh, A History of British Trade Unions since 1889, vol. 2, 1911–1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Marsh, Arthur and Ryan, Victoria, The Seamen (London: Malthouse Publishing, 1989)Google Scholar.

⁴³ Joshua, Harris, Wallace, Tina, and Booth, Heather, To Ride the Storm: The 1980 Bristol “Riot” and the State (London: Heinemann Educational, 1983), p. 29Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ The quote is from Labour Research Department (n. 25 above), p. 31. In 1922 the Home Office considered it “politic to keep on as good terms as possible” with the Shipping Federation (Home Office minutes, March 18, 1922, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/60). Rebuffing unions' calls for pressure on shipowners in 1923, Roundell Cecil Palmer, Viscount Wolmer of the Board of Trade, commented ruefully, “Sometimes the Board of Trade … are credited with magnetic and wonderful powers which I am afriad they do not possess” (Deputation to the Board of Trade [Viscount Wolmer] from the Seafarers' Joint Council regarding the Employment of Arabs to the Detriment of British Seafarers, January 15, 1923, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/70). On employers' refusal to cooperate with government regulatory bodies, see Tabili, , “‘Keeping the Natives … Under Control’: Race Segregation and the Domestic Dimensions of Empire, 1920–1939,” International Labor and Working Class History (Fall 1993), in pressGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ In spring 1921, the Colonial Office and the Board of Trade considered legislation to put all “coloured colonial seamen” on special articles (C. H. Grimshaw of the Board of Trade to the Home Office, June 2, 1921, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/29.

⁴⁶ Byrne, David, “The 1930 ‘Arab Riot’: A Race Riot That Never Was,” Race and Class 18, no. 3 (1977–1978), pp. 266–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reports Arabs were considered the seamen's union president Joseph Havelock Wilson's “pets.” Union records available in the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick do not include membership lists or any other evidence that would enable the reconstruction of the union's composition—racial, ethnic, regional, or otherwise. Extrapolations from anecdotal evidence in the Seaman and in union and government records, when combined with aggregate statistics, suggest that several thousand apiece of the men classed as “British” and “Alien” in the Board of Trade's annual Census of Seamen were Black men: to discuss relative numbers of different ethnic origins would be purely speculative. Rank-and-file organizer George Hardy alleged that, in 1926, of a total of 51,566 “Lascars” on British ships, 45,000 were on Asiatic articles and 6,580 were in racially mixed crews earning European wages (Hardy, George, The Struggle of British Seamen [London: Seamen's Section of Transport and General Workers' Union Minority Movement, 1927])Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ For details of this very complicated story, see chap. 5 of Tabili, L., ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Black Workers and the Construction of Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), in pressGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ For details, see Gainer (n. 26 above); and Garrard (n. 26 above).

⁴⁹ The fortress of Aden had belonged to Britain since 1802. The rest of the territory was technically an Ottoman possession until after the war, when it became a protectorate of Britain, and its inhabitants British protected persons. In 1937 Aden became a crown colony and, eventually, in 1967, the capital of South Yemen. Also see Serjeant, R. B., “The Ports of Aden and Shihr,” in Studies in Arabian History and Civilisation, ed. Sarjeant, R. B. (London: Variorum Reprints, 1981), pp. 207–11Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ “It was pointed out that a Seaman's Discharge Book with his photograph therein is sufficient passport for any seaman landing in a foreign country” (Minutes of the National Union of Seamen Temporary Management Committee, February 17, 1931, MRC, Mss175/1/3/1&2, fol. 92). “A discharge book is the seaman's most precious possession, and he should care for it as such. It is at all times the seaman's only passport to work, and no matter what his qualifications and length of service may be, he seldom if ever gets a job without its production” (the Seaman [February 22, 1933], p. 2). Also see Thornton, R. H., British Shipping (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), p. 224Google Scholar, for a discussion of seamen's credentials.

⁵¹ See correspondence among solicitor A. W. Ruddock, representing South Shields Adenese seamen, the Home Office, and South Shields police, as well as correspondence related to a similar incident in Cardiff, in March, April, and May 1917 PRO, HO45/11897/332087/7, 19 and/12.

⁵² Stewart admitted many of these men were probably French subjects of Somaliland. Major-General J. M. Stewart to the Secretary of State for India, March 28, 1917, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/12; also see Home Office correspondence, July 23, and August 2, 1917, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/10.

⁵³ British officials used the term “Arab” somewhat indiscriminately to describe Islamic seamen from East Africa as well as the Arabian peninsula and environs. While folklore has it that large numbers of such men entered the British merchant service during the war years, no estimate of their numbers is available.

⁵⁴ For another story of hopes raised and betrayed by the First World War, see Spitzer (n. 21 above).

⁵⁵ Although protectorate status implied the retention of local autonomy, under British administration “the chieftains of the Protectorate were gradually brought under control” while the borders between the Aden Protectorate and Yemen retained “ambiguity.” See Williams, Ann, Britain and France in the Middle East and North Africa (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 49–50Google Scholar. In practice, the precise relationship between the crown and the protectorates was unclear and inconsistent, and, in some cases, formal annexation was viewed as a dispensable formality rendered moot by “implied annexation.” See correspondence April 1920–February 1921 among the Home Office, the Board of Trade, and the Colonial Office, regarding “Exemption of Protected Persons.” See esp. “Extract from ‘The Law Times’ June 12th 1920,” PRO, HO45/13716/417984. For this reason the status of British protected persons was open to dispute. In the midst of vexed negotiations with the India Office, W. Haldane Porter of the Home Office commented with unconscious irony, “It is difficult to explain even to the educated person the legal difference between a British subject and the British protected person, and quite impossible to make a coloured seaman understand” (Interdepartmental meeting, November 2, 1928; note of a conference at the Home Office, November 5, 1928, IOR, L/E/9/953.

⁵⁶ After a brief boom in 1919–20, largely produced by irresponsible overcapitalization, the shipping industry slumped again in 1921. See Labour Research Department (n. 25 above).

⁵⁷ In June 1919 alone, there were riots in Vienna and Winnepeg, Canada, and a pogrom in Poland as well as police and teachers' strikes in Britain. See Daily Herald (June 18, 1919), p. 3Google Scholar; (June 23, 1919), p. 2; (June 24, 1919); Mowat, Charles Loch, Britain between the Wars, 1918–1940 (London: Methuen, 1956), pp. 24–25Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ These phrases came from the maritime journal Syren and Shipping (June 18, 1919), p. 1055Google Scholar; and the chief constable of Liverpool to the Home Office, June 1919, both in the Home Office file on the riots, PRO, HO45/11017/377969. The reasons for the 1919 riots have yet to be thoroughly explored, but the most suggestive article is Roy May and Cohen, Robin, “The Interaction between Race and Colonialism: A Case Study of the Liverpool Race Riots of 1919,” Race and Class 16, no. 2 (1974): 111–26Google Scholar. Also see chap. 7 of Tabili, “Black Workers in Imperial Britain” (n. 25 above); and Jenkinson, Jacqueline, “The 1919 Riots,” in Racial Violence in Britain, 1840–1950, ed. Panayi, Panikos (Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1993), pp. 92–111Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Ralph Desmarias observed that to the interwar Home Office militant “workers were presented less as victims of economic circumstance and more as enemies of the state” in “Lloyd George and the Development of the British Government's Strikebreaking Organization,” pt. 1, International Review of Social History 20 (1975): 1–15, esp. 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also see Morgan, Jane, Conflict and Order: The Police and Labour Disputes in England and Wales, 1900–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Home Office to Newcastle, April 15, 1920; J. W. Oldfield, immigration officer at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to the Home Office, May 1, 1920; Home Office minutes, June 26, 1920, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/17.

⁶¹ Correspondence among J. W. Oldfield, immigration officer at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the Home Office, and the India Office, and Home Office minutes, January and February 1920, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/17. The Home Office also begrudged committing resources to a task not properly theirs, and India Office opposition to the proposal effectively squelched it. India Office to the Home Office March 4, 1920, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/17. India Office staff themselves were far from unanimous: C. E. Baines favored confining all seamen under India Office jurisdiction to “Tascar” [Lascar] articles, while J. E. Shuckburgh favored “treating all Arab seamen on the same footing as British subjects,” and W. Ferard saw defining protected persons as aliens as a welcome pretext to abdicate responsibility to the Foreign Office (India Office document 1555, February 26, 1920, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/17).

⁶² As Francesca Klug points out, British nationality in itself was no guarantee of equal rights and prerogatives. Until 1928, for example, the franchise was restricted on gender grounds, and women have remained without equal rights throughout the twentieth century (“Oh, to Be in England: The British Case Study,” in Woman-Nation-State, ed. Yuval-Davis, Nira and Anthius, Floya (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 17–18Google Scholar.

⁶³ G. E. A. Grindle of the Colonial Office to Sir John Pedder in the Home Office, September 15, 1920, PRO, HO45/13716/417984.

⁶⁴ Pedder to the Colonial Office, September 18, 1920. Those territories included the Federated Malay States, Nigeria, the Gold Coast and Northern Territories, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia. Seamen from several other, mainly African protectorates were entitled to apply for individual exemptions, and “we throw all the rest to the wolves” (G. E. A. Grindle, undersecretary of state for the colonies to Pedder, Home Office undersecretary, May 13, 1920; Undersecretary Harold Scott of the Home Office to chief constables, May 26, 1920. Also see correspondence April 1920–February 1921 among the Home Office, the Board of Trade, and the Colonial Office, regarding “Exemption of Protected Persons,” and esp. “Extract from ‘The Law Times’ June 12th 1920,” all in PRO, HO45/13716/417984).

⁶⁵ J. W. Oldfield, assistant superintending immigration officer, to Home Office, January 23, 1920; and Home Office minutes, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/17. Aliens legislation of 1919 and 1920 exempted sailors on shore leave of up to sixty days from registration as aliens.

⁶⁶ Cooper cited a recent regulation, “S.I.267 of 30.6.20.” E. N. Cooper to the Home Office, February 17, 1921, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/23.

⁶⁷ The Home Office, conversely, refused to register Gabbar under the Coloured Alien Seamen Order because they feared registration would regularize his position in Britain. Home Office to the India Office, November 20, 1925, IOR, L/E/9/953; and see Notes of a conference held at the Home Office, January 26, 1928, PRO, HO45/13392/493912/42.

⁶⁸ Aliens powers, as defined in the legislation of 1919, 1920, and 1925, included refusal of leave to land, registration and monitoring of legal resident aliens, and deportation without recourse to appeal at the virtual discretion of the home secretary. Grounds for deportation included but were by no means limited to destitution, illness, suspected criminal behavior including labor organizing, and failing to register on entry. See, for details, Gordon, Paul, Policing Immigration: Britain's Internal Controls (London: Pluto Press, 1985), esp. pp. 8–10Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Board of Trade to Consul-general at Marseilles, September 20, 1920; Home Office minutes, September 20, 1920, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/19; Home Office minutes, October 20, 1920, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/20.

⁷⁰ Such proof would include a British passport, an emergency certificate of British nationality, or a wartime seaman's identification certificate. Home Office circular to immigration officers, PRO, S.I.284/332, 087/19, signed by Haldane Porter, October 20, 1920. For white seamen, and for Black seamen before 1925, none of these forms of identification were necessary if a man held seamen's discharge papers. The Home Office exempted men who could prove domicile in the United Kingdom, who held return tickets to Aden, or whose repatriation would be “impractical” for employers or the authorities. Home Office minutes, October 20, 1920, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/20.

⁷¹ Home Office to G. E. Baker of the Board of Trade, November 17, 1920, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/20.

⁷² Home Office to immigration officers in Home Office ports, December 31, 1920, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/22. The Aliens Order of 1920 required all aliens to register with the police on arrival in the United Kingdom, but seamen were exempt for sixty days on the assumption they were between ships. For this reason and since their discharge papers were accepted as adequate identification, few seamen carried passports.

⁷³ G. E. Baker of the Board of Trade to W. Haldane Porter, Chief Inspector of the Immigration Branch, December 4, 1920, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/20. Confident that incipient civil conflict amply justified their involvement, Pedder urged his colleagues in the Home Office to “join hands with the Board of Trade.” Home Office minutes, November 18, 1920, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/20. The scuffle, which occurred among a “crowd of seafaring men in the neighbourhood of the Shipping Office,” was apparently precipitated when a ship's captain announced he was about to sign an all-Black crew of firemen. Typescript of trial testimony printed in the South Wales Argus of Wednesday, November 10, 1920, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/22.

⁷⁴ W. Haldane Porter, chief inspector of the Immigration Branch to Immigration Officers in Home Office ports, December 31, 1920, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/22.

⁷⁵ This strike, which lasted from March 6–September 19, was precipitated when the National Maritime Board, composed of employers' and union representatives, negotiated a pay cut of £2 10s. While Havelock Wilson's National Sailors' and Firemen's Union voted to accept the cut—by a margin of fifty-seven of 19,000 ballots cast—Joe Cotter's Cooks' and Stewards' Union struck unsuccessfully. See Marsh and Ryan (n. 42 above), 112–13.

⁷⁶ Cardiff town clerk to the Home Office, April 21, 1921; and report from His Majesty's officer in charge, Cardiff, to the Home Office, May 1921, PRO, HO45/11897/ 332087/24.

⁷⁷ Although the home secretary had virtually limitless discretion to deport aliens, British subjects could technically be repatriated only voluntarily. Home Office minutes, April 1921; and Home Office draft letter May 1921, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/24; also see approaches to Estonian and Japanese authorities, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/35.

⁷⁸ Henry T. A. Bosanquet, of the King George Fund for Sailors, to the Home Office, June 10, 1921; secretary of the NSFU and chaplain of the Missions to Seamen to the Colonial Office, June 13, 1921; report from Cardiff, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/33, /35, / 39.

⁷⁹ To the Seamen's Union, Cardiff, the Colonial Office responded they had no funds for relief, only for repatriation. Grindle of the Colonial Office to the secretary, Seamen's Union, Cardiff, June 22, 1921, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/33; reports from Cardiff, June 1921, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/35, 39.

⁸⁰ Lord mayor of Cardiff to the Home Office, June 22, 1921, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/33, HO45/11897/332087/35; the chief constable of Newport denounced Henson as an example of “the low type of seamen's union agents” who exacerbated racial conflict. Home Office minutes, March 18, 1922, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/60.

⁸¹ Throughout summer and autumn 1921, the Home Office and local police in Cardiff and several other ports cooperated in a series of efforts to deport or repatriate Arab seamen regardless of their nationality and in spite of their awareness that many “might refuse to leave England.” In most cases, men who agreed to go when initially approached “at the appointed hour … failed to put in an appearance” for repatriation, most likely because they had obtained employment in the intervening weeks. See Home Office files, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/39, /41, /42, /46, /50. Failed “repatriation” schemes were a hallmark of interwar race policy, and another story in themselves.

⁸² Newport Immigration Officer Wilkes to the Home Office, March 18, 1922, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/60.

⁸³ “Deputation to the Board of Trade (Viscount Wolmer) from the Seafarers' Joint Council regarding the Employment of Arabs to the Detriment of British Seafarers,” January 15, 1923, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/70. Delegates to the meeting included representatives of the Imperial Merchant Service Guild, the Marine Engineers' Association, the Mercantile Marine Service Association, the NSFU, the Shipconstructors' and Shipwrights' Association, and S. G. LeTouzel, editor of the Seaman, representing the Seafarers' Joint Council. With the exception of the NSFU and LeTouzel, few of their members could have been in competition with Black men, who were barred from the higher ranks.

⁸⁴ Pedder in Home Office minutes, January 1923, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/70. Although the question of “coloured seamen” had been raised in the House of Commons the previous month, it was on behalf of “social workers and ministers of religion,” concerned about “stranded seamen“—not on behalf of the union, who were instead criticized for abuse of power. Lieutenant-Commander Joseph Montagu Kenworthy to Sir P. Lloyd-Greame, president of the Board of Trade, December 11, 1922, Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th ser., vol. 159 (1922)Google Scholar, cols. 2335, 2337–38.

⁸⁵ National Union of Seamen executive council minutes, April 22, 23, 1925, MRC, Mss 175/1/1/6, fols. 41–42.

⁸⁶ The year 1924 was the best year since the war for seamen's employment. National Maritime Board Sailors and Firemen's Panel, “Report on the Joint Supply System, 1924” (January 13, 1925), MRC, Mss 175/6/NMB/3/1.

⁸⁷ Rank-and-file organization threatened union leaders as well as employers by discrediting union leaders, thereby jeopardizing the effectiveness of the National Maritime Board, a union-employer regulatory body. See Tabili, “Black Workers in Imperial Britain” (n. 25 above), chap. 6. On the pay cut, the strike, and race discrimination, see Hardy (n. 46 above); on the strike, see Marsh and Ryan (n. 42 above), pp. 122–25.

⁸⁸ Clipping from Western Mail (November 15, 1924) forwarded to trie Home Office by E. N. Cooper, 12 James Watt Street, Glasgow, to the Home Office, November 19, 1924, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/91. While the men themselves distinguished among alien seamen, Black seamen, and corrupt seamen, the local press apparently found it inconvenient or impossible to do so. Ignoring the organization's explicit nonracism, the Western Mail spiced its report with stereotypes of tubercular Turks or Armenians masquerading as British “Arabs.”

⁸⁹ Henderson's son, Arthur Henderson, Jr., as M.P. for Cardiff South, was a vocal opponent of “coloured alien seamen.” See, e.g., Henderson's questions in the House of Commons, July 18, 1929 and May 7, 1930, Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser., vols. 230 and 238 (1929–1930), cols. 606, 1065–68Google Scholar.

⁹⁰ Lansbury was unsuccessful. Correspondence between George Lansbury and the Home Office, PRO, HO45/24820/456725. In 1930 the Labour Party Research Department criticized the “drastic powers” delegated the home secretary, but efforts during the second Labour government to curb abuse through an advisory committee were similarly squelched when the board became too friendly to appellants' interests. See “Aliens Deportation Advisory Committee,” PRO, HO45/14909/617473. Henderson's biographer describes his eleven months in the Home Office as “uneventful,” commenting on his distaste for Aliens matters and his abdication of responsibility to the permanent secretary, John Anderson. See Leventhal, F. M., Arthur Henderson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 126Google Scholar.

⁹¹ Board of Trade to customs and excise officers, carbon copy to Henderson, May 19, 1924, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/91; Board of Trade to Home Office, August 28, 1924; and Home Office minutes, November 3, 1924, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/94. E. N. Cooper, 12 James Watt Street, Glasgow, to Home Office, November 19, 1924, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/91. On the fall of the Labour government of 1924, see Mowat (n. 57 above), pp. 187–94.

⁹² Joynson-Hicks was no panderer to labor. His arrival in the Home Office was accompanied by extensive measures to bust the impending general strike of 1926. See Mowat, pp. 193, 294–320, esp. 309, 316. Joynson-Hicks was also a notorious anti-Semite, and his tenure as home secretary saw enhanced aliens restriction on anti-Semitic lines. See Cesarini, David, “Joynson-Hicks and the Radical Right in England after the First World War,” in Kushner, and Lunn, , eds. (n. 3 above), pp. 118–39, esp. p. 129–30Google Scholar.

⁹³ Statutory Rules and Orders 1925, no. 290, March 18, 1925, IOR, L/E/9/953, fol. 349, reprinted in Board of Trade Mercantile Marine Department paper no. 461, July–September 1925, p. 120; Home Office memorandum, November 3, 1924, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/94. Originally envisioned as a onetime registration “confined to two or three ports,” the order, by the time it was implemented, covered thirteen major ports. These were Barry Dock, Penarth, Port Talbot, Cardiff, Newport, Swansea, Llanelly, Liverpool, Salford, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, South Shields, Middlesbrough, and Hull. See Cooper to Home Office, October 18, 1924; Home Office memorandum, November 3, 1924, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/91, /94. The Home Office intended to exempt men in shore employment and not to unduly harass those without proof in the early stages. Home Office letter to constables, March 23, 1925, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/98; Board of Trade paper no. 461, p. 122, IOR L/E/9/953, fol. 349. The order was broadened in January 1926 to all major U.K. ports.

⁹⁴ Cooper to the Home Office, October 18, 1924, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/91; “Notes of meetings attended by Liverpool Immigration Officers at various ports.” E. N. Cooper to Carew Robinson at the Home Office, April 2, 1925, PRO, HO45/12314/476761.

⁹⁵ Home Office instructions to chief constables, issued March 23, made the racism behind this painfully explicit: “The racial resemblance between many coloured seamen is such that there is no satisfactory means of identifying individuals.” Home Office confidential memorandum to chief constables, “Registration of Coloured Alien Seamen (Other than Chinese and Japanese),” March 23, 1925, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/98. An analogous procedure, the issue of certificates of service, a type of work credential, by the Board of Trade, was simultaneously tightened up for “all coloured seamen irrespective of race or nationality” (Board of Trade paper, no. 461, pp. 122–23, IOR, L/E/9/ 953).

⁹⁶ Berka was denied a passport when he reported his occupation was seafaring, but he received one after stating he was a clerk. See also the cases of Fazal Mohamed reported by his wife, Mary Fazel, to the India Office, September 7, 1925, IOR, L/E/9/953, fol. 257; of Alexander Givvons, reported by the Manchester chief constable to the Home Office, April 14, 1925, PRO, HO45/12314/476761/7; and of Ahmed Gabbar (n. 67 above).

⁹⁷ After April 1925 a man had to produce documentary evidence of more than six weeks' residence in Britain, or of leave to land from an immigration officer, in order to get a certificate of registration under the order as a U.K. domiciled alien, thus permission to remain in the United Kingdom. See Board of Trade Paper no. 461, p. 122, IOR, L/E/9/953, fol. 349.

⁹⁸ Also see accounts of these events as reported in 1935 in the Keys (n. 8 above); and by Little (n. 1 above).

⁹⁹ Men with expired passports issued abroad would still be treated as British subjects as the Home Office preferred that such documents be renewed in the country of issue. Men from the exempted protectorates, the Malay States, Nigeria, the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia would be accorded “most favourable treatment as regards admission to the U.K.” In October 1925, all protected subjects were treated this way, but “the general feeling among the staff who deal with coloured seamen” was to suspect that in many cases, for instance in Addis Ababa, credentials were too freely given, and they wished to cease accepting them. Home Office report, October 1925, PRO, HO45/12314/476761/48.

¹⁰⁰ This was the result of conditions attached to the British Shipping Assistance Act, 1935. See India Office file, 1935–39, IOR, L/E/9/955.

¹⁰¹ See Report on the Joint Supply System, 1924, MRC, Mss 175/6/NMB/3/1.

¹⁰² The phrase is Banton's, Michael, from White and Coloured: The Behaviour of British People toward Coloured Immigrants (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960)Google Scholar. Banton later defended the “stranger” thesis in the “Correspondence” column of Race 15 (1973): 111–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar, although his most recent work suggests movement toward a subtler position, arguing, indeed for a dialectic between notions of “race” and “colour” and the definitions contained in antiracism statutes—that is, between popular definitions and the law. See Banton, Michael, “The Race Relations Problematic,” British Journal of Sociology 42, no. 1 (March 1991): 115–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰³ For a discussion of these ambiguities, see Huttenback, Robert A., Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in the British Self-Governing Colonies, 1830–1910 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 21–23Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁴ See protests by the Cardiff Adenese Association, April 7, 1925, PRO, HO45/12314/476761/5, /6; and India Office, April 25, 1925, IOR, L/E/9/953.

¹⁰⁵ Enclosed in Grindle of the Colonial Office to the Home Office, April 27, 1925; and see further letters to the Colonial Office, dated April 30 and May 5, 1925, PRO, HO45/12314/476761/17.

¹⁰⁶ P. S. R. Chowdhury to the secretary of state for India, February 17, 1926; E. P. Donaldson of the India Office to the Home Office, March 2, 1926, IOR, L/E/9/953.

¹⁰⁷ Hugh Alex Ford to the Foreign Office, January 1926, forwarded to the India Office, IOR, L/E/9/953; Home Office minutes, March 1, 1926, PRO, HO45/12314/476761/77. The article appeared in the January 30, 1926, number of the Negro World.

¹⁰⁸ G. R. Warner of the Foreign Office to the Home Office, July 14, 1926, IOR, L/E/9/953.

¹⁰⁹ India Office minute paper, June 9, 1925, IOR, fols. 319–22, L/E/9/953; also see confidential draft paper, December 14, 1925, IOR, L/E/9/953.

¹¹⁰ The discrepancy between the state's public policy of nondiscrimination and covert race discrimination no doubt accounts for Rich's conclusion that “middle opinion” curbed the worst excesses of racism in the 1920s and 1930s (see Race and Empire, n. 2 above). Whenever the Home Office were called to account, as they indeed were in Parliament, their responses were designed more to obscure than to enlighten. See, e.g., Joynson-Hicks's response to Captain Arthur Evans on December 21, 1925 and March 15, 1926, Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th ser., vol. 189 (1925)Google Scholar, cols. 1964–65, and 193 (1926), cols. 40–42; and Captain Douglas Hewitt Hacking, undersecretary of state for the Home Office, to George Lansbury and J. S. Wardlaw Milne, April 14, 28, 1926, Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th ser., vol. 194 (1926)Google Scholar, cols. 195–96, 2030. Also see Little's account, pp. 88–89. On December 21, 1925, Joynson-Hicks assured Evans in the House of Commons that “No British subject is required to register” (Parliamentary Debates [Commons] 5th ser., vol. 189 [1925], cols. 1964–65Google Scholar).

¹¹¹ Evasion was insignificant: only 32 nonregistered men—amounting to ½ of 1 percent of the 7,408 men who registered—had been apprehended in three months. Home Office memorandum to the India Office, containing the first tally under the order, late October 1925, PRO, HO45/12314/476761/48, also found in IOR, L/E/9/953. In the late 1920s, between 50 percent and 60 percent of the appeals the India Office processed proved to be British subjects. See India Office correspondence with the Home Office, November 1928, PRO, HO45/13392/493912/73a. Of 241 cases, 169 were resolved, and of these, 101 men (60 percent) were British subjects; 46 men (27.2 percent) were British protected persons; 12 men (7.1 percent) were untraceable; and only 10 men (6 percent) were proven to be aliens, “Indian High Commissioner: Coloured Seamen: Grants: Refusals of Nationality Certificate,” March 26, 1928, PRO, HO45/13392/493912/46.

¹¹² The Home Office itself, in defending the order, insisted that registration was “welcomed by those affected” because it gave them “a definite status in this country.” Memorandum on the operation of the Aliens Order, October 1925, PRO, HO45/12314/476761/48.

¹¹³ Home Office memorandum, November 3, 1924, PRO, HO45/11897/332087/94.

¹¹⁴ P. R. Fudge, Immigration Office, Liverpool, to the Home Office, September 7, 1925, PRO, HO45/14299/562898; minutes of a meeting at the Home Office, January 1928, PRO, HO45/13392/493912/42.

¹¹⁵ A man whose registration was pending or “deferred” would not be hired because employers might be unable to discharge an undocumented man at the end of the voyage. C. D. C. Robinson in a Home Office memorandum, October 1927, PRO, HO45/13392/493912/36. Chief constable, Cardiff, forwarding a letter from Detective Sergeant Gerald Broben, April 1926; Home Office to Cardiff, May 12, 1926; and Home Office to Broben, June 18, 1926, all in PRO, HO45/12314/476761/92, 99, 100, 101. As suggested above, the repatriation process was slow and cumbersome, and many men were fundamentally unwilling to go, so that by the time berths had been found for men who “volunteered,” most had apparently found work or other means of support.

¹¹⁶ C. E. Baines, September 17, 1933; and, on Gulam Rasul, India Office memorandum, September 17, 1933, both in IOR, L/E/9/972.

¹¹⁷ India Office minute paper, October 1926, IOR, L/E/9/953.

¹¹⁸ As late as November 1927, Home Office personnel complained of the “almost protean” difficulties the order posed, and discussed scrapping it. Home Office minutes on “Coloured Seamen; Difficulties of Administration,” November 22, 1927, PRO, HO45/13392/493912/36.

¹¹⁹ Home Office memorandum to the India Office, late October 1925, PRO, HO45/12314/476761/48; also found in IOR, L/E/9/953; Memorandum from the chief inspector, Aliens Branch, to the Home Office, October 1925, PRO, HO45/12314/476761/48.

¹²⁰ Acting Resident Major H. M. Wightwick, July 25, 1931, IOR, L/E/9/954.

¹²¹ J. C. Walton to the Colonial Office, July 2, 1925; India Office to the Home Office, April 13, 1926; C. D. C. Robinson of the India Office to Donaldson of the Home Office, April 19, 1926, IOR, L/E/9/953.

¹²² Note of an interdepartmental conference at the Foreign Office, March 12, 1931, Foreign Office circular T.3687/501/378 and Foreign Office circular, October 10, 1931, T.9496/501/378. (Both can be found in IOR L/E/9/954. Related material is also found in PRO, HO45/14299/562898/96, March 1931); and see Board of Trade Mercantile Marine Department Memorandum no. 446, “General Minute to All Superintendants: ‘Coloured Seamen,’” from G. E. Baker, December 16, 1932, PRO, MT9/2735/M.3580.

¹²³ Foreign Office circulars T.5918/217/378 and T. 12484/217/378, December 8, 1934, and Dominions Office to India Office, November 9, 1934, IOR, L/E/9/972. In April 1934, the Colonial Office affirmed that visas and other endorsements could be affixed to certificates of nationality, solidifying their function as second-class passports. Secretary of State Philip Cunliffe-Lister to the high commissioner for the Somali protectorate, April 18, 1934, IOR, L/E/9/972.

¹²⁴ Like the status of all “New Commonwealth” subjects, both men and women, British women's relationship to nationality remains problematic in the late twentieth century. See Campbell, Beatrix, Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and Politics in the 80s (London: Virago, 1984)Google Scholar; Klug (n. 62 above).

¹²⁵ Joynson-Hicks to Captain Arthur Evans, March 15, 1926, Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 5th ser., vol. 193 (1926), col. 42Google Scholar.

¹²⁶ Edward Mifsud to Trade Commissioner, Malta House, London, September 23, 1935. IOR, L/E/9/972.

¹²⁷ Correspondence among the Home Office, the Passport Office, and the Colonial Office, A. V. Agius, trade commissioner of Malta, and Edward Mifsud of the Office of the Lieutenant Governor of Malta, May 10, 11, and 16, June 14, 19, and 28, September 23, 1935; and March 11, 1936, (E&O 1735/36 and HO Gen 35/7/2) IOR, L/E/9/972.

¹²⁸ Correspondence among the Home Office, the Dominions Office, and the Colonial Office, April 6, and May 13, 1936, IOR, L/E/9/972.

¹²⁹ India Office personnel commented that, if Indian subjects, newly redefined as British, were “made subject to conscription … we should … find it difficult to resist it.” M. J. Clauson of the India Office Political Department, n.d., ca. 1942–43 (Pol. 9443/42; E&O 5876/42), IOR, L/E/9/953. Repeal was the response to protests regarding African protected persons.

¹³⁰ See Foot, Paul, Immigration and Race in British Politics (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965)Google Scholar; Sivanandan, A., “From Immigration Control to Induced Repatriation,” in his A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance (London: Pluto, 1983), pp. 131–40Google Scholar; Dresser, Madge, Black and White on the Buses: The 1963 Colour Bar Dispute in Bristol (Bristol: Bristol Broadsides, 1986)Google Scholar; Pilkington, Edward, Beyond the Mother Country: West Indians and the Notting Hill White Riots (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988)Google Scholar.

¹³¹ The Nazis encountered similar difficulties in codifying supposedly obvious and “natural” racial categories. See Koonz, Claudia, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin's, 1987), p. 372Google Scholar.

¹³² For a discussion of the labor disputes of the early 1920s, see Cronin, James E., “Coping with Labour, 1918–1926,” in Conflict and the Political Order in Modern Britain, ed. Cronin, James E. and Schneer, Jon (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982), pp. 113–45Google Scholar.

¹³³ Quotes are from Rich, , Race and Empire (n. 2 above), p. 122Google Scholar. While Rich has aptly criticized many historians' tendency to see in interwar Britain's race policy a monolithic and unmediated racist impulse, Rich errs when he asserts that “middle opinion”—“central, informed” popular thought—was able to “cushion the general extension of systematic racist doctrines” (pp. 4–5, 122).

¹³⁴ Quotes are from ibid., pp. 122, 126; also see n. 10 above.

¹³⁵ For a discussion of who benefited from imperialism, see Davis and Huttenback (n. 20 above); Cain and Hopkins (n. 22 above).

¹³⁶ The cultural dimensions of this “recolonization” process in post-1945 Britain have frequently been articulated, but its material and structural dimensions have remained largely unexplored. See, in addition to Gilroy (n. 17 above) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back (n. 22 above), Rex, John, Race, Colonialism and the City (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 79, 85–88, 107Google Scholar; Banton, , White and Coloured (n. 102 above), esp. pp. 59, 69Google Scholar; For structural analyses of post-1945 migrant labor, see Castles, Stephen and Kosack, Godula, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe (1973; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Peach, Ceri, West Indian Migration to Britain: A Social Geography (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1968)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the persistence of imperial links beyond formal decolonization, see Kahler, Miles and respondents, “Europe and Its ‘Privileged’ Partners in Africa and the Middle East,” Journal of Common Market Studies 21, nos. 1 and 2 (September/December 1982): 199–226CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³⁷ This is not to discount Britain's structural relationships with other European states and how they might have influenced the reception of European migrants; on the contrary, these too require scholarly exploration.

¹³⁸ On British imperialism since the First World War, see Darwin, “Fear of Falling,” and “Imperialism in Decline?” (both n. 23 above); and Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire (n. 22 above).