Abstract
Crimps were convenient bogeymen who personified the evils of sailortown. Mostly boarding-house keepers, but sometimes tailors, bar-owners or brothel-keepers, crimps exploited seafarers’ lump-sum wages and desire for entertainment and home comforts. Over time, crimps diversified into crew recruitment, seeking fees from ships’ captains and controlling labour markets. Crimping could be a sophisticated process of control, surveillance and exploitation, and seafarers responded with a mixture of resistance, acceptance and even enthusiasm, when the crimp seemed to be opposing the interests of captains and shipowners. Crimps had an advanced spatial awareness of the need to contact the seafarer at the earliest possible opportunity—usually before the ship had landed—and then closely define and control the spaces that the seaman occupied on shore.
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Milne, G.J. (2016). Crimps and Crimping. In: People, Place and Power on the Nineteenth-Century Waterfront. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33159-1_4
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