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The State in Sailortown

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People, Place and Power on the Nineteenth-Century Waterfront

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Abstract

Sailortown was an early focus of the surveillance state, which created documentation regimes and tried to regulate accommodation, drink and prostitution. The international mobility of seafarers challenged nation states to address questions of jurisdiction and authority over each other’s subjects. The British state in particular extended its global information-gathering systems by having to monitor the world’s largest merchant fleet. State intervention intensified further with the late-century rise of nationalistic ideologies, and black seafarers in particular were subject to increasing levels of documentary scrutiny. States also intervened in the public health of waterfront districts, inevitably intruding into issues of morality and sexuality because of the prominence of venereal diseases in medical assumptions about the health of seafarers and women working in prostitution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

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  6. 6.

    Western Mail, 5 Oct. 1880.

  7. 7.

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  8. 8.

    Ravi Ahuja, “Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, c.1900–1960,” International Review of Social History 51, supplement (2006): 111–41.

  9. 9.

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  10. 10.

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  11. 11.

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  12. 12.

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  13. 13.

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  15. 15.

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  16. 16.

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  17. 17.

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  20. 20.

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  21. 21.

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  22. 22.

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  23. 23.

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  24. 24.

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  25. 25.

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  26. 26.

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  27. 27.

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  28. 28.

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  29. 29.

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  30. 30.

    Galveston Daily News, 25 Jan. 1896.

  31. 31.

    Mark Crinson, Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (London, 1996), 130–34.

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  34. 34.

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  35. 35.

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  36. 36.

    TNA, BT 1/463/18, Crimpage Act, 1846.

  37. 37.

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  38. 38.

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  39. 39.

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  40. 40.

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  41. 41.

    Women’s Library, 3AMS/B/08/03, C. Neville-Rolfe and Otto May, “The Mercantile Marine and the Problem of Venereal Disease” (1924).

  42. 42.

    TNA, BT 1/471/20, Complaint of R. Lewis, Cardiff, 1849.

  43. 43.

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  44. 44.

    Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 1 Apr. 1886.

  45. 45.

    Hawaiian Gazette, 11 Sept. 1872.

  46. 46.

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  47. 47.

    TNA, MT 9/479, Petition of Cardiff Seamen, 1893.

  48. 48.

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  49. 49.

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  50. 50.

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  52. 52.

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  53. 53.

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  54. 54.

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  55. 55.

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  56. 56.

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  57. 57.

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  58. 58.

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  59. 59.

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  60. 60.

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  61. 61.

    Standard, 26 Feb. 1890.

  62. 62.

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  63. 63.

    Daily News, 3 July 1890.

  64. 64.

    Daily News, 14 Jan. 1895.

  65. 65.

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  66. 66.

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  67. 67.

    Reynolds’s Newspaper, 20 Feb. 1898.

  68. 68.

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  69. 69.

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  70. 70.

    TNA, MT 9/687, Transmission Scheme: Crimping at Home Trade Continental Ports, letter from Hamburg Consul, 28 Nov. 1901.

  71. 71.

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  72. 72.

    Standard, 3 Mar. 1890.

  73. 73.

    Morning Post, 10 Aug. 1891.

  74. 74.

    A Commander RN [William Dawson], “British Seamen Abroad,” United Service Magazine (Jan. 1896), 404–19.

  75. 75.

    LSE Archives, Booth Collection, Interview with London Sailors’ Home Official, B138, 35–37.

  76. 76.

    Liverpool Mercury, 22 Dec. 1892.

  77. 77.

    Standard, 6 Jan. 1893.

  78. 78.

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  79. 79.

    John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge, 2000); Edward Higgs, “The Rise of the Information State: The Development of Central State Surveillance of the Citizen in England, 1500–2000,” Journal of Historical Sociology 14 (2001): 175–97; V. C. Burton, “Counting Seafarers: The Published Records of the Registry of Merchant Seamen, 1849–1913,” Mariner’s Mirror 71 (1985): 305–20.

  80. 80.

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  81. 81.

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  82. 82.

    Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 21 Apr. 1885.

  83. 83.

    The Times, 6 Mar. 1891; BPP, Royal Commission on Labour (Group B) volume I. Docks, Wharves and Shipping, 1892 (C.6708-V), q. 8647.

  84. 84.

    BPP, Select Committee on Merchant Seamen Bill, 1878 (205), qq. 3379, 3406.

  85. 85.

    BPP, Select Committee on Merchant Seamen Bill, 1878 (205), q. 3494.

  86. 86.

    Bone, Broken Stowage, 47.

  87. 87.

    Morning Post, 24 Nov. 1851.

  88. 88.

    Shields Daily Gazette, 16 Sept. 1892; Tyne and Wear Archives, MG.SS/1/10, South Shields Petty Sessions, Apr.–May 1896.

  89. 89.

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  90. 90.

    Women’s Library, 3AMS/B/08/03, Pamphlet “Social Conditions in Ports and Dockland Areas,” (1935); 3AMS/B/08/02, Report on Problems Peculiar to the Bute Town Area.

  91. 91.

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  93. 93.

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  95. 95.

    Standard, 19 Feb. 1886.

  96. 96.

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  97. 97.

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  100. 100.

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  103. 103.

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  104. 104.

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  105. 105.

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  106. 106.

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  107. 107.

    BPP, Select Committee on Intemperance, Third Report, 1877 (418), q. 8216.

  108. 108.

    BPP, Select Committee on Intemperance, First Report, 1877 (171), q. 196.

  109. 109.

    BPP, Royal Commission on the Contagious Diseases Acts, 1871 (C.408), qq. 2279–84.

  110. 110.

    Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 28 Apr. 1886.

  111. 111.

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  112. 112.

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  113. 113.

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  114. 114.

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  115. 115.

    Western Mail, 20 Dec. 1895.

  116. 116.

    Western Mail, 30 Dec. 1898.

  117. 117.

    North American and United States Gazette, 17 Sept. 1875.

  118. 118.

    Daily Evening Bulletin, 20 July 1887.

  119. 119.

    TNA, MT 9/746, Revision of Official Log Book, 1902.

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    Graeme J. Milne

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Milne, G.J. (2016). The State in Sailortown. In: People, Place and Power on the Nineteenth-Century Waterfront. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33159-1_6

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