Bordering seafarers at sea and onshore

Abstract

This study uses a historically informed lens of coloniality, bordering, and intersectionality to analyze maritime bordering discourses and practices that target seafarers recruited from the Global South who embody the border in their everyday lives. In seeking to explain the current context exemplified by the sacking of P&O Ferry workers and the recruitment of “foreign agency” crews in March 2022, the study foregrounds 19th- and 20th-century maritime bordering legislation on ships and onshore, focusing on public-/private-bordering partnerships between governments, shipping companies, and unions. Archival research on British Indian seafarers employed by P&O a century ago and analysis of contemporary media and political discourses relating to “foreign agency crews” are drawn on to consider the implications of earlier bordering discourses and practices for 21st-century British citizenship and belonging. Attending to imperial bordering regulations that created the racialized and class-defined labor category of lascars explains the “common sense” designations of seafarers recruited in the Global South and their families as potential “illegal migrants,” and in doing so, it constitutes the long history of the public/private partnerships that constitute the UK's “hostile environment” immigration policies.