Abstract
The article argues that seafaring labour is not only conditioned by the forces of nature and the economic strategies of ship-owners but also by practices of political sovereignty. Any ship that is registered in a certain state is made into a partition of the political sovereignty of this state. This legal construction has since been worn down by the effects of globalisation. The costs of operating ships could be reduced by registering ships in new flag states with less stringent regulations. The link between the flag state and its ships used to be important for the conditions of maritime labour. Today, this link is fictitious. It is the market which sets the conditions for labour contracts.
Introduction
Western seafaring developed in the context of power struggles across the oceans, fighting for control of shipping lanes and denying these to political opponents. The development of royal navies concentrated maritime warfare in specific branches of seafaring. This offered the possibility – if not always the reality – of practising shipping as a purely economic business. Shipping started to become a thoroughly capitalist business at the end of the eighteenth century, when political domination over certain regions of the world’s oceans could no longer be enforced. Ship-owners could now compete to transport cargo across the world. These new chances could only be made use of when customary seafaring was replaced by a regime which made seafarers into economic instruments.
Starting in the first half of the nineteenth century, the maritime powers of the time transformed seafarers into capitalist maritime labourers by abolishing their customary rights and subordinating them under the regime of skippers (captains). These were not only the representatives of the ship-owner but also of the contained sovereignty of the flag state.
The real subsumption of maritime labour was accompanied by technical developments. However, it was not technology but changes in the labour relation which industrialised maritime labour.
In the shipping business the international economic crisis of the 1970s pushed cost reduction for operating ships by registering them in one of the new flag states. These allowed ship-owners to legally hire cheap personnel from all over the world. The crews of convenience which are typical for ships under flags of convenience brought new problems for life and labour aboard. There have been political endeavours to at least partially reregulate the radically deregulated shipping business, yet these continue to run up against limits set by a cutthroat international market.
1 The Pre-History of Flag-States
When Christopher Columbus came back from his first voyage in 1493, he had not found a sea route to India but rather to one of the islands that have become known as the Bahamas. Pope Alexander VI confirmed that this discovery had made the isle of Guanahani the property of the Castilian Crown.1
These events put the race for the riches of the world on the agenda of European powers. At the time, only the Castilian and the Portuguese Crowns were powerful enough to compete over far-away regions on land and on sea. To prevent armed conflicts between these royal governments, the Treaty of Tordesillas was concluded in 1494 under the aegis of the Pope. It divided up the known world between Spain and Portugal.2 The parties to this treaty drew lines (rayas) not only through the known continents but also through the ocean.3 If the Treaty of Tordesillas marks the beginning of European overseas exploitation, it also marks the beginning of the history of flag-states.4 Since the expansion of political power did not yet separate the appropriation of land space from the appropriation of sea space, the use of certain regions of the High Seas was politically restricted to ships that had been granted the right to navigate them by the European power claiming dominance over this part of the world. This international order was sanctioned by the church.
In the seventeenth century,5 competing political powers no longer had recourse to the church as arbiter. The lines through maps and the world no longer separated the dominions of European powers, instead they separated the unregulated sphere of the world from those regions where European political powers claimed power and legality. The logical conclusion of this new method of dividing the world was summed up in a formulation that was to develop into a well-known catch phrase: ‘No peace beyond the line’.6 In other words, if European powers concluded treaties concerning their respective rights to navigate and hence to trade, these treaties did not extend to the world beyond the lines. These parts of the world were up for grabs. The High Seas beyond the line were thrown open to armed struggle. Plunder was not only practised against far-away populations and their ships but also against the ships of European competitors.
2 The Slow Advent of a Non-Armed Branch of Seafaring
Since the world trade which originated in Europe7 developed as a form of armed appropriation that was practised on the High Seas and its shores, seafaring was part and parcel of the economic and military competition between European powers. And so was seafaring labour. Even in coastal waters seafarers had to be aware of the potential need to make use of weapons to defend the ship, the cargo and their life.
It was in the sixteenth century that political powers of the time first created separate organisations for maritime warfare, developing them into rudimentary royal fleets in the seventeenth century. Right from the beginning, patterns of onshore military organisation were not only instituted but even strengthened aboard the ships of royal fleets. It was on these ships (and among the big merchantmen copying their practices) that an unrestricted reign of captains was instituted. If these developments were the precondition for conceiving of merchant seafaring as a (potentially) non-military branch of seafaring, this was not yet established as such. Indeed, any such development was set back considerably when European sovereigns decided to bolster their military power at sea by issuing commissions or letters of marque8 to private owners of ships. If the practice goes back to the thirteenth century, it was in the sixteenth century that they were to become an important means of maritime warfare.
These documents transformed merchantmen as well as private commerce raiders – in other words: pirates – into privateers.9 They were commissioned to capture any ship carrying cargo that might (or might not) be destined for political opponents.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the political powers of the time gave out letters of marque to almost anybody who applied for them.10 For the seafarers themselves these letters or commissions meant that they were not to be strung up as pirates, if captured.
Letters of marque were part and parcel of maritime warfare, albeit in a specific manner. Since the crews of privateers did not receive pay but profited from their raids by presenting captured ships (prizes) to one of the Admiralty courts,11 privateers were not interested in destroying ships. Therefore, privateers were not used for maritime battles as such or for blockading enemy ports. Instead, they were commissioned to ruin the trade of the enemy. According to the data collected by Anderson and Gifford, privateers comprised a large proportion of the total military force at sea during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.12
If privateering is an interesting aspect of international military history, it should also be noted in connection with the history of seafaring labour. Most commissioned ships were the property of merchants,13 some were owned by their captains. The crews consisted of volunteers. Since they did not receive wages but rather partook of the economic gains of their raids, they wanted their captains to be daring and their activities to be focused on keeping their prizes seaworthy. If that did not make for an egalitarian structure aboard, it was at least very different from the rigid hierarchy and discipline that was being developed on warships.
The end of a war meant the end of royal commissions for privateering.14 If a ship was owned by its captain, he could either switch to merchant seafaring or continue robbery at sea as a pirate. Commissioned ships that were owned by merchants were then, once again, made use of for the transport of cargo.
But neither in France nor in England were they then re-integrated into a maritime service that was strictly separated from the respective royal navies.15 From 1668 onwards, in France l’inscription maritime obligated men from the coastal regions to serve on ships. It also subjected every seaman, be he serving on a ship of the royal navy or on a merchant ship, to military discipline. The system was reformed in 1795 but only repealed in 1965.
In England ‘the state saw its merchant seamen as being virtually interchangeable with the fighting seamen of the Royal Navy, and the legislative emphasis was on maintaining the flow of recruits to sea service and ensuring that the fleet could be manned speedily in times of war.’16 While there was no legal equivalent to the French system, there was interchangeability between the navy and merchant marine for men as well as for officers.17 It was only in 1850 that the Board of Trade, which had been instituted in 1786, took over full responsibility for the Merchant Service.18 And when in 1853 continual service was introduced for naval ratings, the merchant service no longer had to be considered its chief recruiting ground.19
3 From Mare Clausum to International Competition over Sea-Transport
Since the beginning of the sixteenth century English, French and later Dutch governments had opposed the claims of Spain and Portugal over certain regions of the High Seas. They demanded mare liberum, that is: the end of any political restriction to the right of navigating the High Seas. The demand was put forward in pamphlets,20 but it was emphasised in practice by the issue of commissions for privateers.
Yet, as soon as the new maritime powers had become able to effectively compete with Spain and Portugal, they no longer demanded mare liberum but developed their own political strategy of mare clausum. Respective claims became law in several European states. None was to be as effectively pursued as the Navigation Acts, passed in the English Parliament in 1651 and 1660.21 These acts – a by-product of the English Revolution22 – decreed that trade to and from English colonies as well as between Europe and England was to be reserved for English merchants, hence only to be transported in English ships. Mare clausum provoked an upswing in smuggling.
Notwithstanding the fact that the Navigation Acts were only to be repealed in 1849, their end had become predictable when the thirteen wealthiest English colonies in North America achieved their independence and opened their ports to any foreign merchant ship. The political conditioning of sea-trade, which had first been constituted in the late Middle Ages, was coming to be replaced by international competition over cargo.23 Shipping was starting to become a thoroughly capitalist business. For ship-owners and their skippers to legally take part in competition over cargo, they had to register their ships with the administration of the state where their business was located. The registration of a ship made and still makes ships into ‘a quantum of sovereignty of that country’.24 This legal construction was and is evidenced by the flag under which a ship is operated.
4 The Twilight of Customary Seafaring
If newcomers wanted to make inroads into long-established relations of trade and transport, they had to offer lower prices. At the time, this was usually done by cutting down on the number of crew members25 and on the costs of their upkeep. Under-manning was notorious in the nineteenth century.26
But merchants and ship-owners – often one and the same person – soon recognised that their strategies of competition were severely restricted by customary practices of seafaring. One national government after another issued regulations for its merchant marine. According to Yrjö Kaukiainen they thereby replaced, or at least challenged, an older practice.27
That these regulations had implicitly also abolished customary rights of seafarers was becoming evident when more and more merchants decided to send their ships on tramp voyages.28 While it had been general practice to hire crews for the voyage to a certain destination,29 usually one or two ports and for the return trip, this started to change when masters were ordered to practise cross-trading (as it was sometimes called). Here they were looking for cargo even outside traditional ports of call, selling it in another port, then sailing on with a new cargo, or – if nothing was found – in ballast, only to end such a voyage in the home port after one, two or even more years. Under these conditions crew members could hardly make use of their customary right to practise a bit of trade for themselves.30
Tramp shipping not only deprived seafarers of chances for an additional income but also changed their social status aboard. As long as they had possessed the right to transport goods on the ship, they were not only labourers but also – even if in a small way – owners of cargo whose interests had to be considered. The abolition of their right to small trade made crews into subordinates.
Tramp shipping also took away the possibility of making plans for one’s near future. If a young man had planned to go to sea for a few years and then take over his parents’ homestead or if he had asked a girl to marry him at the end of the shipping season, these plans were voided by a voyage which could make him stay away for two, three or even five years.
Tramp shipping, as well as the destination of ships to far-away ports, depended on seafarers being forced to stay aboard until the end of a voyage. Year after year, German consuls reported that crews had demanded to be discharged from their ship. Consuls could not do so, but some of them suggested that upper limits for the duration of a contract should be decided upon.31
Many seamen jumped ship,32 some – especially youngsters – jumped ship to flee an abusive captain. For others the better pay in foreign markets for maritime labour may have acted as a pull.33
Refusing seamen a say in the length of their service aboard, subjugating them to the legally bolstered authority of captains and reducing the costs of sea-transport by reducing the number of crew-members was no longer deemed sufficient when ship-owners began to compete for faster deliveries.34 Hence, merchants wanting to challenge or to defend privileged access to certain transports started to evaluate captains not only for their business skills35 but also for their ability to speed up voyages.36 Many a captain became willing to sail close to the wind, and to wait before ordering to reef sails even in high winds. Such practices required frequent and dangerous work in the rigging. Even by itself this would have intensified the labour aboard; the reduction in crew-numbers, resulting from economic considerations, aggravated the situation. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the life of seafarers came to be endangered not only by the forces of nature but also by those of international economic competition.
The governments of European maritime nations were convinced that to further their national shipping industry there was nothing quite as expedient as maintaining the discipline of its crews.37 There is perhaps no more telling sign of how radical the new political measures were than the fact that almost everywhere the concept of ‘desertion’, that is of the defection from military service, came to be applied to the crews of merchant ships. For this, seafarers had to be subjected to special legal regulations. No longer was their breach of a contract to be considered in the context of civil law.38 It was now to be dealt with as a criminal act, to be punished with a stint in prison.
It was only in the United States that jumping ship was punished solely by the loss of earned pay.39 In most German maritime states, newly-created administrative institutions for the regulation of merchant shipping were empowered to prosecute deserters. In Prussia this was not quite so easy, because the state council insisted on the fact that Prussia was governed by the rule of law wherefore the government should not deviate from the generality of law for all of the king’s subjects. It was only in 1854 that the Prussian government could follow the example of the other German maritime states and enact the ‘Gesetz zur Bestrafung von Seeleuten Preußischer Handelsschiffe, die sich dem übernommenen Dienst entziehen’. §1 stated that jumping ship was punishable by a stint in prison of up to six weeks or a fine of 50 Thaler. That the knowledge of one’s rights was also widespread amongst Prussian seamen is proved by the reports of consuls who had been told by seamen that they were not empowered to adjudicate on conflicts because Prussian citizens could only be judged from a regular court.40 In Britain the full penalty for desertion, as for various other offences against the duty of seamen, was twelve weeks’ imprisonment.41 After the Employers and Workmen Act of 1874 ended the criminalisation of work contracts for labourers ashore, desertion of seamen was de-criminalised in 1880, only to be re-criminalised by the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894. Jumping an English ship remained a crime punishable by fine and imprisonment.42 In France, where l’inscription had long subjugated every seaman under the harsh disciplinary regulations of the navy, the death penalty for desertion was not kept up for the merchant marine. But the decrees of 1852 and 1898 still offered owners of merchant ships a veritable military regime of discipline.43
Since the effectiveness of any legal measure depended on the willingness and the ability of masters (skippers) to enforce them, the traditional position of masters on merchant ships needed to change.44 Governments started to decree that the master represented the state aboard his ship, making his legal status somewhat similar to the position of captains on ships of the respective national fleet. Although ship-owners had long demanded the strengthening of master’s authority over their crews, such endeavours had not been effective before the nineteenth century.45
In popular as well as in academic publications it has been contended now and then that the almost unrestricted authority of captains was a functional necessity for seafaring, but, for most of the merchant ships, this form of domination was not a functional given. Instead, it had to be decreed by law.46
However, until well into the second half of the nineteenth century, the social status of skippers did not coincide with their new legal status aboard. Most of them had gained their position through seniority and the knowledge of the local waters and trading customs that went along with it.47 Not all of them were literate, and only a few of those who were endeavoured to learn something about navigation during the winter months when coasters were laid up in port. This meant that most with experience at sea mastered seafaring as well as their skipper. Had he been tempted to lord it over his crew, he would have had trouble finding a crew for the next season. Recruiting was still very much restricted to shore regions where almost everybody knew about conditions aboard, including those on specific ships.
As far as navigation is concerned, it was not just on coasters in European waters that ships navigated by hugging the coast. On long voyages to far-away places many masters also used the knowledge of landmarks on shores, determined the latitude by noon sights and dead reckoning and engaged a pilot when nearing a port.48 In 1836, a parliamentary committee which had inquired into the reasons for the frequency of sea accidents suggested introducing an examination for officers in the British merchant marine.49 Shipping interests managed to have this plan postponed. It was only in 1851 that the Board of Trade was charged with supervising certification.50 Just like in Finland,51 the era of certificates and state-run schools for navigation had started much earlier in German states,52 but in the 1860s seamen still asked for permission to work as captains without having obtained the requisite certificate. They argued that they were absolutely capable of bringing a ship over the ocean.53
The legal transformation of seafaring practices into those of a capitalist industry had not only done away with traditional obligations for the welfare of crews but also criminalised former practices of resistance aboard. This became evident whenever a crew refused to start a voyage because they were convinced that the ship was not seaworthy. They were (or could have been) arrested for refusing to perform their duty. We have to remember that while ‘floating coffins’ endangered the life of seamen, insurance protected the profit of ship-owners.54
It was Samuel Plimsoll who stirred up national outrage over the many disasters at sea that were happening because of overloading or undermanning. In his book Our Seamen: an Appeal he explained that the self-interest of insurance companies would not rectify the wrong-doings which led to the many disasters at sea. Brokers, though receiving a premium from the ship-owner or freighter, insured nothing but handed over portions of an insurance to several insurance companies. This meant that if, for example, the whole of the insured value of £ 5,500 was lost, the insurance company (at that time called the underwriter) may not have lost more than £150 or £100. They usually paid.
With much grumbling sometimes, it may be, and sometimes with more than a suspicion of its injustice. Still, it is paid, and the only remedial measure open to the underwriter is, that if he has good grounds for suspicion, he merely makes a mental note to have no further dealings with the suspected persons.55
In 1875, shipping interests defeated the Unworthy Ships Bill. But the investigations of a Royal Commission into the practices and conditions of the merchant marine supported all of Plimsoll’s allegations. In 1876 the Bill was passed. It required a line to be painted on ships showing the maximum loading point. Today, these load lines are still called Plimsoll lines.56
5 The Real Subsumption of Seafaring Labour to Capital
Seafaring depended – and still depends – on the skills of its personnel. But these skills go largely unrecognised when everything is seen as flowing from the leadership in command. The enhanced legal authority of captains made the social status of crew members somewhat similar to that of crew members aboard warships and on the very big ships of merchant companies. As long as battles and fever had not drastically reduced the crews of these ships, labour aboard was radically divided and rigidly subjugated to command, meaning that the organisation of labour had already been in line with that of future capitalist forms of industrial production. The much smaller crews on most merchant ships set limits to the division of labour.57 Therefore, the real subsumption of seafaring labour on these ships could only be achieved by strengthening the subjugation of labourers under command. Through drastically intensifying labour on deck,58 ship-owners heightened the productivity of sailing ships.
Franz Reuleaux argued that any boat carrying a sail had already been carrying a machine for propulsion. By changing the relation between the different parts of this machinery, that is, the kinematic circuit, seafarers transformed wind into propulsion.59
Following Marx’s concept of the real subsumption of labour and Franz Reuleux’s theory of kinematics,60 the industrialisation of seafaring should be seen as a change in the social relations of labour. In adopting these concepts, Welke and Gerstenberger61 criticised the long dominant understanding that it was with the advent of steam power that seafaring labour was industrialised.62
Sailing machines had developed over the ages, arriving at those complicated masses of rigging which emerged in the nineteenth century. To manage the kinematic relations between the different parts of the sailing machine, seafarers had to repeatedly climb up the rigging. But in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the invention of mechanical winches made it possible to do some of this work from on deck. On clippers it was sometimes helped by small steam engines. Deck labour – at least on some ships – started to become mechanised, almost or even more so than labour in the engine room. This was also because available labour-saving solutions were rarely applied.63 Preferring cheap human labour to costly technology is an ubiquitous practice in capitalist production.
Steam could only be utilised for propulsion through hands-on technical work. Labour in the engine room was not only very strenuous, it also required a high degree of skilled manual work.64 The control circuit of the engine depended on the opening or closing of valves at exactly the right moments. Production of the amount of steam that was needed by the bridge was only possible if coal was being added to the fire in exact quantities at exact times. Nevertheless, the very rudimentary technology employed often came to be improved by the practices and suggestions of engine labourers.65 However, especially on big steamships – like those of the British P&O Company or the German NDL – the regulations of labour in the engine room followed military traditions of command and bureaucracy rather than considerations of technical efficiency.
The advent of steam separated seamen working on deck from those working in the engine-room. While on small ships it was sometimes necessary to order members of the deck’s crew to help out in the engine-room, a rigid separation was much more typical. Even when there were no longer ships which used rigging alongside a steam engine and the propulsion of the ship depended exclusively on steam, many of those working on deck were tempted to conceive of themselves as the only real seamen. Notwithstanding the fact that they had to acquire new skills for handling cargo and for the operation of the new mechanical devices, the overwhelming technological change threatened to undermine their professional identities.
Racism was rampant and focused on Lascars. Although this term came to be used very loosely, and was certainly not how the seamen in question referred to themselves,66 most of the first foreign seamen to have been employed on British ships did indeed come from India.67 The conditions of their employment – the so-called lascar-articles – introduced the colonial form of coolie-labour into European merchant ships.68 After Aden had been conquered in 1839, the term lascar simply came to designate foreign seafarers with fewer rights than nationals.
Racism hindered solidarity. The deals negotiated by the unions in 1891 saw English firemen aboard ships paid £4 per month to a lascar’s £1.20 (paid in rupees not sterling). The Merchant Shipping Act of 1906 responded to union demands and legislated for expanded accommodation and improved diet for English seafarers. Lascars were explicitly excluded from these improvements.69 In Germany, on the other hand, the Social Democrats advocated equal pay for national and foreign seamen and the inclusion of foreigners into the social-insurance system.70 In the age of steam, lascars were most often hired as firemen and stokers. German ship-owners preferred to hire Chinese seamen as stokers (but also as sailors for the deck crews).71
At the end of the nineteenth century, flogging was prohibited in many industrial workplaces. This did not end flogging in engine rooms. If racial and class arrogance was one of the causes of the brutality of engine-room work, the logic underlying this brutality was that very rudimentary technology could only be set in motion with very hard bodily labour.72 When there was insufficient output, engineers tended to violently force production. Such assaults were not only directed at foreign seamen; but even as late as World War II, Indian seamen’s welfare officers at British ports complained about the ill-treatment of Indian seamen.73 In Germany, the practices of command in the engine rooms were examined by the Reichstag when the suicide rate amongst stokers and trimmers became known among the wider public.74 Seamen working in engine rooms were the first to become members of labour organisations. In contrast to seamen working on deck, they may have come to conceive of themselves as proletarians. This may have been furthered by changes in the economic organisation of the shipping business. The huge investments necessary for the building of a steamship called for joint-stock companies if not also for state subsidies. That made it much more evident that the maritime labour relations were not between seamen and persons but between seamen and capital.
Subordination of the deck’s crews may have been enhanced by new forms of representing (or suggesting) the functional justification of officers’ legal authority. Irrespective of their actual qualification in scientific navigation, the simple fact of their possessing certificates and being the owners of a sextant lent an air of legitimacy to their politically decreed authority.75
6 Seafarers Aboard Merchant Ships During the Two World Wars
In both world wars the labour of merchant seafarers was decisive for getting supplies to the warring countries. The British government decided to assume 80 per cent of the risks on every voyage.76 Germany had started early on with submarine attacks against merchant ships, drew back temporarily due to international outrage, before again engaging in unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917. The merchant marine had to get used to navigating in convoys.77 This was fairly successful and ‘until the end of World War I nearly 1700 British merchant ships had sailed under escort with only 1 per cent sunk’. On the other hand, half of the German merchant marine disappeared.78
Although novel means for defending ships such as sonar were used during World War II, the most effective countermeasures resulted from experiences in the First World War. In 1938 the British Admiralty issued a ‘Masters and Officers Handbook’, which ‘specified techniques for avoiding discovery, capture, or destruction’.79 Voyaging in convoys was deemed necessary. Seafarers also had to practise rescuing, and many had to learn to serve guns.80
Most of the research about merchant shipping during the world wars is focused on the ships, on their enlistment for war services, their specific wartime functions and their fates. Seafarers are present as victims81 and sometimes as heroes in these narratives.82 But in 1990 Tony Lane suggested that for seafarers on merchant ships during World War II, the war was a disturbance from outside with only a minimal impact on their labour, their life and their attitudes. Lane’s argument is based on a host of oral-history interviews with seafarers. Astonishing as this may be, it is also plausible. Day and night, cargo still had to be loaded and discharged while the ships had to be kept as functional as possible. Lane very convincingly shows that, even during the War, seaboard society remained a world of its own.
However, there were also differences. As protection against German U-boats, every single ship in an allied convoy had to make sure to keep up. There were many different ships, including the World War II ‘Liberty-ships’ built to order for the US government. If German merchant ships were not made use of for the transport of soldiers, in Britain, merchant ships, especially the so-called ‘Winston Specials’, transported troops.83
‘For a long time, perhaps the most dangerous duty in the West was to man merchant ships at sea’.84 4,786 Allied merchant ships were lost85 and very many merchant seafarers died.86 If seafarers were captured, they sometimes were dealt with as civilians and interned,87 but sometimes also as prisoners of war. There had been legal conventions, but the legal situation of captured merchant seamen remained unclear and practices varied.88 If merchant vessels under the British Flag were sunk, their owners collected insurance money. ‘It later became known that many of them had been grossly overinsured’.89 Not so for surviving seamen. Since they had not hired with the owners of the ship but signed ‘articles of agreement’ with their master, they lost any connection to their former employment when a ship was lost. And if they managed to save themselves in a boat, this was legally dealt with as something of an unpaid excursion. There was no continuance of pay.90 Some even received tax demands for the period they were off pay.91
7 Seafaring Labour in the Aftermath of the Second World War
The Control Council of the Allies prohibited German shipping and the construction of new vessels. However, with the beginning of the Cold War these restrictions were relaxed or abolished. Germany was once again integrated into the community of Western seafaring nations. From then on Germany’s shipping industry faced the same problem as its major competitors: a scarcity of personnel. As a solution, the age-old practice of hiring crews in prisons resurged.
With the advent of full employment in many Western societies, the shipping business had to improve the conditions of labour on their ships. Pay and food became better.92 Refrigerators came aboard and cool rooms were installed. Security measures were enhanced, and – perhaps most important of all – when new ships were built, the life of seamen was taken into account. Michael Grey from Lloyd’s List explained how the architecture of ships had to be changed when it was no longer taken for granted that the living quarters of sailors were always to be crammed into a part of the ship that could not be used for stowing cargo.93 In the 1960s, there were already many ships where most crew members had single cabins with a washing facility. If some ship-owners have since argued that seamen prefer multi-bedrooms, single cabins seem still to be dominant, a development which has been made much easier by the drastic reduction of crew members.
But while some aspects of life aboard had been improved in the 1960s and early 1970s, others started to deteriorate when more and more ships were built for the transport of containers. The breathtakingly rapid development of containerisation was enhanced by the fact that the US company Sea-Land acquired long-term contracts with the US Military for transports to the Vietnam War, which meant deliveries to the US Army in Germany,94 Okinawa and the Philippines.95
Containerisation differed from earlier changes in technology, insofar as it precluded a gradual introduction. The transports from door to door not only required international standards, they also required new ships and new port terminals. It also required communications technology and a whole new logistics of loading. Second officers aboard, the ones usually responsible for loading, very quickly had to become specialists in logistics and modern forms of communication.96
It is also not the case that the boxes, once brought aboard, seldom require labour. After loading, the lashings have to be controlled and sometimes fastened, reefers – refrigerated containers – have to be controlled daily, as do containers with dangerous cargo. If the skills necessary for handling cargo have indeed been reduced on container ships, the reduction in the number of crew members has not reduced the work load accordingly.
The advent of steam had already considerably lessened the stay in ports97 and hence the contacts of seamen with life ashore. Containerisation, with its drastic shortening of port stays and the fact that the new terminals are far away from the centre of nearby cities, transformed the life of seafarers into a bleak continuum of work and sleep. Their labour connects the world, but they themselves hardly ever get to see any part of it. Port stays of bulk carriers are usually longer than those of container ships, but the respective terminals also tend to be far away from city centres. And there are no longer agents of ship-owners who bring newspapers aboard and organise transports to a city centre. Today, such services are sometimes delivered by the missions for seafarers.
8 Seafaring Labour in Globalised Capitalism
8.1 Changes in the Economy of the Shipping Industry
For the shipping industry, the changes ushered in by globalisation came as a surprise. The growth of international trade had not been affected by the decrease in the rate of growth of industrial production which had already started in the 1960s. The demand for cargo space on ships continued to grow. Many new ships, especially tankers, were being ordered and the prices on the market for used ships were skyrocketing. But in 1973 and 1974, OPEC98 decided to considerably raise the price of oil. This had immediate effects on the costs of shipping. Some containerships were laid up in the Suez Canal for months. The situation was worse for oil tankers. There was hardly any cargo for the large Norwegian tanker fleet.99
At the time, the US government could no longer fulfil its promise to uphold the gold standard. In 1974, it terminated the Bretton Woods system of monetary management.100 From then on the exchange rates of currencies were volatile. To lessen the dangers of such changes during the course of commercial transactions, so-called derivates came to be provided. They were soon to be used for the purposes of speculation. The explosion in financial markets that has come to be the hallmark of globalisation was set off when one economically-leading country after another abolished restrictions on capital transfer. Owners of capital were being offered new means of investment. If this did not lead to a sinking rate of international trade, it did nevertheless result in a definite slackening of its growth, hence to reduced demand for cargo space on ships. This was happening at a time when many of the ships that were being built had been financed by credits of up to 90 or even 100 per cent.
The crisis offered possibilities for newcomers: firstly, because prices for used ships had shrunk decisively, and secondly, because the new ship-owners were able to compete. Being mostly based in developing countries, they could offer much less pay to their national crews than the levels that had been achieved by the maritime unions in the previously-leading maritime states. If there was need for a captain who knew about the new requirements in international ports, there were enough European captains who, having lost their employment because of the crisis, were willing to serve on the ships of newcomers. Others simply decided to change their profession.
8.2 National Sovereignty on Offer101
During the shipping crisis of the 1970s, new national ship registers were created. Already-established ship-owners decided to ‘flag-out’ one or more of their ships. To flag-out a ship means that it is registered in a state that is different from the state where its management is located.102 Ship-owners need to register their ship with a sovereign state, because the right to navigate the sea is not a right in the possession of individual ship-owners, but of sovereign states. As a portion of the sovereignty of the flag state, the ship is allowed to make use of that right.
Today, the decision to register a ship in another state is usually motivated by economic reasons.103 Every one of the new flag states offers low dues for registration and no taxes on shipping profits. Flag states often offer to help circumvent even their own statutory restrictions and requirements. Most importantly, none of the new flag states prescribe the nationality of crew members on its ships. This means that in the shipping industry it is legal to search for cheap personnel from all over the world, offering seafarers the working conditions of their countries of origin and evading the legally regulated labour conditions where management is located.104 Already in the 1970s, long-established shipping companies had decided to make use of a Flag of Convenience for some or all of their ships.105 While at the time flagging-out was practised rather clandestinely, it has since become a regular management practice.106
There are now flag states where there is no shipping business that is owned by any citizen of the respective state and no port into which the fictitious national ships could sail. A few – like Bolivia, Luxembourg or Switzerland – do not even have a harbour or coastline.
While Flags of Convenience had at first only been offered by developing countries, governments in traditional European maritime states – starting with Norway (NIS) in 1987 – have come to offer so-called second registers.107 All of them demand that a certain percentage of officers consist of European citizens, but all of them allow the rest of the crew to be hired on the world market for maritime labour. In Germany, in 1994, the plan to create a second register provoked long and fierce opposition. Seamen were demonstrating and in the north of Germany church bells were ringing. The governments of Bremen and Schleswig Holstein and the Union ÖTV appealed to the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. The appeal was rejected. The wording of the decision is telling. According to the court, the German International Ship Register (GIS) was necessary because it was the only means by which to offer enough incentives for ship-owners to manage their ships under the German flag.108 In spite of the offer of international ship registers, Flags of Convenience are still considered economically preferable by most ship-owners.109
There are also Flags of Extreme Convenience.110 They offer nothing besides the economic service of registration. Companies under such flags usually only have post-office box addresses, ‘including in India, the Seychelles and the United Arab Emirates, or in extremely obscure locations in these countries.’111 They often change their flag, obscure their ownership, do not undergo regular maintenance and ‘often manipulate their AIS, the navigation system required on all commercial vessels for the safety of maritime traffic’.112 Flags of Extreme Convenience attract all sorts of substandard ships, amongst them ships that are made use of as secretly as possible. Such ships were used by Latin American drug cartels as well as by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Korean dark ships are used to evade the sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council. The decision of the Security Council obliges UN member states to inspect and report North Korean shipments should they enter one of their ports. However, ‘Pyongyang and its collaborators have found ways of maintaining that shadow trade’.113 In 2022 the world dark (or shadow) fleet had grown to an estimated six hundred vessels. In November 2023 it was estimated that it now consisted of one 1,649 ships. These developments have been triggered by endeavours to sanction Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. By May 2025, three hundred tankers had been banned from European ports. But the Russian shadow fleet seems to grow much faster than the EU can sanction specific ships. This is possible because ship-owners (especially in southern Europe) are selling their old tankers to Russia.114
The existence of shadow vessels is simply the most blatant evidence of the dangers that have become omnipresent in the maritime world since the radical liberalisation of the shipping industry. Yet, together with the exclusive use of very old ships and the sheer size to which the global shadow fleet has grown, it endangers the safety of many seafarers and other ships. It also heightens the danger of environmental disasters. There are many reasons why ‘any journey involving a shadow vessel poses more risks to seafarers than journeys on most legally operating ones’.115
8.3 Ship-Management in Globalised Capitalism
In the past, ship-owners felt or at least demonstrated a personal affiliation to their ships and their crews. The christening of a ship symbolised this relation and so did the welcome crews received by the owner when they arrived in the home port of the ship. Most crew members today, the captain not always excepted, do not know who owns the ship on which they are working. Ownership and management are separated. Third-party management was inevitable for multinational oil companies when they decided to operate their own fleets, or for banks that became owners through bankruptcy liquidations. Third-party management is also indispensable for issuing houses which pool capital from small investors outside the shipping business.116 Management firms use sub-contracts for every aspect of the ship’s operation, be that the supply of technical instruments or that of the tea for the crew.117
For the commercial use of a ship, most companies conclude an agreement with a charterer. Such agreements may cover one voyage or a definite span of time. As soon as this ‘charter party’ agreement exists, the charterer becomes the most important instance for the captain. Charterers organise cargo and the voyage from port to port; they tell the captain which speed must be employed, often demanding daily weather reports from the ship and directing navigation from ashore.118 Hardly any captain dares to insist on his own assessment of the actual conditions in very bad weather. Charterers instruct captains about the time slot that has been agreed upon with the authority at the next port. Although captains are not employees of charterers but rather of the shipping companies, these companies are interested in good relations with the charterers of their ships.
8.4 Endeavours to Reregulate a Radically Deregulated Global Business
Discussions about the need for international regulations in the shipping industry had already started after the loss of the Titanic in 1912. In 1948 it was decided to create a suborganisation of the United Nations for the regulation of the international shipping industry. Since 1959, the convention which created the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has been in force. It makes decisions on the non-economic aspects of the international shipping industry. They are in force when they have been ratified by the majority of the flag states that are members of the IMO. This institution changed when more and more flag states were created and the number of ships that are registered in some of these Flags of Convenience surpassed those of the fleets of traditionally leading flag states. Nonetheless, the International Convention for Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL), which was adopted in 1973, came into force in 1983. The new majority also accepted the need for international control of minimum qualifications for the crews. In 1978 the IMO decided on the International Convention of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (StCW; now: StCW 95). The IMO also decided that these conventions would even be binding on flag states that had not ratified them.
However, the governments of newly-created Flags of Convenience made use of their sovereign power to regulate or not to regulate the operation of their fleet by offering an unregulated alternative.119 While some traditional shipping companies did not exploit this fact, many others did. Together with the practices of many new companies, this led to very many substandard ships.120 ‘Substandard’ is today’s term for ships which in the nineteenth century would have been called coffin ships.121
Ship accidents abounded and many ships were lost. It was an oil-tanker accident near the European Atlantic coast in 1978122 which triggered a push for new controls to replace the almost non-existent ones in the new flag states. In 1982 fourteen European governments in Paris concluded the first Memorandum of Understanding (ParisMoU), deciding to annually inspect 25 per cent of all the foreign ships landing in their ports, in order to control their safety measures, the condition and qualifications of the crews (STCW) and the measures for preventing pollution from ships (MARPOL).123 Since every ship is legally considered to be the particle of as sovereign state, to enter a ship without the explicit consent of its captain amounts to violating the sovereign rights of the respective flag-state sovereign.
Today, there are ten such memoranda. 116 countries and regions have adopted at least one of them. They have certain deficiencies: insufficient or underqualified personnel, corruption, and restrictions which limit reviews to documents unless there is evidence that justifies examination of the actual conditions. That port state controls have made a difference is mainly due to the publication of their results.124 Although all flags have seen at least some ships detained in port for violations, there are definite differences between the various flags.
The Paris MoU regularly publishes white, grey and black lists of flags. They are based on the number of detentions of ships under specific flags.125 Flags on the white list all have consistently low detention records. The Tokyo MoU also publishes blacklists. Everyone in the businesses of shipping, insurance and chartering can find out how many ships of a certain flag have been detained in port because of deficiencies. A ship that is operated under a flag which is on the blacklist will likely be inspected during its next port stay.126 In 2001 Paris MoU and Tokyo MoU changed their goal of controlling a certain percentage of foreign ships to the goal of banning substandard ships from their ports. Once a ship has been detained in a port of one of these MoU signatories, it will be controlled every six months and, if retained for violations once more, will be banned from any port adhering to the Paris MoU or the Tokyo MoU.127
8.5 The Ships
Any discussion of seafaring labour must address the fact that seafarers not only work but also live on ships, and that space is limited. Today, most sociological analyses of seafaring follow the suggestion of Erving Goffman in understanding ships as ‘total institutions’, placing them alongside prisons, concentration camps, orphanages, boarding schools and military barracks.128 Since seafarers often themselves use the metaphor of ‘prison’, this concept may appear convincing.129 Yet, seafarers voluntarily join this institution, and the hierarchy which is present on every ship is different from the institution of wardens in ‘total institutions’. Critics of Goffman suggest focusing more on the ship as a place of work, marked by specific political and economic practices. Because ships have neither a cultural nor geographical specificity, look almost alike and are simply ships, Helen Samson has termed them hyperspaces.130 Gerstenberger and Welke have pointed out that out-flagging has transformed ships into political no-man’s-lands.131 Marie C. Grasmeier argues that, even if ships look alike and the organisation of labour aboard is internationally standardised, the shipping industry is imprinted by Western culture. She terms ships postcolonial hyperspaces,132 thereby also taking note of the presence of racism aboard them.
While according to international law every ship is a portion of the sovereignty of the flag state, this does not have any relevance for most of today’s seafarers. It is capitalism at its purest, the labour-relation constituted exclusively through contracts.
8.6 The Crews
Most ships in today’s world fleet have ‘crews of convenience’.133 While some captains and some officers are employed by a shipping company, many officers and almost all crew members are employed by a crewing agency in their country of origin. These agencies are private businesses. Some have been set up by shipping companies. The most numerous nationals amongst today’s crews are employed by the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA).134 Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW s) have to remit a share of their earnings to their home country. For some, this share amounts to 80 per cent. There is a standard employment contract which is also supposed to protect the workers against abuse.
Recruiting agencies ensure that their employees have passed the courses which are set up according to the international convention on training and watchkeeping (StCW), including a course in ship English.
In today’s world of seafaring, crewing agencies have become the most important disciplinary institutions. If they are somehow informed that a certain seaman has contacted the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF),135 or informed the officers of a port state control about problems aboard, they must expect to be blacklisted from future contracts. Captains also can inform a crewing agency. Blacklists exist and if a blacklisted person finds a job, it will be a substandard job on a substandard ship.
8.7 Working and Living on Ships
Life aboard ship can vary widely depending on the ship, the company and the captain.136 However, there are some shared general characteristics.
Officers may have shorter contracts, but for non-officers seafaring means working and living aboard uninterruptedly for seven to nine months. In former times, there were often lengthy port stays and the chance for shore leave. Such stays resulted from the problems of coordinating sea voyages with the procurement of cargo and port technology. When these economic and technological problems were overcome in the first decades of the twentieth century, shore leave came to be internationally accepted as a necessary compensation for the rigors of the profession.
While adventures during shore leave range high in the folklore of seafaring, today’s seafarers are very often denied that relief from the monotony of their existence aboard. The Maritime Labor Convention of 2005137 has confirmed the right to shore leave, but some port authorities deny this right to the crews of certain flags. US port authorities have denied shore leave to certain nationals.138
Today shore leave is rarely actually denied, it is simply made impossible by the adherence to the logistics that have been worked out by the charterer of a ship. Such frictions between personal rights and economic goals are especially pronounced on containerships. Captains rarely dare to neglect the charterer’s very tight timetable by insisting on shore leave for members of their crew. If the problem is especially pronounced for container ships, crews on bulk carriers or tankers often also miss shore leave because ports for these ships have been built very far from the nearest town centre.
Without shore leave, conversations during tea breaks and long evenings are restricted to the stories and the topics that everybody already knows.139 The videos that one can already recount frame by frame are watched again and again. Once in a while there may be an evening of Karaoke.
Since 2004 the International Ship and Port Security code is supposed to shut off ports to almost anybody, relatives and friends of seafarers included. Even crew members themselves are often prohibited from walking around the port. The code is an amendment to the 1974 SOLAS (International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea) convention,140 which was brought about at almost breathtaking speed after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack. The ISPS code is still in force, but outside of the US controls have slackened in many ports.
If the obligation to stay aboard is isolating seafarers from the world ashore, conditions aboard aggravate that isolation. Today’s crewing practices result in crews from three, four or even more countries of origin.141 While all crew members must pass a language course, this ship-English does not lend itself to much more than shop talk. Since most crews are still denied internet access,142 the telephone cards that are distributed by the employees of the Mission for Seafarers and are usable in port remain indispensable for contact with families and friends.143 The mission’s centres also offer access to the internet during a port stay. Ship officers and captains may have more possibilities for contacting their friends and families, but for them also there are very few persons aboard with whom they could and would want to have conversations about more than shop talk.
On many a ship loneliness is aggravated by the presence of racial, national and religious prejudices. These exist amongst officers144 as well as amongst crew members. Female employees145 in nautical and technical careers remark that masculinity is still hegemonic in the shipping industry, not only in everyday interactions on board but also within institutions of maritime education and training.146
If social isolation is the aspect of their life which seafarers mention as being the most difficult to endure, the analysis of ship accidents has made it clear that very many crew-members also suffer fatigue. Since the middle of the 1990s fatigue has been universally noted as an attendant symptom of seafaring labour. It is especially common amongst crews on ships in short-sea trades because these often follow a six-hours-on, six-hours-off watch system. This system, after deducting time for meals, showers, drills etc., often gives crew members no more than three hours of sleep in a row – often for several days or weeks in succession. If the off-watch time is on a feeder ship147 and during a port stay, one can hardly shut off one’s ears against the infernal noise of loading and unloading containers. Since they have to adhere to regulations but cannot change the conditions, captains are tempted to falsify their records of rest hours. Others seem to yield to company and commercial pressure and violate rest hours in order to save costs.148 On voyages around the world things are usually less hectic, but since seafarers have to voyage through three or four time-zones per week, they usually suffer from poor sleep and also experience fatigue. ‘A strong cup of coffee cannot cure that’.149 Flight crews get a break after a long flight, but there is nothing like that for seafarers. Mishaps due to fatigue are on an uptrend at sea. Ship companies adhere to minimum safe manning regulations, and seafarers dare not voice protest.
Seafaring presents more risks and lower levels of safety than many other civilian occupations. While this has been present ever since people have gone go to sea, the proliferation of Flags of Convenience and Flags of Extreme Convenience makes it possible to avoid flag-state regulation and flag-state control. Many seafarers have to endure ‘voyages of abuse’150 on substandard ships. Safety measures on such ships are often defective or totally lacking. Owners of such ships also save on sanitary facilities and food. And in many cases months go by without any sign of the money promised to seafarers. With no pay they cannot even afford to escape and make their own way home.151
If the owner of a substandard ship decides that its operation no longer promises any profit, they sometimes decide to simply abandon the ship and its crew.152 Without pay, and often without the means to communicate with their families, abandoned seafarers have to rely on the benevolence of people ashore to get food and water and on the ITF to help them get home and to receive at least some of their pay. During such endeavours, many families at home experience poverty. There have long been insurance schemes153 against the costs of repatriation but the owners of substandard ships do not take out such a scheme.
Many seafarers have had to endure piracy, many more have known fear when voyaging in dangerous waters and an unknown number of seafarers never went back to seafaring after experiencing such attacks. A deck-hand who has encountered somebody appearing suddenly with a knife in his cabin may well be traumatised for many years. There is no counselling for crew-members who have had to live through a traumatic experience.154 If the upswing in piracy at the end of the 1980s was caused by the difficulties of making a living for one’s family, it has since developed into organised crime with collaborators in many ports sending out information about the voyages of specific ships. Given the very small crews and the intensity of work aboard merchant ships it is difficult to spare the personnel to set up watches in dangerous waters. The Anti-Piracy Centre, which was set up by the International Chamber of Commerce in Kuala Lumpur in 1992, keeps statistical track of piracy and advises ship-owners about anti-piracy measures. For some time, recorded instances were falling, but this trend ended in the 2020s.155
Conclusion: Endeavours to Improve Conditions of Seafaring Labour – and their Limits
Out-flagging has not removed the legal responsibility of ship-owners for the ship, the cargo, and the conditions of labour aboard. But many a flag accepts registration without disclosure of the owner, and owners of substandard ships often practise flag-hopping or rename their ships. If crews have not been paid or a ship and its crew have been abandoned it is the ITF which endeavours to find the ship-owners and make them pay.
After having fought against Flags of Convenience for many years,156 the ITF is now concentrating its efforts on labour agreements with ship-owners. Yet any such agreement is only valid for the specific ship; its application to the other ships under the same management is not a given.
Since its founding in 1919 the International Labour Organization (ILO) has organised many conventions on labour conditions. These started out as attempts to generalise the conditions of labour which social struggle had achieved in Western societies. When this proved impossible, the ILO changed its goal. Since 1999 it aims for the enforcement of ‘decent work’ throughout the world. Its most outstanding achievement so far is the Consolidated Maritime Labour Convention (MLC), which was adopted in 2005 and has been in force since 2013. The MLC was negotiated by representatives of its member states, representatives of the shipping industry and the International Transport Workers’ Federation. It is the first global collective agreement for any industry and has been lauded as such. Yet there are deficiencies.
Amongst the many specific provisions, one is about noise disturbances aboard. While loading and discharging containers will always be extremely loud, and there is nothing much to be done about it, noise resulting from the engines could be reduced in cabins if ships were being built accordingly. This is actually mentioned in B.4.3.1 of the convention, but, unfortunately, only in the form of an appeal. There is also still no regulation on obligatory insurance against the costs resulting from the abandonment of seafarers.
Charterers were not included in the negotiation of the MLC, nor is there as yet any possibility to oblige them to respect its regulations. Therefore, there is not much hope that more seafarers will enjoy shore leave in the near future. Despite these and other problems, this convention can function as a benchmark to be referred to in the context of conflicts. In April 2025 the ILO reached an agreement on a new global minimum wage for seafarers.157 Unfortunately it is to be expected that for many seafarers the market will, once again, prove to be stronger than conventions and agreements.
If this holds true for the shipping industry in general, it is the globalised maritime labour market which is the main reason for restrictions on social progress. For most seafarers, the economic situation in their country of origin makes any job aboard a merchant ship preferable to most jobs that could be found at home. This also hinders opposition aboard a ship where conditions verge on the unbearable.158 For others, seafaring offers a career that would not be easy to find at home.
None of those who have researched the occupational identities of today’s seafarers have encountered the love of the sea and adventure that used to be identified with seafarers in former times.
Today, ninety per cent of all the goods that are delivered to people around the world are transported in ships at least part of the way. But the men and women whose labour not only sustains globalised capitalism but also the very interconnectedness of the world are locked out of that world.
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Kocka, Jürgen 1990, Arbeitsverhältnisse und Arbeiterexistenzen. Grundlagen der Klassenbildung, Bonn: Dietz.
Küttner, Sibylle 2000, Farbige Seeleute im Kaiserreich. Asiaten und Afrikaner im Dienst der deutschen Handelsmarine, Erfurt: Sutton.
Lavery, Brian (ed.) 1998, Shipboard Life and Organisation, 1731–1815, Aldershot: Navy Records Society.
Lemnitzer, Jan Martin 2008, ‘Kriegskreuel auf See im 19. Jahrhundert: vom „zivilisierten“ zum uneingeschränkten Seekrieg’, in Kriegskreuel. Die Entgrenzung der Gewalt von kriegerischen Konflikten vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Sönke Neitzel and Daniel Hohrath, Leiden: Brill | Schöningh.
Lenhof, Jean-Louis 2003, ‘Les Grèves d’Inscrits Maritimes en France à la Belle Époque (1900–1914)’, Collection Histoire, Gestion, Organisations, 11: 181–202.
Lenhof, Jean-Louis 2004, ‘Violences mâitrisées: la gestion du risque à bord des derniers violiers de commerce au long cours (1880–1920)’, in La violence et la mer, edited by Mickaël Augeron and Mathias Tranchant, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
Lenhof, Jean-Louis 2005, Les Hommes en mer. De Trafalgar au Vendée Globe, Paris: Armand Colin.
Lewis, William J. 2003, Under the Red Duster: The Merchant Navy in World War II, Shrewsbury: Airlife.
Miller, Michael 2012, Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Century History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Munro, Archie 2006, The Winston Specials: Troopships via the Cape, 1940–1943, Liskeard: Maritime Books.
Nerzic, Jean-Yves 2016, La Grande Guerre en Méditerranée. L’enfer des navires de commerce, Milon-la-Chapelle: Éditions H & D.
Picciotto, Sol 2011, Regulating Global Corporate Capitalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pierenkemper, Toni 1994, Gewerbe und Industrie im 18. und 20. Jahrhundert, München: Oldenbourg.
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Archival Sources
Geheimes Preußisches Staatsarchiv: Rep. 120C. Verwaltung für Handel, Fabriken und Bauwesen, Abth. XVII, Fach 3, Nr. 20, Vol.12 (M), pp. 165–167.
Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv: Sta Oldenburg, Best. Nr. 136, Nr. 12330.
The pope did not grant property of land, but rather the privilege to mission the inhabitants (and hence govern them). Regarding the right of conquest and later theories of legitimate expansion, see Fitzmaurice 2014.
Everything that was located 370 nautical miles west of the Cape Verde Islands went to Spain, everything east of this imaginary line went to Portugal. In 1526 the Pacific was split up accordingly.
In his analysis of the development of European concepts of international right, Carl Schmitt coined the term ‘globales Liniendenken’ and explained the historical specificity of the raya which was decided upon in 1494. See Schmidt 1997, Chapter 1.
And therefore also is part and parcel of the early history of political sovereignty.
And already in a solely-verbally concluded secret clause to the treaty of Cateau Cambrésis in 1559.
This famous historical catchphrase has lately been resurrected for the construction of a video game.
This remark is referring to the fact that there had already been far-reaching trade connections in the thirteenth century which had originated in China and were practised differently. See Abu-Lughod 1989, p. 361.
On the changing meaning of ‘letters of marque’ between the sixteenth and the following two centuries, see Rodger 2004, pp. 199–220.
In France and the Barbary States they were called corsairs, as in the Caribbean buccaneers. ‘If they were disowned in London, Paris, and Amsterdam … the buccaneers were … one of the main weapons with which Britain, France and the United Provinces sought to break Spain’s New World Monopoly’ (Starkey 1994, p. 64).
But in 1708 the English Crown (in the ‘Cruisers and Convoys Act’) announced that from now on it would dispense with any shares in the take. This had been made possible by the growth of the navy.
In order to do so legally, they had to present their captures to a prize court which then decided if it had been legal to take the particular prize in question. If prize law was customary, it was, nevertheless, very complicated, so much so that in 1609 the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius published De Jure Praedae Commentarius (Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty), a book he had started to write after the Directors of the Dutch East India Company had asked him to look into the seizure of a Portuguese ship in the Straits of Singapore. See Thornton 2004, p. 17.
Anderson and Gifford 1991, p. 101.
Sometimes a group of merchants.
In the nineteenth century the view came to be widespread that using private sea warriors violated general moral principles. In 1856 the Declaration of Paris outlawed privateering. This became actualised when the signatory states closed their ports to privateers. When privateers were no longer able to bring their gains to a safe port, merchant ships could stop sailing in convoy or carrying arms. See Lemnitzer 2008, p. 90.
It is telling that Brian Lavery’s very comprehensive collection of documents referring to shipboard life and organisation between 1731 and 1815 is exclusively about the navy without making any mention of the fact that there is nothing about the merchant marine. See Lavery (ed.) 1998.
Dixon 1981, p. 14.
Ibid.
Dixon 1981, p. 37.
Dixon 1981, p. 38.
The most famous of these is Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum, which originally had been a chapter of Grotius’s De Jure Praedae Commentarius (see footnote 10) and been published anonymously in 1609. On the history and effect of this pamphlet, see Thornton 2004, pp. 17–38; Laleh Khalili stresses the fact that Mare Liberum was written to prevent that trade in the Indian Ocean – that is to say, the practice of extracting the resources of Asia was hindered by intra-European skirmishes. See Khalili 2018.
According to Rodger 2004, p. 434, England was not yet a great naval power in 1649, the navy still lacking the funds to be effective. But this was to change in the next five years.
So was the purge of the navy in 1649, which was intended to free the navy from the amateur gentlemen who were officially (if often not in person) commanding her ships. In Rodger’s naval history of Britain it is explained how from the 1630s onwards there were attempts to do away with the ignorance and corruption of the amateur gentlemen officers (Rodger 2004, pp. 391–405).
For merchants in states without any opportunities for maritime dominance, these developments signified the advent of new opportunities. Even before the turn of the century, merchants in Hamburg and Bremen, where the shipping business had been reduced to coasting since the end of the Hansa, destinated a few ships to Carolina or Surinam. At first, these voyages seem to have been considered exceptions. That they had to neglect seasonal weather conditions made insurances more expensive.
Laleh Khalili uses the expression ‘a quantum of sovereignty’. See: Khalili 2020, p. 236.
Undermanning was notorious until the end of the sailing-ship era, and for the British merchant marine a statutory diet scale was only legislated in 1906. See Dixon 1981, pp. 227–8.
For examples see Dixon 1981, pp. 228–32. In Britain the end of the navigation acts had also brought the end of the 1703-issued legal compulsion for merchant ships to carry a certain number of apprentices. Apprenticeship then became a system for preparing foreign-going masters. See also Wilcox 2024.
Kaukiainen 2004, p. 32. Yrjö Kaukiainen dates the arrival of the new system in Finland to the first half of the eighteenth century; and the establishment of the new ‘naval’ system of command aboard to the fact that at the beginning Finnish ship-owners hired Danish masters and even a former Swedish naval officer (Kaukiainen 2004, pp. 38–40).
While in the British shipping industry ship-owners had already started to send agents to foreign countries who were to obtain freight for their ships, many masters in other countries still had to act as their own agents when on a tramp voyage (Welke 1997, pp. 133–9).
Davis stresses the fact that in the eighteenth century this also held true for masters (if these were not part-owners of the ship, that is). See Davis 1972, pp. 128–9. For the nineteenth century, see Dixon 1981, p. 35.
In Germany this was termed Führung (Gerstenberger 2022, pp. 128ff.); in Italy paccottiglia (Basso 2023, p. 49); according to Ralph Davis, ‘furthing’ was also a customary right of the crews on English ships (Davis 1972, pp. 147–9). Everywhere the small trade sometimes brought more gain to the crew than their pay.
Gerstenberger and Welke 1999, especially p. 52.
When Niklas Frykman wrote that desertion ‘was the mariner’s traditional response’, he was referring to service on warships and to desertion as being preferred by mariners to unlawful petitioning or outright mutiny. But the same interpretation can be put forward for seafarers on merchant ships (Frykman 2020, p. 39).
According to Yrjö Kaukiainen this was the most important reason for desertion of Finnish seafarers. While there were about a hundred desertions per year between 1856 and 1860, the number rose to 200 per year between 1872 and 1875, or ten per cent of the Finnish blue-water fleet (Kaukiainen 1997, p. 224). About the same rate has been reported for the Canadian merchant fleet (Fisher 1980, p. 56).
The races of ships transporting tea from India to London have become famous, but the tendency to demand fast voyages was not restricted to this branch of the shipping business.
Concerning their importance, cf. Welke 1997, pp. 133–9; also: ‘… a successful tramp skipper is … as far removed from the popular idea of what a sailor is as day from night. But such men are of inestimable value to the commerce of the country’ (Bullen 1900, p. 28).
Lenhof argues that while the demand for speedy voyages was reacting to the demands of clients, at the end of the nineteenth century owners of sailing ships demanded them because they wanted to reduce the costs for the long voyages for which the tall ships of the time were preferred (Lenhof 1994, p. 401).
The preamble to the Mercantile Marine Act of 1850 is telling: ‘Whereas it is expedient for improving the Condition of Masters, Mates and Seamen, and for maintaining Discipline in the British Merchant Service’ (Hansard 3, 112: p. 108, cited in Dixon 1981, p. 101).
In former times a seaman who had accepted the advance and had then not turned up when the ship was leaving port or had run away before he had gained the amount that had been paid as advance, was considered a thief who owed restitution. But he would not have been considered a deserter.
While captains could at first make use of the local police to bring back a deserted seaman this was ended by law in 1898. See Chamberlain 1903, p. 45.
For archival documents about these developments, see: Gerstenberger 2001; Gerstenberger and Welke 1996, pp. 37–44.
Dixon 1981, pp. 102–3.
‘In 1908, the punishment for going ashore without leave or “willfully disobeying” an officer’s “lawful commands” was changed from a fine to criminal prosecution before a magistrate and a jail sentence’ (Balachandran 2012, p. 227).
According to Jean-Louis Lenhof, l’inscription could not only function for the state but also for ship-owners and in some respects also for seamen because, on the one hand, the French shipping industry had long remained very rudimentary, and on the other, it had guaranteed the ‘inscripted’ a secure job and some social benefits. In 1900 a whole series of strikes marked the end of this labour regime (Lenhof 2005, pp. 313–26).
Even in 1900 Frank Thomas Bullen still informed his readers that the title of captain was reserved for the navy (Bullen 1900, p. 14).
Yrjö Kaukiainen dates the arrival of the new system in Finland already to the first half of the eighteenth century; and the establishment of the new ‘naval’ system of command aboard to the fact that Finnish ship-owners hired Danish masters and even a former Swedish naval officer (Kaukiainen 2004, pp. 38–9).
According to Yrjö Kaukiainen it ‘replaced, or at least challenged, an older practice’ (Kaukiainen 2004, p. 32).
Kaukiainen 2004, p. 36.
There are very thorough descriptions by T.N.M. Richter, who travelled on such ships between 1805 and 1817. See Richter 1824, p. 56; see also: Taylor 1971; Gerstenberger and Welke 1996.
The committee had been informed of alarming practices; for example, a ship having been commanded by a fourteen-year old, or a warehouse porter (Dixon 1981, p. 69).
Kennerley 1993, pp. 103–34.
Kaukiainen 2004, pp. 124–5.
1799 in Bremen, 1804 in Gdansk.
Examples are to be found in: Nieders. StA-Oldenburg, Best,136, Nr. 12330.
Lewis 2003, Introduction.
Plimsoll 1873, p. 11.
There are different lines for different cargos and for different seasons; WNA, for example, being the Winter Load line for the North Atlantic.
Regarding very small crews, see Dixon 1981, p. 233.
Lenhof gives examples. If in 1852 a three-mast ship transported 40 tons per crew member (officers included), the tons transported per crew member had more than doubled by the end of the century (Lenhof 2004, p. 399).
Reuleaux 1875.
Kinematics is the science of describing the motion of objects. It is a branch of physics and a subdivision of classical mechanics.
Gerstenberger and Welke 1996, pp. 273–6.
For critiques of this theoretical concept, see also Schmidt 1993, pp. 19–21, 283–6; Kocka 1990, p. 375; Pierenkemper 1994, chapters 1 and 2.
Ahuja 2024, p. 25.
Frank Thomas Bullen was a sailor who gave a very detailed description of the work of firemen and trimmers, adding: ‘The very thought of such a life is terrifying’ (Bullen 1900, p. 247).
Gerstenberger and Welke 1996, pp. 187–244.
Ravi Ahuja has explained that Indian deckhands who were called ‘Lascars’ referred to themselves as khalasisis, ‘signifying the “free” sailor in Indian Ocean seafaring or a “labourer of superior order”, employed chiefly about ships or in the army’ (Ahuja 2024, pp. 43–4).
According to Michael H. Fisher, tens of thousands of lascars reached Britain between 1760 and 1855. Sometimes their proportion ranged from 20 to 50 per cent of a crew. Many of them were treated brutally by British officers (Fisher 2007, p. 37); according to an Act of 1802, Lascars were not to be employed in ships sailing in waters west of the Cape of Good Hope, but this changed under economic pressure (Dixon 1981, p. 52).
The relevance of this development becomes clear when we consider ‘that one out of four members of the British merchant marine … was hired in the “lascar” recruitment ports of Calcutta and Bombay in the interwar period. In addition to these roughly 50,000 men, almost as many were registered in some years as having been recruited for other steamers’ (Ahuja 2024, p. 10).
Sherwood 1991, p. 229; here cited from Khalili 2020, p. 229.
Küttner 2000, pp. 146–61.
At the turn of the century there were 3,000 officially registered Chinese seamen amongst the 47,780 registered seamen working on German ships. Until 1914 their number kept on rising. See Conrad 2003, pp. 89–90.
Kennerley 2008, pp. 191–220.
Balachandran 2012, p. 226.
But even in the context of the ‘Verein für Socialpolitik’ – an organisation which was focused on social reform – it was argued that there was no better measure for the wellbeing of white labourers in the engine rooms than the hire of Chinese, Malay and Indian seamen, because these could endure heat better. During the 1900 conference of this organisation Inspector Polis explained that if their pay was lower and they provided their own food, they were not really cheaper because they were not as strong as European seamen (Polis 1900, p. 53).
Valerie Burton has pointed out that ship-owners were committed to a policy of ‘raising the class’ of shipmasters. When it was proposed in 1860 to create scholarships for navigational schools for needy individuals, ship-owners were opposed. One owner argued that ‘one of the great faults of the age … is to overeducate the working classes’ (Burton 1990, pp. 97–118).
Miller 2012, p. 216.
Miller 2012, p. 221.
Miller 2012, p. 237.
Miller 2012, p. 283.
In 1937 over 9,000 officers of the English Merchant Marine had already completed convoy and gunnery courses (Bennett 1999, Chapter 2); on 17 November 1941, the US Congress approved the arming of merchant vessels.
A very concrete narrative of the sinking of a ship (the Canadian Star in March 1943) is contained in Lewis 2003. One chapter of his book is based on the account of this event by his brother who, aged 17, was one of the few survivors.
Bunker 1995.
Munro 2006.
Miller 2012, p. 283.
Ibid.
During World War II some 30,000 seamen on British merchant ships were killed by enemy action (Dally 2009, Foreword). Dally includes an account of his own experiences of shipboard life during the spring and summer of 1942.
Estimates for the approximately hundred-thousand internees – in the East Indies – amongst them merchant seafarers – suggest a death rate of one to six. See Miller 2012, p. 289.
Kestler 2017, pp. 122–5.
Lewis 2003, p. 8.
Lewis 2003, p. 12.
Woodman 2004, p. 675.
Old German seamen still remember that on Lloyd ships one could order ‘eggs of your choice’ on Thursdays (Celebrating Sundays on Thursdays is one of the many seafaring customs that are now lost). The remark about the choice of eggs on ship Sundays as well as some others that refer to the concrete experiences of seafarers are not explicitly cited from Gerstenberger and Welke 2008. The research methods that were used ashore and while being aboard from two to four weeks on six different ships are explained in Gerstenberger and Welke 2008, pp. 311–17.
Grey 2002, p. 77.
In 1966 the first commercial international container service connected New York with Bremerhaven.
Broeze (ed.) 2002, p. 35.
At first, plans of loading – which containers had to be stowed below deck because of their specific content, which would have to be placed so they could be unloaded in one of the next ports, and so on – were handed over to the responsible officer aboard. But soon charterers started to simply send a list of containers and expected captains to tell the next port what they had to expect. See Gerstenberger and Welke 2008, pp. 210–14.
Using archival sources García-Domingo compiled statistics of port stays of sailing ships and steamships respectively. See García-Domingo 2023, p. 29.
Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Tenold 2006.
See especially Huffschmid 2002, Chapter 1. Bretton Woods was the small New Hampshire town where it had been decided to have fixed terms of exchange between the currencies of 44 states and the US Dollar, which meant that the terms of exchange for the currencies of all the other currencies were also fixed. The US government had pledged itself to, on demand, exchange dollars into gold at the rate that had been fixed in Bretton Woods. But then the gold reserves of the US were depleted, firstly because, to counteract the Soviet Union’s policies, governments in many of the newly independent states were accorded huge sums. Secondly because the production of gold became insufficient when Germany and Japan demanded to exchange huge amounts of dollars into gold.
The commodification of political sovereignty is one of the defining characteristics of globalised capitalism. It is also present in offshore fiscal havens as well as in export-processing zones.
Already in the seventeenth century, merchants who wanted to have their ships sail under a neutral flag in time of war had made use of this possibility. In 1941, the government of the USA followed this practice when it flagged out its so-called liberty ships to the neutral state of Panama. These ships had been built for the transport of war-related goods to the Allies against Hitler. When they were privatised after the war, most of the new owners continued with their previous registration. The flag of Panama had already been used by US ship-owners during Prohibition in the 1930s because they wanted to serve alcohol on their ships.
There is a very thorough econometric analysis of these decisions; see Bergantino and Marlow 1997.
At first glance this may resemble the abolition of crewing restrictions for English merchant ships which resulted from the end of the Navigation Acts in 1849. Instead of having to crew their ships with two-thirds of nationals, ship-owners could now legally engage foreign seafarers. But once a foreigner (excepting those who had to accept lascar conditions) was made a member of the crew, he was paid like a national crew member and not excluded from the results of agreements that were concluded between maritime unions and ship-owners in the specific society. This legal situation came to an end with the new recruiting practices of the 1970s.
It is debated whether or not the flag of Switzerland is to be counted amongst the flags of convenience.
On the development of the practice, see Picciotto 2011, pp. 91–4.
The UK uses the Isle of Man for the location of this register; France uses the Kerguelen Isles.
Decision of 10 January 1995. Deutsches Bundesverfassungsgericht E 92 I.S., pp. 26–53.
In 2024 only 15 per cent of ships in German ownership were actually registered in Germany.
The term has been suggested by Elisabeth Braw (Braw 2024, p. 5).
Braw 2024, p. 2.
Ibid.
Braw 2024, p. 3.
Brössler and Wetzel 2025.
Braw 2024, p. 8.
Regarding ownership and financing, see Grasmeier 2020, pp. 80–3. The term ‘Dentist-Shipping’ has become known even outside the shipping business.
It is not only the straitjacket of logistics but also the use of ships’ chandlers for the provision of food which makes it all but impossible for cooks to go ashore in foreign ports to buy fresh vegetables and fruit.
For detailed explanations and examples, see Gerstenberger and Welke 2008, pp. 207–9.
Alderton and Winchester 2002, p. 189.
Most substandard ships are either ships for bulk cargo or for specific cargo.
In the sectors of containerships, gas and chemical tankers there are few of them because the buyers of their services usually require high quality.
In 1978, the Amoco Cadiz was being operated under the flag of Liberia.
This first MoU is called the Paris MoU. Today, 28 states participate in this organisation. It covers the waters of the European coastal states and the North Atlantic from North America to Europe.
The publication of the number of detentions per flag made it evident that flags with many detentions draw the owners of deficient ships to their registration. For example, between 1997 and 1999 the registration of ships in Bolivia rose by 5,900 per cent; in Cambodia by 140 per cent; in Belize by 79 per cent (Alderton and Winchester 2002, p. 187).
The latest one covers the period from 7 January 2024 to 30 June 2025. See <https://parismou.org/Inspection-Database>.
The effectiveness of these measures will be mitigated by the practice of flag-hopping, in which ship-owners and operators rename their ships and acquire new vessel registrations in other jurisdictions.
For Paris MoU: Yang, Yang and Teixeira 2020; For Tokyo MoU: Xiao, Wang, Lin and Li 2020.
Goffman 1961.
Karjalainen 2007, pp. 147ff. Gerstenberger and Welke have been told by grinning seafarers that ships are worse than prisons because in prison you can play soccer.
Sampson 2003.
Gerstenberger and Welke 2008, pp. 36–41.
Grasmeier 2019, p. 7.
Grasmeier 2020, p. 86, has adopted this term from Morris and Klikauer 2011.
Extensively on the Philippine labour-exporting regime, see Grasmeier 2020, pp. 87–109.
The ITF represents one million seafarers and 200 national unions in 106 countries. Seafarers become members of the ITF through their affiliated national unions.
For an empirical survey regarding labour conditions, see Karatepe and Scherrer 2024.
It could only enter into force in 2013 when the majority of the member states of the ILO ratified this convention.
In 2017 for example, Philippine, Chinese, Burmese and Indian seafarers were most affected. See ICMA 2017.
If there is a television set in the ratings’ mess, it can usually only be turned on in port. Even if there is only a broadcast in a language that nobody can understand, the TV seems to run because it offers something from ashore.
This was possible without going through the lengthy procedures of adopting a new convention.
There are Chinese ships, some US ships and perhaps some others whose crews consist solely of national citizens.
Already in 1998 third parties to Immarsat were offering e-mail for seafarers. This offer has not been taken up by ship companies. See Davies and Parfett 1998.
E-mails could and sometimes would be sent out by the captain, who would then also read them.
Gerstenberger and Welke argue that the racial prejudices of European engineers tend to stymie endeavours to better train their engine crew. One engineer was very clear: ‘I am not paid for that’ (Gerstenberger and Welke 2008, pp. 138–44, but especially p. 140).
ILO and SIRC 2003.
Grasmeier 2020, p. 341.
Feeder ships transport goods from the big port (hubs) to ports that are nearer to their destination.
Rajapakse and Emad 2023, p. 3.
MI News Network 2019.
‘Voyages of Abuse’ was the title of a book by Couper et al. 1999; see also: Chapman 1992.
ITF Seafarers 2025, no page given.
RightShip 2023.
On the traditional responsibility of flag states and on insurance schemes see Couper et al. 1999, pp. 139–65.
The Mission to Seafarers is offering counsel, but its means are limited.
Gerstenberger 2008.
For example: Couper et al. 1999.
Blenkey 2025.
In former times port workers often demonstrated solidarity with seafarers in a conflict by refusing to discharge or load ships. This is no longer the case, since many of the world’s largest ports are privately owned. They sanction any union activity. The port-workers strike on the east coast of the USA during autumn 2024 was for a pay rise.
