Public lecture by Prof. Ravi Ahuja (CeMIS)
“The “natives” of the S.S. Egypt: Indian steamship workers and racial management in the British Empire”
Thursday 27 June 2019, 7:30pm / Buchladen Rote Straße, Nikolaikirchhof 7, Göttingen20 May 1922, the English Channel: eighty-seven passengers and crew perish by drowning when the Royal Mail Ship “Egypt” sinks on its way from London to Bombay. The majority of the crew is Indian—not unusual at a time when more than 20 per cent of the workforce serving on British merchant ships are recruited from the subcontinent. The accident gives rise to an international press campaign and to judicial proceedings that shed a glaring light on issues of racial segmentation in the global maritime labour market and of racialized modalities of labour management on board British steamships. Social historian Ravi Ahuja discusses this unusually well documented incident to reconstruct linkages between racial discrimination and modalities of labour management that are still at work in our own time of postcolonial global capitalism.
An India Inside/Out event by CeMIS