Maritime labour and contested spaces of agency: seafarers’ and dockers’ struggles for decolonisation and democracy

David Featherstone

Chapter 9 in Handbook of Labour Geography, 2025, pp 176-189 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter engages with seafarers’ and dockers’ struggles for decolonisation and democracy in the twentieth century. Drawing upon a range of international examples, it makes two related contributions to Labour Geography. First, I contribute to emerging work on the relations between anti-colonialism and spaces of labour organising by engaging with seafarers’ mobile trajectories. I discuss how this offers important lenses on the diverse spatialities of anti-colonial politics and organising that undergird maritime workers’ democratic claims and position the smuggling of radical literature as a significant element in seafarers’ links to anti-colonial organising. Second, I examine forms of maritime workers’ transnational solidarities, arguing for the importance of situating such internationalisms in relation to the racialised labour geographies of the shipping industry. I conclude by arguing that forms of ‘internationalism from below’ shaped by maritime workers are of renewed significance in the contemporary political conjuncture.

Keywords: Seafarers; Dockers; Agency; Democracy; Internationalism; Decolonisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781785363399
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