In “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain, Laura Tabili examines black workers in Great Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. She looks at union practices, labor relations, and work policy in British merchant shipping, making her book partly a work of labor history. The most compelling part of her narrative, however, is the interplay of race and the waning imperialism in interwar Britain. During this period, many blacks formed communities in several British port cities, creating racial tension and labor issues for British shipping. To incorporate black seamen on the ships, the British had to reconstruct traditional, imperial racial categories left over from the Victorian period to maintain a distinct difference between black and white; myths of exoticism and inherent inferiority kept black seaman from earning the same wage as did their white counterparts. Labor unrest among white seaman plagued the shipping industry in the interwar years, and the shipowners and captains thought that keeping black seamen separate would prevent further tension and reduce costs. To do this, whites in the shipping industry needed the British state’s assistance to set up legal distinctions based on the race of British seamen, which the government did.[1]
The author notes that several groups developed their own construction of race to further their own ends. On one hand, shipowners wanted to keep their cheap labor and prevent their operational costs from increasing before and during the Great Depression years, hence race was used as an excuse to pay blacks extremely low wages. On the other hand, some government offices sought to salvage Britain’s damaged imperial reputation by at least appearing to treat its subjects of different races equally. Tabili portrays the British state as sympathetic to black seamen’s unequal treatment, but very vulnerable to outside pressures, such as the shipping industry (pp. 58-80). The author suggests that a new black political identity emerged as a reaction to the racial subordination that black seamen experienced, but that they largely failed to organize in any effective way (pp. 135-160). “We Ask for British Justice” documents how the construction of race in early-twentieth-century Britain could be manipulated for economic and political ends. For Tabili, race is purely ideological, which echoes Barbara Fields’ essay. Fields argues that race is not a physical thing, even though it seems that historical writing has treated race as such. The case of black seamen in Britain certainly supports this description of race, for the shipping industry and the state were able to easily construct race based on region of origin, not just physical appearance. Fields and Tabili do not agree, however, concerning the place of class in relation to race. Fields contends that class is not in the same analytical field as race, but Tabili often speaks of class and race in the same intellectual manner, as if they are equal categories of historical analysis. Despite this, their two works portray race in similar ways.[2]
“We Ask for British Justice” also fits well with Martha Hodes’ article, “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” which chronicles the life of Eunice Connolly and the changing nature of race across international and cultural borders. Connolly found that she was not racially categorized in the Caribbean as she was in New England; her racial identity was dependent on where she was and to what community she belonged. Perceptions of appearance, behavior, class status—all these things helped shape racial identity, and these perceptions often change from culture to culture.[3] For Hodes, race is a powerful concept precisely because it is malleable. In Britain, most of the black seamen came from British territorial holdings in Africa, where perceptions of race and identity was much different. Hodes and Tabili’s transnational approach to race helps illuminate the fluidity of the concept of race across borders. Further, Peter Kolchin’s survey of the historiography of “whiteness” reinforces the ever-changing nature of race from the perspective of whites, noting that white identity is just as fluid as any other racial construct. It is not clear from Tabili’s work if the same white Britons engaged in debate about their own racial identity while assigning such to blacks, but the British did have the “one drop rule” at this time. Having any non-white ancestry, regardless of how small or distant, kept one from being classified as white. Kolchin contends that the use of race as a category in historical works tends to explain everything or nothing.[4] In “We Ask for British Justice”, race explains everything, for it is the tool that enabled subordinating practices in the shipping industry. The historical narrative of black Seamen in Britain would be nearly impossible to tell without a thorough examination of race in the context of British society.
[1] Laura Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
[2] Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 143-177.
[3] Martha Hodes, “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” American Historical Review 108, no. 1 (February 2003), 84-118.
[4] Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of American History 89, no. 1 (June 2002).