colonialism

The ideas and political commitments of the revolutionary abolitionist and Spencean Robert Wedderburn (1762-1835) represent a compelling example of a form of universality, articulated in the midst of the Age of Revolution, which defied European colonialism and plantation slavery. An engagement with Wedderburn’s writings on the Haitian Revolution, maroon warfare and his proposal of a Spencean communist programme will clarify ongoing debates about Enlightenment, empire, slavery and universality and might inform a re-engagement with the idea of universal emancipation in the political present.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

On 10 August 1819, a British government informant wrote a letter to the Home Office about a political meeting he had attended in Soho, London the night before. The purpose of the meeting was a debate on ‘whether it be right for the People of England to assassinate their Rulers’:

I had some difficulty to discover the place for it is apparently a ruinous loft which you ascend by a step-ladder...both Orators and Audience were with a few exceptions, persons of the very lowest description.

The Doctrines were certainly of the most dreadful nature...violently seditious andtreasonable – One of those men who appeared to be the principal in their concern is a Mulatto and announced himself as the Descendant of an African Slave – After noticing the Insurrections of the Slaves in some of the West India Islands he said they fought in some instances for twenty years for 'Liberty' – and then appealed to Britons who boasted such superior feeling and principles, whether they were ready to fight but for a short time for their Liberties – He stated his name to be Wedderburn and said he was author of a production entitled 'The Axe Laid to the Root'...[1]

Robert Wedderburn (1762-1835) and his 1817 journal, The Axe Laid to the Root, or A Fatal Blow to Oppressors, Being an Address to the Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica, were products of an Age of Revolution which encompassed not only decades of upheaval in the European core, but slave revolt,marronage, and wars of independence in the colonial periphery. The journal was structured as a correspondence between Wedderburn and himself as editor, imitating a popular style for radical periodicals of the time. These letters contained reports and histories of slave revolts, polemics and denunciations aimed at his peers in the British workers’ movement, and perspectives for transnational revolution. Wedderburn calls himself a ‘Spencean Philanthropist’ in the opening letter of the first issue, and signed off with the following line: ‘I am a West Indian, a lover of liberty, and would dishonour human nature if I did not shew myself a friend to the liberty of others’.[2] Wedderburn’s self-description provides three themes which help us to understand his thought and practise, as developed in the revolutionary conjuncture which created the modern world, and which intrude upon contemporary debates over empire, Enlightenment, racialisation, abolition, decolonisation, and universal emancipation.

The first theme to consider is Wedderburn’s reference to his‘West Indian’ background. This expresses his race and status as a colonial subject, his direct experience of plantation slavery and his commitment to its abolition, and his interest in the history and lessons of the Haitian Revolution. The second is his identification as a ‘Spencean Philanthropist’ ’, indicating his  role as a leading member of a London-based proto-communist tendency active in the workers’ movements of the early nineteenth century, and their vision and programme for a society without private property, with land owned in common by parishes.. The final theme, ‘a friend to the liberty of others’, describes Wedderburn’s recognition of a ‘Universal War’ between the rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed[3], his attempts to win workers in the metropolis to the cause of the slaves and colonised peoples of the periphery, and his conception of universal freedom that was not one of imposing a Eurocentric definition of Enlightenment onto the rest of the world, but one defined through fierce struggles for self-emancipation.

A reconstruction of Wedderburn’s political programme provides a corrective to those theories which take an uncritical view of the European origins and conceptions of liberty in this period, particularly when they cannot suitably account for its conditions and contradictions. As  Buck-Morss posed starkly,  ‘Freedom … as the highest and universal political value … began to take root at precisely the time that the economic practice of slavery … came to underwrite the entire economic system of the west’.[4] Thus my interpretation of Wedderburn accepts and reiteratesthat the universality of European Enlightenment  thought was an inherently contradictory one, which could simultaneously be invoked both for and against conquest, colonialism and slavery.[5] Going further, it also acknowledges that these contradictions are in some part constitutive of Enlightenment universalism and therefore cannot be straightforwardly resolved through ‘the completion of the Enlightenment project’. As Gilroy noted in his rebuke of Habermas, even such qualified defences of European Enlightenment ‘remain substantially unaffected by the histories of barbarity … Locke’s colonial interests and the effects of the conquest of the Americas on Descartes and Rousseau are simply non-issues’.[6]

At the other limit, this reading is also oriented against theoretical schools or modes which reject universalism entirely, preferring what Amin denounced as ‘the culturalist praise of provincialisms’.[7] The few times that postcolonial scholars have engaged with the history of the Haitian Revolution, they have treated it as doomed from its inception due to its relationship to modernity. Thus Babha argued that because Touissant Louverture believed in ‘the signs of modernity … liberty, equality, fraternity’, he inevitably learned ‘the tragic lesson that the moral, modern dispostion of mankind, enshrined in the sign of the Revolution, only fuels the archaic racial factor in the society of slavery’.[8] Similarly, Scott reads Louverture as an almost naïve victim, a ‘tragic subject of colonial modernity’ who ‘must seek his freedom in the very technologies, conceptual languages, and institutional formations in which modernity’s rationality has sought his enslavement.’[9] In both of these readings revolution is not a universal process, but a particular symbol or technology inheirted from colonial modernity, which therefore cannot be used by the colonised against this same modernity.

More recently, with more specificity and perhaps further alongthe anti-universal continuum, Afro-pessimist scholarship has described Blackness , as expressed by Frank Wilderson, a ‘position of noncommunicability in the face of all other positions’. Per this reading, there is no analogy to be made or universality possible, whether theoretical or practical, between the ‘social death’ of Blackness, and other dynamics of exploitation or oppression. The slave is ontologically beyond the arcs of narrative redemption thrown up by modernity: that of liberty for humans, decolonisation for natives, or communism for the proletarian.[10] No historical process of restitution is realisable for those ascribed the ontological status of Black. The actual history of New World slave revolts, not least of all the Haitian Revolution and its formation of a sovereign Black state, does not shake Jared Sexton’s conviction that ‘abolition is beyond (the restoration of) sovereignty, Beyond the restoration of a lost commons through radical redistribution’.[11]

Wedderburn’s works reveal how far the Afro-pessimist reading falls short when applied to real histories of slavery and emancipation. Greg Thomas has recently observed the ‘glaring absence of Black radical and revolutionary intellectual history’ in the Afro-pessimism school, which is ‘casually dismissive of all historical actuality that does not support a pessimist paradigm’.[12] Wedderburn’s reflections on the Haitian Revolution, maroon warfare, and  proposal of a Spencean  proto-communist programme for the colonial periphery demonstrate that though Wedderburn criticised the hypocrisies and inherent limits of European Enlightenment universalism,  he was an ardent and articulate proponent of an alternate, redemptive mode or vision of universality. As an actually-existing revolutionary abolitionist, Wedderburn saw the slave as the central subject of multiple narratives of redemption: freedom, decolonisation and the Spencean commons.

Universalisms: insurgent, strategic, from below

Interest in the notion of the universal in emancipation struggles is undergoing a slow but significant revival, after decades of ambient doubt. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s comments, in the midst of the black-led insurrections of summer 2020, capture this moment of transition and the renunciation of doubt well: ‘I for one would like very much, I endorse completely, reinvigorating the notion of universal; I don't know what to call it, if the word universal is the problem that people stumble over.’[13] But universalism seems to have returned in a very different form, having sublated the abstract, colonial and Eurocentric modes of old. It is simultanoeously more qualified and more total, in that by rejecting the prima facie assumptions of a flattening European universality, it is able to encompass non-European experience as well. When we turn to Wedderburn’s thought and practise, we shall see that a similair dynamic is at work in how he cast the universal in the midst of that revolutionary age.

Asad Haider’s recent critique of identity and racialisation concludes with a similar invocation, the achievement of a ‘universal position’, which ‘does not exist in the abstract, as a prescriptive principle which is mechanically applied to indifferent circumstances. It is created and recreated in the act of insurgency’.[14] Two of the sources, and their associated formulations of universality, which Haider marshals for these conclusions are particularly relevant in understanding where Wedderburn’s contribution fits in.

The first is Massimiliano Tomba’s ‘insurgent universality’, a formulation arrived at from a comparative reading of the two great documents of the French Revolution; the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 and the Constitution of 1793. For Tomba, the Declaration of 1789 represents the origins of a ‘juridical universalism’ of subjects as abstract individuals having rights imposed on them. By contrast, the ‘insurgent universality’ of the Jacobin constitution of 1793 is an expression of  its ‘background in the insurgencies of women, the poor, and slaves’.[15] Thomas Spence, for his part, used the constitution of 1793 as his starting point for his own proto-communist constitution in 1803.[16] Sophie Wahnich has gone further, arguing that in both of the French Revolution’s Declarations, there is the presence of a concrete universality, for most articles were intended as both pronouncements and tools of struggle.[17]

The second of those sources is the formulation provided by Paul Gilroy; a ‘strategic universalism’ distinguished from the ‘innocent, unreflexive universalisms—liberal, religious, and ethnocentric’ precisely because it acknowledges ‘the complicity of rationality and barbarity’.[18] Indeed Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic is explicitly an alternative origin and interpretation of Enlightenment universality, a ‘counterculture of modernity’. Figures from the Age of Revolution play a key role in this drama, including the black Cato Street conspirator William Davidson and of course Robert Wedderburn.[19]

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s history of the revolutionary Atlantic is partly but crucially an expansion of this Black Atlantic. They identify the presence of a ‘“universalism” from below’ at the the crest of this history, as typified by a handful of cosmopolitan revolutionary moments, to list but a few: the French Revolution, the Irish Rebellion, the Despard Plot, Spenceanism and, perhaps most importantly, the Haitian Revolution.[20] Indeed the revolution occupies one of the most symbolic and explanatory moments in alternative accounts of the origins of universality, since CLR James was the first to rightly induct it as ‘one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle’.[21] James’ recognition of anti-colonial universalism as a theme of the revolution is best captured in the vignette of Leclerc’s army faltering in the face of the Haitians singing Marseillaise and Ça Ira from their fortifications, thus wondering if their ‘barbarous enemies’ have justice on their side.[22] Nick Nesbitt’s study of Haiti’s relationship to the radical Enlightenment identifies this articulation of a concept of ‘universal emancipation’ as the Haitian Revolution’s ‘unique contribution to humanity’. It went further than both the American and the French Revolutions as the ‘culminating, most progressive event of the Age of Enlightenment’ precisely because it was able to further radicalise and manifest ‘an Enlightenment that refused to address Africans as full subjects of human rights’.[23]

As we shall see, slave revolt in the Caribbean colonies, particularly the experience and symbolism of events at Saint-Domingue, were a fundamental concern and influence for Wedderburn’s politics. This was both because they offered an expanded discourse of emancipation that challenged colonial slavery and promised to make men of those denied that status, but also because they demonstrated that revolutionary struggle was a viable route for recreating society upon new social and economic principles, which for him was Spenceanism.

The fate of Saint-Domingue

The European plantation colonies and the United States saw near-constant waves of slave revolt during the Age of Revolution.[24] Wedderburn’s abolitionism was informed by an engagement with these revolts and he held fast to the hope of an imminent general revolt. In stark contrast, most moderate British abolitionists feared insurgency and called for abolition precisely to shore-up the colonial system. This is best exemplified in Henry Brougham’s warning that if left to unfold ‘the Abolition of the Slave Trade will have been effected by the utter destruction of the Colonial System’.[25] Wedderburn's hopes, and Brougham’s fears, were not remote. The spectre of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) haunted both Europe and the New World, inspiring a whole phase of conspiracies and revolts – to list but a few: the Second Maroon War (1795-6) in Jamaica, the Second Carib War (1795-7) in Saint Vincent, Fédon's rebellion (1795-6) in Grenada, the Coro rebellion (1795) in Venezuela, Bussa’s rebellion (1816) in Barbados, the Demerara rebellion (1823) in British Guyana, and finally the Great Jamaican Slave Revolt (1831-1832). Though Haiti stands alone as the only victorious revolt, the other moments were not without consequence. Within Wedderburn’s lifetime the British Empire conceded the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, with complete emancipation to follow in 1838.

Wedderburn’s animosity towards the colonial slave system came from his direct experience of it during his early years in Jamaica. He was born to an African-born woman named Rosanna, and a wealthy Scottish planter and slave owner, James Wedderburn, who possessed Rosanna. One of Wedderburn’s earliest memories was the flogging of his pregnant mother, indeed James Wedderburn ‘insulted, abused and abandoned’ her, later selling her on. Wedderburn proudly recalled his mother’s ‘violent and rebellious temper … I have not the least doubt … that I have inherited the same disposition – the same desire to see justice overtake the oppressors of my countrymen’.[26]

Wedderburn eventually departed Jamaica by enlisting with the Royal Navy as a youth, making his way to London in 1778. In those early years he operated, near modern-day Holborn, in a multiracial gang called the St. Giles Blackbirds whose ranks included runaway slaves, Asian lascars, Jews and Irishmen.[27]

In the following years he would re-enlist at least once, likely out of difficulty of finding other work in the metropolis. There is evidence that he was involved in the mutiny at the Nore in 1797 when sailors wrested control of a Royal Navy fleet, declared themselves a ‘floating republic’, and attempted to defect to revolutionary France.[28] In the decades that followed Wedderburn fell in with the post-Jacobin radical underground of London, eventually coming to join and then lead the Spencean tendency.

Wedderburn studied and reflected on the symbolic and strategic lessons of the Haitian Revolution and the history of Jamaican maroon warfare. Haiti is mentioned in the very first issue of The Axe Laid to the Root, where Wedderburn claims to have received a report of rumours from contacts in Jamaica intimating that ‘Jamaica will be in the hands of the blacks within twenty years’. The revolution in Haiti (Saint-Domingue) was invoked as a heroic parallel and precedent:

Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St. Domingo awaits you … Recollect the fermentation will be universal. Their weapons are their bill-hooks; their store of provision is every were in abundance; you know they can live upon sugar canes, and a vast variety of herbs and fruits,—yeah, even upon the buds of trees. You cannot cut off their supplies. They will be victorious in their fight, slaying all before them; they want no turnpike roads; they will not stand to engage organized troops, like the silly Irish rebels. Their method of fighting is to be found in the scriptures, which they are now learning to read.[29]

Perhaps drawing on reports from Haiti, Wedderburn recasts the bill-hook tool – or the machete as it was known in Spanish – of the enslaved plantation labourer as the weapon of rebellion. He also references the Battle of Vinegar Hill during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, where the United Irishmen suffered an utter rout after confronting the British Army in direct combat. He rejects these tactics for the imminent Jamaican revolt, instead celebrating the efficacy of assymetrical warfare.

Further reflections on the Haitian Revolution take place in the sixth issue, through a purported correspondence between Wedderburn and his half-sister, a free Jamaican woman of mixed-descent named Miss Campbell. Though she is described as a plantation overseer, she is won over to abolitionism and Spenceanism and grants her slaves manumission and land accordingly. Most historians agree that though Campbell may have existed, the letters were definitely an invention of Wedderburn’s. Nevertheless the correspondence is extremely valuable for what it tells us of Wedderburn’s understanding of history and strategy in the Caribbean, if not hers.[30]

A letter in that same issue claims that some of the men that Campbell freed were spreading ideas in favour of ‘liberty and possession of the soil’, and though the House of Assembly passed laws to hang slaves ‘preaching, teaching or exhorting’, conversations were still taking place: ‘They have been talking about it this month past to the country negroes on the market days … The news is gone to Old Arbore and St. Anns, to the Blue Mountains, to North Side, and the plantain boats have carried the news to Port Morant, and Morant Bay’. Thus the governor’s secretary calls Campbell in for questioning about her part in spreading these ideas, revealing his fear that ‘there will be more white blood spilt in Jamaica than was in St. Domingo’. The letter goes on to substantiate these fears:

the free Malattoes are...talking about St. Domingo: a great many of the Spaniards fled here, you must know, and brought their favourite slaves with them from St. Domingo, and the young men of Jamaica go amongst them, so they know the causes of their masters’ coming to Jamaica. The slaves begin to talk … the planters’ look frightened the slaves know what it is about.[31]

The history of Jamaican maroon rebellions and communities, provided, to Wedderburn, a tradition of liberty and basic humanity that not only wasn’t derived from Europe, but historically was actively ranged against it.

Marronage was the ever present shadow of plantation slavery and the eternal fear of the masters. Leslie Manigat, in his study of the marronage and the roots of the Haitian Revolution, defines the maroon as a ‘fugitive slave who has broken with the social order of the plantation to live, actually free...where he could escape the control of the colonial power and the plantocratic establishment. In the case of grand marronage, ‘he joins with his fellow maroons to constitute or strengthen the band and to adopt a hit-and-run tactic in a guerilla war against the plantation order’.[32] Wedderburn was evidently aware of the use and efficacy of such tactics, as seen in his prediction, quoted above, that in the course of their rebellion, slaves  will live in the wilds, eating ‘sugar canes’, ‘herbs and fruits’ and ‘the buds of trees’ if they have to.

Maroon communities were highly heterogeneous and, in many cases, were composed of social and kinship alliances between indigenous people and escaped African slaves: ‘most maroons became effective guerillas because they blended Amerindian with West African military methods’. In cases where indigenous populations were wiped out in the early phase of colonialism, such as in Jamaica, they still held a symbolic importance to later maroon communities.[33]

In the fourth issue of Axe Laid to the Root, Wedderburn references Campbell’s maroon ancestry, those rebels ‘who fell for freedom’s cause’, and provides a summary of the maroon struggle against the English colonists, who seized Jamaica following the flight of the Spanish in the 1650s. He specifically references the fact that it was Cromwell’s Protectorate which, despite its anti-tyrannical origins and  bourgeois-republican precedence, attempted to reimpose slavery on the maroons:

You who were slaves to the cruel Spaniards stolen from your country, and brought here, but Cromwell, the great, who humbled kings at his feet, and brought one to the scaffold, sent a fleet out, whose admiral dared not return without performing something to please his master, came here and drove the Spaniards out; the slaves, my people, then fled to the woods for refuge, the invaders called to them to return to bondage, they refused; they contended for twenty years, and upwards; bondage was more terrific than death.

In their struggle against the Spanish and then the English, Wedderburn emphasises both the maroons’ desire for liberty, as against colonial slavery, and their basic humanity, as against the brutality of the English: ‘not barbarous, nor voracious … the Maroons were human beings, and ought not to be hunted down by Britons acting the blood-hound’s part’.

Wedderburn summarises his reflections by directly addressing the descendants of the maroons with an anti-colonial provocation: ‘yes, the English, in the days of Cromwell, while they were asserting the rights of man at home, were destroying your ancestors then fighting for their liberty’.[34] Therefore he condemns English liberty, despite its presumed pedigree (as much in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as now) as reserved for the homeland.[35] Meanwhile, for Wedderburn, it is the maroons’ struggle for freedom that is representative of a kind of true universality.

He expressed this same contradiction between European ‘freedom’ and colonial reality to a crowd of radicals assembled at his Hopkins Street loft in August 1819. A spy report to the Home Office tells that Wedderburn castigated Britain for sending:

Men in arms to West Indies or Africa which produced commotion. They would empl[o]y blacks to go and steal females—they would put them in sacks and would be murdered if they made an alarm Vessels would be in readiness and they would fly off with them This was done by Parliament—who done it for gain—the same as they employed them in their Cotton factories to make Slaves of them … [36]

These reflections on the strategy and symbolism of slave and maroon struggle against colonial slavery provide him with one of the sources out of which he synthesises a radical perspective and programme for the Caribbean. The other is the theory and programme of Spenceanism.

Deluded Spenceans?

Spenceanism was a proto-communist political tendency that represented the revolutionary wing of the early nineteenth-century London underground. Originally devised by the radical pamphleteer Thomas Spence (1750-1814), the programme, or ‘Spence’s Plan’ as it was often called, was distinguished from the rest of the post-Jacobin milieu because it sought ‘to destroy not only personal and hereditary lordship, but the cause of them, which is private property in land’. Property would instead be held in common by parishes, and the revenue generated would be ‘deemed the equal property of man, woman, and child, whether old or young, rich or poor, legitimate or illegitimate’. Spence pinned the hope of realising his Plan on the successes of those insurrections unfolding ‘abroad and at home, in America, France, and in our own fleets’.[37]

After Spence’s death in 1814 a group of his friends and comrades formed the Society of Spencean Philanthropists to propagate his programme. The Spencean Philanthropists played a key role in the underground and mass politics of that decade. In the winter of 1816 they organised mass workers’ meetings for reform at Spa Fields, London, which escalated into rioting and looting of arms. The leaders of the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820, a failed attempt at assassinating the Prime Minister and his cabinet, were veteran Spenceans.[38] Wedderburn had known Spence for nine months before the old radical’s passing, and soon became ‘an attentive and active member of the Spencean society’; by 1817 he was one of its de facto leaders.[39]

When the Seditious Meetings Bill, designed to disband radical political organising, was heard in parliament in February 1817, the Spenceans were described in the following terms: ‘They were all on the same agrarian principle—the equal division of property—the simultaneous rising of the parishes—, the hunting down of the landholder’.[40] Spenceanism reached the Caribbean in 1817,[41] when the Jamaican Royal Gazette reprinted theAddress of the Society of Spencean Philanthropists to All Mankind (1816), a pamphlet which served as the Spenceans’ manifesto addressed ‘to the Governments and people of the world’. TheGazette prefaced the reprint with the warning that ‘this document is as extraordinary an instance of the perversion of first principles and the delusion of the human mind, as has been devised to perplex and mislead the world since the commencement of the French Revolution’.[42] The newspaper reprinted another article referencing the Spenceans in September of the same year: an essay by Robert Southey, the romantic poet turned reactionary, which denounces the Spenceans as ‘some weak men, some mistaken or insane ones, and other very wicked ones’.[43]

It seems to be in direct response to these anti-Spencean commentaries, this ‘paper war’, that Wedderburn, addressing ‘his countrymen and relatives’, mounted a defence of Spenceanism:

It is natural to expect you will enquire what is meant by a deluded Spencean; I must inform you it is a title given by ignorant or self-interested men, to the followers of one Thomas Spence, who knew that the earth was given to the children of men, making no difference for colour or character, just or unjust; and that any person calling a piece of land his own private property was a criminal; and though they may sell it, or will it to their children, it is only transferring of that which was first obtained by force or fraud, this old truth, newly discovered, has completely terrified the landholders in England.

He declared that he was ‘proud to wear the name of a madman … [and] traitor’.[44] For, in his words, the Spenceans demanded what Wedderburn described as:

a radical adjustment of the social system on the broad basis of universal justice, and the securing to every member of the community his indefeasible right to an equal share of the profit of the land and its appurtenances.[45]

Spence’s programme was applicable ‘at all times, and in all countries’, and it is here where the Spencean programme begins to inhabit a space of synonymy with the politics of slave resistance and abolitionism. In defence of the transnational scope of his ideas, Spence himself had declared that ‘I have no such narrow views as an eye to one Country only. My politics are for the World at large’, once identifying the agents of his politics as ‘the slaves and landless men’.[46]Wedderburn similarly identified a state of affairs where a few landholders were arrayed against ‘the great majority in every nation that are dispossessed of their right to the soil throughout the world’.[47] At an underground political meeting hosted on 13^th October 1819, Wedderburn led a debate on the question ‘Which of the two Parties were likely to be victorious, the Rich or the Poor in the event of Universal War’. He made the case that though the world was given to all people ‘as their Inheritance...they had been fleeced out of it—But now was the time to possess themselves of it’.[48] Thus ‘Wedderburn the deluded Spencean’ wishedoffered up the programme as one of redemption not simply to the workers of the metropolis, but to his people: ‘Oh ye Africans and relatives now in bondage to the Christians … receive this the only tribute the offspring of an African can give’.[49]

Was Wedderburn indeed deluded, perhaps naive or even Eurocentric, in assuming the applicability of Spenceanism to the Caribbean?   Wedderburn’s experience and interest in historical and extant forms of slave and maroon resistance allowed him to root the universality of the Spencean programme in the specificity of the Caribbean context. Thus as we now consider his political proposals we may note this habit of linking Spencean interpretations of liberty and common land to the existing conditions of the colony.

The second issue of Axe Laid to the Root opens a discussion on proposals for a post-revolutionary black society with a preface: ‘you might expect, that I should point out a form of government for you; this I leave to your judgement’.[50] Nevertheless Wedderburn submits some foundational principles based both on an appraisal of the European experience of revolution (notably its failures!) and, as McCalman has pointed out, communal-democratic forms of social organisation adapted from Maroon societies.[51]

Wedderburn proposes that they organise a society ‘without a king, without lords, dukes, earls, or the like’ and assures them not to follow European examples of government since ‘with all the proud boasting of Europeans they are yet ignorant of what political liberty is’. He recommends that ‘everything should be settled by votes’ through delegates rotated annually, with the caveat that they shall ‘have no white delegate in your assembly’ and also to ‘never have a man worth more than five hundred a year’. [52]

To preserve the post-revolutionary society, he recommends an armed and militantly organised population, proposing that ‘every individual learn the art of war’, that ‘every male and female be provided with instruments of war at the age of 18’. He cites the colonial threats looming against Haiti to express the importance of defending a new revolutionary society: ‘you will have need of all your strength to defend yourself against those men, who are now scheming in Europe against the blacks of St. Domingo’. To ensure that future generations maintain this vigilance against European colonialism, he recommends children be taught to read and write and be educated in ‘remembrance of your former sufferings, which will show you what you may expect from the hands of European Christians’. He denounces capital punishment, prisons and barracks and exhorts to ‘have no lawyers amongst you’, instead suggesting village assemblies of twenty-four elders as a better mode of settling disputes, and judges delegated to deal with cases of greater magnitude.[53]

Wedderburn explicitly connects the Spencean demand for the socialisation of landwith pre-existing modes of communal land ownership among Jamaican slaves and smallholders, warning the post-revolutionary society to ‘mind and keep possession of the land you now possess as slaves; for without that, freedom is not worth possessing’, and reminds them of the importance of maintaining the relation of communal property: ‘never give it up to your oppressors, you are not told to hold it as private property, but as tenants at will to the sovereignty of the people.[54]

The land Wedderburn is referring to was called provision grounds; a key element of the social settlement between slave and planter. Over the span of the period of slavery in Jamaicamore communally cultivated lands were conceded, allowing slaves to develop a social independence and what Mary Turner calls ‘the survival and development of precisely those intellectual capacities which the slave system inteded to destroy’.[55] Wedderburn even highlights a communitarian society familiar to him in Jamaica, from the parish of his birth, the Shariers of St. Mary Parish ‘who have all things common’.[56]

This understanding of the politics of land and liberty was borne out in subsequent generations of Caribbean slave and peasant movements. In 1857, twenty-four years after Wedderburn’s death and the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act, a report to the Jamaica Royal Commission described black freeholders occupying the lands of a white English plantation owner, who beat the owner and a collector when asked to pay rent, in the following way: ‘… a coloured man of the name of Ripley Edie told the people that the Queen had given them the lands when she gave them freedom … and freedom would be of no use if they had not their lands and houses’. In other words, that emancipation inherently meant the redistribution of productive property from planters to freedmen. The commission asked: ‘do you know whether the people connect the idea of liberty of person with liberty of the land?’, to which he replied, ‘in all properties I have had to do with they have put that forth’.[57]

Official land policy in post-emancipation Haiti diverged considerably from this. The new state preserved a system of cash crop production on the basis of plantation agriculture and forms of unfree labour. This was imposed not only by the necessities of funding a military apparatus capable of defending the newly-freed state from re-invasion but also because the revolutionary elite saw it as ‘the country’s greatest potential source of riches’. Jean-Jacques Dessalines for his part decreed the confiscation and nationalisation of all white-owned property and large estates in general, with opposition from private planters to this land policy feeding into his eventual overthrow.[58] However, in the course of the revolutionary process the Haitian people themselves began to practise more communal forms of land usage, encroaching on plantations to expand their provision grounds, partaking in the products of uncultivated lands, building houses on abandoned estates and effectively taking over plantations.[59] This popular process continued in the post-revolutionary state, with Haitian peasants moving towards subsistence land use, collective property and various forms of maroon settlement and village organisation which Casimir has designated ‘the counter-plantation system’.[60]

The ideological and cultural precedents for such a conception of land and liberty derived from multiple sources: the forms of autonomous land-holding carved out during the period of slavery, the social foment of the initial phase of revolution and, as Fick speculates, a potential restoration of West African landholding practises in a New World context.[61] Overall, despite the significant hardships inherent to a poor peasant economy, post-revolutionary Haiti was distinguished from its Caribbean neighbours in having a positive growth rate, better labour and living conditions, freer movement and rich cultural expression.[62]

It is not at all clear whether Wedderburn was aware at all of the failure to enact land reform and the tensions between the plantation system and marronage in post-revolutionary Haiti. It was not this that aspect of the Haitian example that influenced his proposals for a post-revolutionary, anti-colonial state but the extent to which it represented a distinct break with European political forms and that it opened up space for new and experimental modes of property relations. Indeed Spence himself symbolically offered up the last definitive work of his life, his ‘Constitution of Spensonia’, to the new Haitian state which was in the process of drafting a constitution. The epilogue reads:

         And though my book’s in queer lingo,

         I will it send to st. Domingo:

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

Since the financial collapse of 2008 and the unfolding struggles in its aftermath, one can observe a rising interest in Marxist theories on race and racism. In this context some efforts were made to make use of Marx’s value theory for explaining the emergence and persistence of anti-black racism.[i]Some of the most promising approaches within this theoretical tendency make use of Moishe Postones work on antisemitism and the value-form, which is indeed a good place to start.[ii] Nevertheless, these recent theoretical investigations ignore, to no fault of their own, an already existing elaborate attempt that tried to bring together a theory of racism and Marx’s value-form analysis – namely the work of Peter Schmitt-Egner from the 1970s.

At the same time when Postone was studying in Frankfurt, where he was partaking in the debates around the reconstruction of Marx’s critique of political economy, now usually called the new reading of Marx (Neue Marx-Lektüre), Schmitt-Egner attempted to investigate colonial racism through a systematic-dialectic method owing much to the contemporary Hegelian reading ofCapital established in Germany by scholars such as Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt.[iii]Around this time, a public discussion unfolded, which was triggered by the Namibian independence movement against the occupation by South Africa, which brought the questions of apartheid and Germanys genocidal history during its colonial ventures in Africa into focus. Schmitt-Egner tried, as he put it in an article from 1980, to counter the tendency in Germany at the time to overcome this colonial past by ignoring its continuities and its importance for the present.[iv] In his dissertation Kolonialismus und Faschismus (‚Colonialism and Fascism‘) from 1975 as well as in an article from the following year calledWertgesetz und Rassismus (‚Racism and the Law of Value‘) for theGesellschaft-book series, which was initiated by Hans Georg Backhaus, Schmitt-Egner tried to conceptually derive racism from the functioning of the law of value under conditions of a world market constituted through colonial violence. To that effect, he was obviously inspired by the German world-market debate, which was happening at around the same time. Just like this debate, which revolved around the question if there was a modification of the law of value on the world market and how Marx’s critique of political economy can be used to explain modern imperialism, Schmitt-Egners work can be designated as almost forgotten.[v]Even within German anti-racist theory, his work is almost never mentioned.[vi]While some important texts within the German new reading of Marx have been made accessible to English-speaking audiences,[vii] Schmitt-Egner’s, as well as many other important works, are not among them. Therefore, this paper aims to make the outline of his main argument accessible to the ongoing international debate on racism and capitalism. While, as I am going to show, Schmitt-Egners theoretical endeavour has some serious flaws, it nevertheless constitutes one of the most developed theoretical investigations of racism from a Marxian point of view. Its weaknesses notwithstanding, it can bring important insights to current discussions.

Historical and Theoretical Preliminaries

In his dissertation, which was the basis of his article on racism and the law of value from 1976, Schmitt-Egner situates his work within the debates around the relation of racism, colonialism and fascism. He approvingly cites Arendt, Césaire and Fanon who argued for an understanding of colonial domination in the periphery as deeply connected with the emergence of fascism in the metropoles. While he commends these thinkers for looking at colonialism and fascism as related forms of unmediated domination, he also thinks that they lack an investigation of the economic substance of these forms.[viii]According to him, this theoretical desideratum also led to a ‘confusion of the scientific debate’ around the question of racism and how it relates to both colonialism and fascism.[ix]The only way out of this conceptual perplexity, as stated by Schmitt-Egner, would be a proper Marxian conceptual development of racist ideology, that starts ‘from the contradictions of the economic form’.[x]

But even within the Marxist tradition such a theoretical derivation, he contends, was not yet developed. The two most prominent approaches to the theorisation of racist ideology within historical materialism, the social-psychological tradition in the aftermath of Wilhelm Reichs Mass Psychology of Fascism, as well as the orthodox Marxist approach, that developed out of the Second and Third Internationals are deemed deficient by Schmitt-Egner.[xi] Reich, who is mentioned explicitly by Schmitt-Egner, and the proponents of the Frankfurt School like Erich Fromm, who are only hinted at, are criticised for essentially bypassing the economic form-nexus in their socio-psychological accounts of prejudices. All of them, he adds, would adhere to a rather orthodox Marxist view of the economy as becoming objectively more and more socialised, while the subjective consciousness of the proletariat in Germany and other industrialised nations wouldn’t follow suit. Reich and others thought that this discrepancy could only be explained by looking at the agents of psychological socialisation which are deemed to produce authoritarian personality-types, vulnerable to be lured in by racist and other chauvinist ideologies. According to Schmitt-Egner, this kind of argumentation lacks a thorough investigation of the internal relation between matter and mind, artificially seperates economic and psycho-cultural instances and remains trapped in a somewhat modified base-superstructure-model.[xii]

Nevertheless, he lauds the social-psychological approach for at least attempting to explain the genesis of racism. The Marxist traditions of the Second and Third International are criticised by him for having not even tried to explain the structural emergence of racism, but rather reducing it to itsfunction in the preservation of imperialist domination. This approach couldn‘t relate the function of racism – as a means of legitimation, ideological distortion and social cohesion – to its form-determination and therefore failed to establish a relation of necessity between racism and capitalism. This mistake is grounded, according to Schmitt-Egner, in the orthodox Marxists inability ‘to grasp racism as a socially necessary form of consciousness of the commodity-producing and -exchanging society’.[xiii]

Before I lay out Schmitt-Egners argument, some methodological comments are in order. When Schmitt-Egner talks of genesis it shouldn’t be understood as refering to the historical genealogy of racism. Rather it refers to ‘aconceptual relationship of development’, that has to be established via a theoretical reconstruction of the relation of racism to the capitalist mode of production ‘in its ideal average’.[xiv] Schmitt-Egner explicitly states that this kind of conceptual investigation has to forego any kind of historical exposition of the origins of racism – which of course doesn’t mean that one should engage in abstract model-building before engaging with actual history, but that the internal relations between the object under investigation, which were already conceptually reproduced through theoretical and empirical inquiry, should be at the beginning and the center of the theoretical presentation.[xv] In this Schmitt-Egner is a very orthodox follower of Marx’s notes on the method of political economy in his Introduction of 1857.[xvi]

Additionally, another preliminary remark is necessary on Schmitt-Egners conception of ideology. It has become quite ubiquitous for Marxists and non-Marxists alike, to reject any conception of racism as primarily an ideology and to discuss it as a question of power and domination instead. This has the reasonable and most welcome aspect to it, that it highlights the excessive violence, suffering and oppression that was and still is the consequence of racism. To the effect that focusing on the practical, structural and institutional sides of racism emphasises these morally and politically most important dimensions it was a necessary corrective. At times however, the emphasis on ‘power’ contrary to ‘prejudice’ in my eyes tends to reproduce the questionable separation of being and consciousness and conveys an understanding of ideologies as ‚mere ideas‘.[xvii] But the term ideology, in a Marxian sense, denotes not only cognitive processes, but stresses the unity and relative autonomy of forms of consciousness as parts of the totality of social practices. Therefore, when Schmitt-Egner talks of racism as an ideology, he sees it as a conceptual reflection (and distortion) of social actions and social power relations mediated by capitalist forms of wealth (commodities, value, money, capital). These relations can be empirically observed by agents only in their inverted phenomenal forms which conceal their real origin. In contrast to Althusserian accounts of ideology, the distinction between essential relations and phenomenal forms is paramount here.  Ideologies seem only plausible to actors, because they are anchored in social practices, which are in turn co-constituted by these forms of consciousness.[xviii] They are therefore never ‘merely’ ideas.

The Commodity-Form, Human Rights and their Negation

In his theoretical derivation of racism Schmitt-Egner differentiates between three successive levels of abstraction. First, it needed to be established how racism is even possible in a capitalist society in which the idea of human equality ‘already aquired the permanance’, according to Marx, of a ‘popular prejudice’ (Volksvorurteil).[xix] Second, it has to be investigated how the possibility of racism becomes an actuality, that means under which outer circumstances the contradictions of abstract equality encountered on level one develops into actual racism. And finally, it had to be shown under which conditions racism becomes not only a possible and actual but the dominant form of consciousness.[xx]

Schmitt-Egner‘s point of departure is Marx’s analysis of bourgeois rights and the sphere of commodity circulation. He does not try to extrapolate a theory of racism from Marx’s scattered comments on the race-question, such as his now well-known remarks on the hostility between Irish and English workers, but rather he situates it in the conceptual architecture of the critique of the political economy, where supposedly it was left out by Marx. Therefore, he proceeds in a similar way as for instance Pashukanis did regarding the law or as Marxist-Feminists did with reproductive labour.[xxi]

Schmitt-Egners starting point – the sphere of simple commodity circulation – seemed to be a reasonable place to start his endeavour from, because it is where abstract freedom and equality (together with Bentham) have their natural habitat.[xxii]Commodity circulation as the real material basis of the normative orientations of the bourgeois subject is therefore also the level of abstraction where the possibility of racism has to be established:

If we want to follow the genesis of colonial ideology, whose central forms of appearance are racism and chauvinism, it should be possible on this level of abstraction to derive why the bourgeois society casts off its ‚own‘ ideology and chooses, in denial of the bourgeois revolution, the inequality of human beings as its new ideology.[xxiii]

Marx already in his early philosophical writings developed a well-known critique of human rights as the rights of the egoistic, isolated, bourgeois man.[xxiv] He arrived at this argument through an engagement with Hegels Philosophy of Right and took over his notion of the duplication (Verdopplung) of the individual within capitalist society intobourgeois andcitoyen – which is the reflection of the seperation of the economic and political spheres within society as a whole under capitalism. But while he already postulates from very early on a nexus between capitalism and the idea of an inborn equality of men, he, according to Schmitt-Egner, couldn’t yet conceptualise the real material basis of this idea. Only decades later, through the analysis of the commodity-form inCapital and its preparatory works was this achieved.[xxv]

In his mature writings on the critique of political economy Marx found out that the equality of men could only become a plausible and generalizable notion in a society where the products of social labour have turned into commodities, which are exchanged as equivalents by their owners. In this social act, that mediates the whole metabolism of capitalist societies, individuals encounter each other as equal subjects. Buyer and seller of a commodity both are active subjects, both ideally give and receive an equal amount of value and the act of exchange constitutes a contractual relationship both of them enter at their (formally) free choosing.[xxvi]

If therefore the economic form, the act of exchange, on all sides precludes the equality of the subjects, the content, the substance, individually as well as objectively, which drives the exchange precludes freedom. Equality and freedom are not only respected in exchange based on exchange values, but the exchange of exchange values is the productive, real base of allequality andfreedom. As pure ideas they are merely idealised manifestations of it.[xxvii]

But this sphere of abstract freedom and equality already presupposes universal commodity exchange and therefore the commodification of labour power. Circulation, according to Marx, is a ‘haze, hiding a whole world beneath it.’[xxviii]It presupposes a sphere of production based on the exploitation of wage labour. In other words, the existence of commodity-exchange as a social act of free and equal individuals is only the appearance of unfreedom and inequality, of class and exploitation which reigns in the sphere of production.

Freedom and equality remain insubstantial as long as they are based on the appropriation of surplus labour. This contradiction between the determinations of circulation and of production, who are parts of an integrated whole, only find a modus vivendi in which they can simultaneously exist through the mystification of the wage form. As it appears that the all hours of the workday were paid by the capitalist, it seems that there was no exploitation happening at all, which is, according to Marx, the basis for a range of illusions that are spreading also within the working class.[xxix]

One of the most important of these illusions, is that the rights conveyed by the sphere of circulation to the owners of commodities are not seen as socially determined and historically specific products of a class society, but as conveyed by nature. Reified as natural rights, the legal form of mediation of commodity exchange appears as a consequence of the nature of the exchanging homo oeconomicus. Human equality seems natural through exchange value and those who are socially inferiorised accordingly seem to be naturally inferior. This is ultimately the point, according to Schmitt-Egner, from where it is possible to make sense of racism. Once we established the contradictions of bourgeois equality, which are determined by the internal relation of exploitation and commodity-exchange, we see that we have to look for the racist negation of this equality in the sphere of production and how this is naturalized through circulation. We have to look at labour not only as a commodity, but as a form of capital. Then we see racism as anchored in the difference between only formally subsumed labour processes in the colonies and really subsumed labour processes in the metropoles.[xxx]

The Genesis of Racism in the Colonial Labour Regime

According to Schmitt-Egner racism was not a product of slavery per se. As is well known, slavery didn’t need racial classifications to be a feasible form of exploitation for a very long time.[xxxi] Even during the age of revolutions in the late 17th and 18th century, which also marked the climax of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, for the most part, needed no justification apart from its utility. As chattel slavery and plantation production more and more became incorporated into a system of industrial capitalism based on free wage labour, this contradiction was solved by subsuming the slave under the rubric of property, thereby using the ideological hegemony of private property against the emerged radical notions of human liberty as a vindication of the slave system.[xxxii]

As Barbara Fields notes, ‘in the [U.S.] South, the heyday of scientific racism … came after, not during, slavery.’[xxxiii]Schmitt-Egner explains this apparent aberration by relating it to the dominance of merchant capital. As long as it was dominating, he contends, the sanctity of property ranked above everything else and ‘there was no need for slave-trading nations to solve this contradiction through a “theory”, as the person of the slave merged into property.’[xxxiv] As a chattel the slave was not partaking in circulation as a subject, but was treated as a passive object. Exploitation in production was out in the open without a mystification of the wage form in effect. No contradiction emerged between the slaves appearance in circulation and production – they were treated as tools, as fixed capital in both spheres. As long as merchants capital and slave labour was dominating, Schmitt-Egner writes, there was no objective basis for a theory of radical, unbridgable, natural inequality between ‚races‘ to emerge.[xxxv]

This only changes when industrial capital spreads out into the colonies, a process Schmitt-Egner dates to the 19th century, with the expansion of the British empire in Asia and the colonisation of large parts of sub-saharan Africa. In this process the colonies‘ insertion into ‘the world market, which was formally subsumed by industrial capital’ didn’t lead to a developmental pattern similar to the process of original accumulation in England that was analysed by Marx.[xxxvi]In comparison with the metropoles, the colonies were integrated through a system based on unequal exchange and unequal relations of production. Unequal quantities of labour were exchanged because of the comparatively labour intensive production in the colonies and the absence of a tendency of profit rates to equalise on a world scale. At the same time – in contrast to the open plunder conducted by merchant capital – this relationship of subordination is veiled, because it rests on formally free exchange of economic magnitudes.[xxxvii]

The real subsumption promoted by industrial capital asserts itself only sectorally, where capital-exports from the metropoles are involved, other labour processes remain only formally subsumed and therefore very labour intensive. The colonised themselves, according to Schmitt-Egner, only participate in local small-scale trade as they were still to a large degree enmeshed in subsistence-oriented production and were therefore excluded from commercial exchange. While at the same time the local traditional forms of interaction and social ties are violently dissolved, so that the colonised ‘indeed appears “cultureless”, as he is neither part of bourgeois society nor of any old traditional organisation’.[xxxviii] This lack of integration through social ties or meaningful participation in the market requires, according to Schmitt-Egner, the application of sheer force as the primary means of social cohesion.

Schmitt-Egner sees the alignment of the economy according to the requirements of production in the metropoles as the basis of the merely formal subsumption of labour under capital in the colonies. This relation of dependence brings with it that the state of labour productivity is not determined by the necessary average labour time. Instead, what kind of machinery is used is determined be the wants of individual and productive consumption in the colonizing countries. Those made use of the colonies, according to Schmitt-Egner, almost exclusively for extractive purposes, that is, as producers of raw material through agrarian production or mining. Expenditures for constant capital were artificially held down to guarantee a labour intensive form of production, which was further cheapened by violently pressing down the price of labour power and the lenghtening of the work day, that is through the increase of absolute surplus value. The relative displacement of direct coercion as a stimulus for extracting labour, which was achieved in the metropoles, wasn’t allowed to happen in the colonial mode of production:

The depressed unfolding of the productive power of labour necessitates the form of a master-servant-relationship [einesHerr-Knecht-Verhältnisses]. In this surplus-value-yielding production also an unmediated relation of violence is mediated through exchange value. This form of production therefore is in no way feudal (as it was sometimes claimed in the dependency-debate), but commodified and directed by capital through its world-market based mediation, which is at the same time the constituting element of this relation of production.[xxxix]

Therefore, while the development of capitalism and the struggles of the workers movement in Western Europe produced a variety of capitalism which allowed for a historical and moral element as part of the value-determination of labour power, this wasn’t the case for the colonised labourer. According to Marx, the lower limit of the value of labour power is set by the wage being sufficient to buy the ‘physically indispensable provisions’ without which the worker cannot reproduce her labour power in full. If this minimum is undercut by the capitalist, the labourer can only reproduce her labour power ‘in stunted form’.[xl]

In the case of the colonies, where production is built around extraction for the economies of the metropoles and is based on a low organic composition of capital, it becomes the primary motive of the colonising capitalist to extent surplus value ‘in contrast to the metropole primarily through the lenghtening of the work day and the permanent depression of the commodity of labour power under its value.’[xli] Here we find, according to Schmitt-Egner, the condition for the emergence of racist ideology. The colonised labourer is seen as inferior and subhuman, because her labour power is under-valued compared to that of the white worker. She is seen as a human being of lesser value, because that’s how she appears within circulation.

‘[T]hat is to say, if the colonial worker is not able anymore to sell his labour power on the surface according to its value, then his exchange value doesn’t represent an equivalent anymore, therefore he also can’t be recognised as an equal within the sphere of circulation.’[xlii] Racism, Schmitt-Egner writes, translates the differences in the value-determination of labour power between black and white workers into natural differences of human ‚races‘. Those, who are compelled to work for wages under the value of their labour power are seen as not fully human, because they are de-valued not only in the sphere of production – as is the case with wage workers in general – but they are also de-valued in circulation. The colonised worker, according to Schmitt-Egner, ‘is reduced to brutish nature’,[xliii] because the historical and moral element of the value of labour power, which is missing in the case of this kind of worker, in bourgeois society became the badge of being fully human.[xliv]

While racism is seen by Schmitt-Egner as an ideology that was only possible to emerge under the condition of the commodification of colonised labour power, he nevertheless finds that slavery ‘lives on in ideological form within race ideology’, because the colonised worker is seen within circulation and production similar to a slave, only as a tool or an object. At the same time her labour power is her own property, not that of some master. This contradiction, according to Schmitt-Egner, could only be ‚solved‘ through the mystification of race, which is re-enforced within the production process, where, for instance in South Africa, the black workers were relegated by law to simple, manual labour. Dequalification therefore is another feature these workers become associated with. Even when there is no formal barrier, the dull compulsion of economic relations reproduces this relegation by itself, as Schmitt-Egner explains, pointing to the U.S. after abolition.[xlv]

In summary, the objective precondition of racism is to be found in the contradictions of bourgeois equality, which has its base in commodity circulation and the exploitation of wage labour. This uneasy synchronicity of formal equality and material inequality holds the possibility – but only the possibility – of racism. Solely through the historical tracing of this contradiction in the constitution of a world-market through colonialism, can it be said, that racism became a necessary form of consciousness under capitalism. Therefore, Schmitt-Egner‘s argument echoes that of Patrick Wolfe, according to whom ‘the emergence of the ideology of race accords with the shift from mercantilism to an industrial economy which transformed colonial social organisation’ in a way that ‘production and consumption were reconstituted to suit the requirements of metropolitan factories.’[xlvi]The specific form under which capital subsumed labour in the colonies destroyed traditional social ties without integrating the colonised into bourgeois society. Therefore they were seen as beings without culture. They were relegated to hard and unskilled manual labour, which was the basis for their construction as human tools by nature. At the same time they were still proprietors of their own labour power, even if it was strongly coerced wage labour. But it was a labour power whose price was permanently depressed under the social average: ‘The notion of necessary labour time is stripped in the colonies of its social necessity, the historical-moral element disappears; the worker in this case is reduced tomere nature, mere physical subsistence.’[xlvii]

The colonial violence which lead to this extraordinary position within capitalist circulation and production was hidden by the mystifications of the commodity form. Circulation, according to Marx, as was already mentioned, is a haze hiding a whole world beneath it. What it hides is the violence that produced the racialised worker. Through the ideology of racism the features with which she enters the labour market are seen as established not by brute force, but by her own deficient biology. ‘The intermediate steps of the process vanish in the result and leave no trace behind.’[xlviii] Because human equality seems to be a self-evident fact of nature for the bourgeois commodity-exchanging subject, those who can participate in this exchange only with an under-valued embodied commodity – their racialised labour power – seem with the same self-evidence as being deficient by nature. And the reason for said inferiority is accordingly seen as an inner trait of the carrier of said labour power.

Hylton Whites‘ ambitious theoretical derivation of anti-black racism comes quite close to Schmitt-Egners approach, but suffers from the mistake of theorising it as a result of an identification of the black body with abstract labour. White defines abstract labour as labour which ‘by coercion or by technology and corporate organisation … becomes a social force abstracted from individual or willful action.’[xlix] But this is a definition of alienated labour in accordance with the definition given in Marx’s earlyParis Manuscripts.[l] Abstract labour on the contrary is not ‘amassed biological energy’,[li] but the purely social character of labour. Value is ‘arelation of social validation’, in which concrete labours are recognised ‘as a particular quantum of value-constituting abstract labour’ through the exchange of commodities.

White is right, that through the history of slavery and other forms of unfree labour black people are seen as bearers of unbridled, ‚raw‘ labour power and are identified with unskilled, simple and manual labour – but this means they are identified with a specific kind of concrete labour. While anti-semitism indeed affirms the concrete against the abstract, affirming blood and nation against the jew as the symbol of abstract modernity, the fetishistic dualism of (good) concreteness and (bad) abstraction can’t explain anti-black racism.[lii]This racism sees its victims as beeing too concrete, meaning too close to the simplicity of nature, rather than as completely remote from nature as the ‚rootless‘ jews are seen by antisemites. This ‘strongly polarised pair’ of anti-black racism and antisemitism has at its root the projection of the all too concrete, use-value side of capitalism onto the black body as inanimate nature, while projecting its abstract and impersonal dimension onto the jew as the personification of impersonal power.[liii] Fanon was one of the first authors who also recognized the social-psychological aspect of this, which results in identifying ‘the intellectual and the sexual’ in the former case with the jews and in the latter with black people.[liv]This dichotomy can be observed best by looking at racist propagandistic imagery, where African men are usually depicted as musculous brutes, who lure in defenseless women through the force of their sheer unlimited sexual potency, while jewish men are depicted as ugly old leechers, who nevertheless lure in the nation-signifying women by virtue of their manipulative capabilities.[lv]

‘Chauvinism’ and the Pre-History of Race

At this point, readers of this article may have already spotted some of the weaknesses in Schmitt-Egners theory. His derivation remains very speculative and is situated at an extremely high level of abstraction, while at the same time it is filled with sweeping statements intended to capture the essence of social processes which unfolded over vast periods of time and geographical space. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if they were backed up by a sufficient amount of historical material. But when it comes to the history of colonialism and racism, Schmitt-Egners sources are extremely scarce, even for the mid-1970s.

For instance, he ignored large parts of the debate on the origins of racial slavery in Virginia, which was in full swing by the time he was writing. This made it possible for him to argue that the fact that ‘the first labour struggles in the New England colonies were fought out together by blacks and whites’[lvi]was evidence for the absence of racism. Not only were those struggles situated not in the New England but in the Southern Colonies, they were also not fought out by ‚blacks and whites‘, but by slaves and indentured servants who were signified not yet as ‚races‘ but for instance as heathenish ‚Negroes‘ and as dissolute ‚rabble‘.[lvii] The category of whiteness was at this point still in its infancy and, at least in Virginia, became formalised as a legal category only at the end of the seventeenth century following the repercussions of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.[lviii]

If he would have taken notice of this history, he might have recognised that the biologistic racial doctrine he takes for the substance of racism was only the culmination of a process that took off long before the year of 1850, which he understands following Michael Banton as the beginning of the ‘century of racism’.[lix] The idea of race didn’t originate in the colonial context in the 19th century, but in the class struggles and structural transformations within Europe at the time of the formation and dissolution of the states of the type of the Ancièn Regime.[lx] Notions of race were mobilised by nobles to anchor their claims to aristocratic privileges in ideological ideas of unbridgeable natural difference. Aristocrats and bureaucrats of ‚non-noble blood‘ as well as the domestic underclasses were seen by the old elites as inferior by nature.[lxi] In medieval Spain aristocrats made use of already established religious modes of inferiorisation against muslims and jews in the competition for state offices. Conversed ‚New Christians‘ were driven out from such offices (if they weren’t driven out of Spain altogether or killed), whose former religious confessions were seen as having tainted their blood, which resulted in the laws of blood purity.[lxii]But these ascriptive hierarchization were quite different from modern notions of race and were at first not connected to skin colour at all.

Only at the beginning of the 17th century, with thinkers such as Francois Bernier in France and William Petty in England, was it, that the notion of race was mobilised to sort and hierarchise populations on a global scale. Even later, against the background of the plantation systems in the ‚New World‘, the ‚Negroes‘ ultimately became racialised, while Europeans became white, Indigenous Americans – whose skin was considered to be olive or even white before – suddenly were deemed red, and Asians, in some cases formerly known for their pale skin, became the yellow race. Indigenous Americans and Asians were therefore integrated in a colour-coded taxonomy, which was built around African slavery in the 18th century and which was used in later colonial ventures into Asia and Africa as a system of ascriptive hierarchy as well.[lxiii]

One has to take notice of this history to understand why Africans were racialised differently in modern scientific racism than for example Native Americans were, even though both were colonised and racialised and are therefore thrown together by Schmitt-Egner under one category. Even if one wants to look at racism from a form-theoretical angle, as Schmitt-Egner does, without the intention to write a history of racism, he nevertheless has to make a detour to the history of colonialism, because his purely conceptual derivation finds its limits as soon as he leaves the sphere of commodity circulation. ‘The dialectical mode of presentation’ as was clear for Marx ‘is only correct, when it is aware of its limits.’[lxiv] Beyond these limits actual history has to enter – and concerning racism, the writing of its history simply cannot begin with the colonial expansion of capitalism in the 19th century, but has to start much earlier. If one agrees with Schmitt-Egner that modern racism is a reflection of the way different colonised and enslaved populations were violently integrated into a capitalist economy based on formal freedom and equality, one still has to look at the history of this integration in its structural and ideological dimensions to understand why this process took on the form it did. Without recognizing the pre-history of 19th century colonial subjugation and racist inferiorisation one simply cannot grasp the shape and the function of modern racial taxonomies.

At one point in his article, Schmitt-Egner recognises this pre-history of modern racial doctrine. He postulates an ideology he calls ‚chauvinism‘, which he says was also based on inferiorising the colonised, but not along the lines of race but along the lines of peoples and nations. Chauvinism, he contends, was the fitting ideology for colonial expansion, while racism was a form of consciousness geared to already established colonial domination.[lxv] He seems to understand as chauvinism the ideologies that legitimised land grab, dispossession and displacement of native peoples, who were signified as ‚savages‘ and ‚barbarians‘. The objective basis for these ideologies, according to Schmitt-Egner, was the difference between colonising societies, who already produced for exchange value, which was equated with progressiveness, and indigenous peoples who engaged in subsistence-oriented small scale agriculture. Therefore, the export of capitalism into the colonies was seen as the export of civilisation.[lxvi]

While he acknowledges this pre-history of scientific racism, he makes the mistake to understand what he calls chauvinism as a simple precursor to racism, which was later replaced.[lxvii] But ‚chauvinism‘ – the signification of natives as idle savages, who are not able to productively improve land through their labour – was not just a precursor, but the beginning of an ongoing process, which was later justified via race theory. This becomes most obvious, when one looks at the signification of indigenous peoples in the U.S., who were dispossessed as unproductive ‚savages‘, as were Aboriginal people in Australia, but at the same time were seen as ‚red‘ in contrast to ‚black‘ and were racialised in many ways dissimilar to African-Americans. Accordingly, black Americans were not seen as a ‚dying race‘ and were not forcefully assimilated but kept separate, in contrast to indigenous peoples, because the reason for their subjugation was not the appropriation of land, but the appropriation of labour.[lxviii]Both forms of appropriation weren’t successive stages but simultaneously existing forms of colonial violence, which led to different forms of inferiorisation. These differences escape Schmitt-Egner due to his cursory and flawed reconstruction of history.

No State in Sight

Another severe weakness in Schmitt-Egners theoretical derivation is his almost complete disregard for the role of the state in the emergence of racism. This is even more surprising, because Schmitt-Egner was writing at the climax of the German state-derivation debate, which had as its goal the conceptual development of the political form of capitalism proceeding from Marx’s Capital.[lxix] The debate often made reference to the works of Pashukanis, who argued as early as the 1930s, that freedom and equality in the capitalist exchange relation had as their necessary corollary a political force that guarantees legally that both parties in the economic transaction respect each other as private proprietors.[lxx]

Therefore, it is also within colonial law and colonial state power that we find the reason why colonised subjects could only appear in circulation as debased participants in commodity exchange. It was above all through law and state power that racism became a material force that differentiated populations and endowed them with different rights, capabilities and liabilities. It is not racist legal coding that follows economic relations, but because of the unity of economic and political power in the colonies, racism was primarily established through the violence of the state, not the compulsion of the market. Schmitt-Egner hints at this fact, but doesn’t further elaborate on it, when he argues that the ‘political implementation’ of the colonial mode of production presupposes that ‘all organs‘ like trade unions and so on ‘are liquidated which ensure in the metropoles that labour power is sold according to its value.’[lxxi]

Understanding the role of the state is also important for two other issues Schmitt-Egner is weak on: the attraction of racism to its subjects and the transformation of racism after the formal end of colonialism and what George Frederickson called ‘overtly racist regimes’.[lxxii]On the first matter, Schmitt-Egner designates the ‚poor whites‘ and the small planters in the colonies as well as the pressured petty bourgeoisie in the metropoles as the most obvious subjects of racism. The unskilled white worker in the colonies, according to Schmitt-Egner, has nothing which sets himself apart from the racialised worker, so he has to cultivate the colour line in order not to sink to the level of inferiority the colonised is already placed at. The small planter, on the other hand, had the objective interest to remain competitive through ruthless over-exploitation of colonised labour, which is reinforced by his dependency on credit to acquire the means of production. Therefore, although for different reasons, he also had a vital interest in the cultivation of racist degradation.[lxxiii] In the metropoles, it would be the moribund petty bourgeoisie, which cultivates antisemitism and a ‚blood-and-soil‘-world view as a mystified way to make sense of its material position in competition with industrial capital and stifled by finance capital.[lxxiv]

What Schmitt-Egner overlooks is that, especially in settler colonies but also in nation states more generally, racism is tightly bound up with national belonging and the legitimacy of the state. As Balibar formulated it, racism is an inner supplement and an exaggeration of nationalism.[lxxv] The entanglement of race and nation makes it look like the state is grounded in nature, something even deeper than common culture and history. But in the eyes of his subjects the state has to continually give proof of serving the racialised nation by modes of inclusion and exclusion along the lines of race, nationality, religion and so on. Also workers can, if they act as racists, demand from the state to act as a facilitator of social closure: privileging the dominant fraction of workers in certain ways over the demeaned ‚others‘.

But because racism might overdetermine but never cancels out class, the state actions almost never seem enough for the racist, because they can never do away with the existential insecurities capitalism produces. Racism is therefore, again with Balibar, ‘a conflictual relationship to the state which is ‘lived’ distortedly and ‘projected’ as a relationship to the Other.’[lxxvi] Because of the entanglement of racism and nationalism, the ‚others‘ are not only the potential enemies of specific class elements in the colonies and metropoles – like Schmitt-Egners poor whites, small farmers and the petty bourgeoisie – but they can be seen by all classes as contaminants of the nation as a whole. All of them, in theory, can try to assert their interests, at least to a certain extent, vis-à-vis the state through racist exclusion – which of course makes more sense to some class fractions rather than others and also yields very different ‘wages of whiteness’ according to their respective material position.

Under-valued Labour Power and Inferiorisation Today

Seeing the state as fundamentally imbricated in the inferiorisation of racialised populations in production and circulation also allows one to transplant Schmitt-Egners rudiments of a value-form-theory of racism to the question of how racism articulates itself today, which I will try to do in the following admittedly very cursory remarks.

The allocation of demeaned, manual and unskilled labour to racialised populations through legal means was not only characteristic of colonial production, but also a defining feature of for instance European guest worker schemes.[lxxvii] These workers from poorer economies, in some cases from former colonies, came to the metropoles in order to supplement metropolitan labour as a cheap and semi-unfree work force, which could be payed below the social average value of labour power. This led again to the appearance of a fraction of the working class, whose labour power was already under-valued and unequal in comparison to their metropolitan counter parts. At the same time, racist and culturalist tropes were mobilised by political parties, intellectuals and even parts of organised labour to signify them as ‚other‘, brutish and dangerous.[lxxviii]

Even in other Western countries such as Britain, where there was no comparable guest worker program, the migration from former colonies led to analogous outcomes. The migrants until 1962 were formally deemed as British subjects and held full citizenship, but were allocated through formal and informal mechanisms of discrimination as well as through the identity-blind workings of the market to the lower end of the division of labour.[lxxix] These formal and informal disadvantages for migrants in Europe closed them off from many of the opportunities for advancement granted to the working class during the decades of the economic boom after the end of the Second World War. When anti-racist struggles finally did away with many of the formal discriminatory mechanisms the trente glorieuses were already coming to an end, leaving the majority within those groups with unfavorable requisites for the neoliberal onslaught to come.

Likewise, black Americans after the epochal successes of the Civil Rights Movement for the first time entered capitalist markets as formal equals, but it was an economy that was already entering a period of a long downturn.[lxxx] African-Americans were, as Clegg and Usmani recently put it, ‘bypassed by America’s industrial boom.’[lxxxi] The dull compulsion of economic relations enacted through competition for jobs, housing and public resources reproduces and even exaggerates this detrimental position for black workers, leading to persistent racialised disparities, even if there would be no formal or informal discriminations in place.[lxxxii]

Furthermore, laws regarding ‚aliens‘ put additional pressures on migrants to take jobs even if they are over-qualified, threatening them with deportation in case of non-compliance. In areas near borders to poorer countries, industrialised nations over-exploit semi-unfree migrant workers for harvest and other manual and underpaid work. Even, in some cases, full citizens who are descendents of migrants in the second or even third generation are highly overrepresented among the unemployed and inside labour-intensive lines of work. All of these state sanctioned or informally induced regimes of differentiation produce fractions within the working class who are under-valued, concentrated in and therefore affiliated with unskilled work and are at the same time seen as ethnic, ‚racial‘ or religious ‚others‘.

This, one could argue with Schmitt-Egner, has its structural precondition in the politically mediated and economically reproduced inequality of the exchange value of labour power that produces inequalities within circulation, which is ideologically rationalised via old racist and (not so) new culturalist ideologies of essential difference between populations. Following this line of thought, the return of long-lost quasi-racialised underclass ideologies, which some authors have identified, can be explained as a consequence of the breakdown of the dividing line, which kept ‚racially‘ dominant groups of workers in an over-valued position in comparison to racialised stratas of the labouring classes. German Marxist Wolfgang Fritz-Haug has defined one of the major staples of the racism he was seeing on the horizon in the 1990es in that it tendentially doesn’t postulate the inferiority of specific ‚races‘ as a whole, but that it designates inferiors through all cultures.[lxxxiii]This led to the confusion of the colour line and the resurgence of racialised underclasses and the ascent of privileged strata within the (former) migrant populations in Europe or within the black population in the U.S. – a situation, which lead to the embittered intellectual and political struggles around identity and race we are witnessing today.

The post-colonial, globalised world we inhabit reproduces in many ways comparable structural conditions as those analysed by Schmitt-Egner in respect to the relationship between metropoles and periphery. Developing nations are still often used as sources of under-valued and disenfranchised labour, while labour processes in the same countries, because of the cheapness of variable capital, are labour-intensive and display a low organic composition of capital. Tendentially, the dualism of under-valued and adequately-valued labour power, respectively of only formally and really subsumed labour processes, is still existent within the world economy, even though the lines are more blurry today. Additionally, the antagonism between an integrated working class and a globally existing surplus population may now have eclipsed the antagonism of exploitation and over-exploitation as the central structural carrier of racism.

Also, as is ignored by Schmitt-Egner, even within the metropoles competition within industries leads to persistent inequalities in wages and therefore to differences in the position of workers on the labour market.[lxxxiv] Through discrimination and also through the identity-blind workings of capitalist competition the lower class positions in low-wage lines of work are allocated to already vulnerable often racialised groups within the working class. If it is true, that ‘circulation carries racism’,[lxxxv] we have to recognise these wage and profit differentials within advanced economies as important elements of ‘the social matrix’ that produces and reproduces ‘race and racism’ as Charles Post recently argued.[lxxxvi]

Conclusion

Even as there are plenty of weaknesses in his speculative approach, Schmitt-Egners theory can help to make sense of how race ideas are related to the capitalist mode of production. While it definitely needs a more history-conscious re-working and further theoretical elaboration, it is an elaborate attempt to explain the structurally induced plausibility and some central features of racist ideologies directed against colonised and other ‘under-valued’ populations from a value-form-theoretical perspective. This approach could play an important, ideology-critical part in a larger historical-materialist framework for the analysis of racisms. According to Schmitt-Egner the ‚inferiority‘ attributed to some groups can be deciphered as their inferior position on the labour market and the interrelated de-valuation of their labour power with contradicts the bourgeois ideal of equality within commodity circulation and therefore serves as the basis for the racist negation of human rights which are seen by the bourgeois subject as a self-evident fact of nature. The ‚brutishness‘ and ‚simpleness‘ which is especially attributed to black people can be related to their insertion into capitalism via unfree labour regimes, the connected depression of their standard of life and the tendency to still be allocated into lines of work based on unskilled labour – a social relation that is reproduced with different subjects and a different objective through intra-metropolitan competition and the migratory regimes which were established in the past decades. Schmitt-Egners conceptual derivations help to make sense of some aspects of these ongoing processes and of the way racism functions as an ideological mystification of a history of economically motivated violence, whose long-running effects are hidden under the haze of abstract freedom and equality within capitalist markets.

Nevertheless, as is the case with value-form-theoretical approaches in general, they are no surrogate for more empirically oriented scholarship. In my eyes, form-theory constitutes a meta-theory of the conditions of possibility of a phenomenon under the totality of capitalist social relations. It rarely helps to fully grasp the specifics of time and space or gives adequate theoretical guidance for political action. The most dangerous handling of value-form-approaches is to take them as a theory that was directly applicable across the board, without having any mid-range theories or empirical studies to mediate between the abstract and the concrete. In that case, form-theory, by nature of its characteristic abstraction from concrete actors and institutions, would turn into a form of structural functionalism, that supplants structure for agency as Heide Gerstenberger has argued correctly.[lxxxvii]The limits of form-derivations and the importance of concrete history, both of whom were obvious to Marx, therefore should always be kept in mind.

Nevertheless, form-theory is also no abstract ideal model-building, but has at its core the deduction of form determinations, that is macro-explanations of internally related structures and mechanism which are in place as long as capitalism is. And as long as capitalism is in place, we need to understand how these form-determinations work. Schmitt-Egners theory, as I tried to show in this article, can help us to a certain extent to make sense of how these forms are bound up with race-ideology. But in the end, a rigorous Marxist framework for the analysis of racism has to go way beyond value-form theory.

Bibliography

Balibar, Étienne 1991a, ‘Is There a Neo-Racism? ’ in Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities, by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, London/New York: Verso.

Balibar, Étienne 1991b, ‘Racism and Nationalism’ in Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities, by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, London/New York: Verso.

Balibar, Étienne 1991c, ‘Es gibt keinen Staat in Europa: Racism and Politics in Europe Today’, New Left Review, I, 186: 5-19.

Bhandar, Brenna and Alberto Toscano 2015, ‘Race, Real Estate and Real Abstraction’, Radical Philosophy, <https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/race-real-estate-and-real-abs…;.

Bonefeld, Werner / Richard Gunn / Kosmas Psychopedis (eds.) 1992, Open Marxism. Volume 1: Dialectics and History, London: Pluto Press.

Bonefeld, Werner / Richard Gunn / John Holloway / Kosmas Psychopedis (eds.) 1995, Open Marxism. Volume 3: Emancipating Marx, London: Pluto Press.

Bonefeld, Werner 2014, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason, New York/London/Oxford/New Delhi/Sydney: Bloomsbury.

Botwinick, Howard 2017, Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparities under Capitalist Competition, Leiden: Brill.

Brenke, Gabriele 1989, Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland und der Namibia-Konflikt, München: R. Oldenbourg.

Brenner, Robert 2006, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005, London/New York: Verso.

Chang, Harry 1985, ‘Towards a Marxist Theory of Racism: Two Essays by Harry Chang – edited by Paul Liem and Eric Montague’ in Review of Radical Political Economics, 17, 3: 34-45.

Chen, Chris 2013, ‘The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality: Notes toward an Abolitionist Antiracism’ in Endnotes, 3: 202-223.

Day, Iyko 2016, Alien Capital. Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism, Durham/London: Duke University Press.

Demel, Wlater 2016, ‘How the Chinese Became Yellow: A Contribution to the Early History of Race Theories’ in China in the German Enlightenment, edited by Bettina Brandt and Daniel Leonhard Purdy, Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press.

Clegg, John and Adaner Usmani 2019, ‘The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration’ in Catalyst, 3, 3: 9-53.

Elbe, Ingo 2013, ‘Between Marx, Marxism, and Marxisms – Ways of Reading Marx’s Theory’, Viewpoint Magazine, <https://viewpointmag.com/2013/10/21/between-marx-marxism-and-marxisms-w…;.

Fanon, Frantz 2008, Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press.

Fields, Barbara and Karen Fields 2012, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, London/New York: Verso.

Fredrickson, George M. 2002, Racism: A Short History, Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Gerstenberger, Heide 2007, Impersonal Power: History and Theory of the Bourgeois State, Leiden/Boston: Brill.

Gonzalez, Maya 2013, ‘The Gendered Circuit: Reading The Arcane of Reproduction’, Viewpoint Magazine, <https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/28/the-gendered-circuit-reading-the-ar…;.

Grant, Daragh 2015, ‘“Civilizing” the Colonial Subject: The Co-Evolution of State and Slavery in South Carolina, 1670–1739’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 57,3: 606-636.

Grigat, Stephan 2007, Fetisch und Freiheit, Freiburg: Ca Ira.

Haug, Wolfgang Fritz 2000, ‘Zur Dialektik des Anti-Rassismus’ in Theorien über Rassismus, edited by Nora Räthzel, Hamburg: Argument.

Heinrich, Michael 2004, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Hobbes, Thomas 1996, Leviathan, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hoff, Jan 2016, Marx Worldwide: On the Development of the International Discourse on Marx Since 1965, Leiden: Brill.

Holloway, John / Sol Picciotto (eds.) 1978, State and Capital: A Marxist Debate, London: Edward Arnold.

Hund, Wulf D. 2010, ‘Negative Societalisation: Racism and the Constitution of Race’ in Wages of Whiteness and Racist Symbolic Capital edited by Wulf D. Hund, Jeremy Krikler and David Roediger, Münster: LIT.

Malik, Kenan 1996, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society, New York: New York University Press.

Marx, Karl 1843 [1981], ‘Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Werke (MEW), Volume 1, Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl 1844 [1968], ‘Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Werke (MEW), Volume 4, Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl 1857–58 [1983], ‘Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Werke (MEW), Volume 42, Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl 1865 [1962a], ‚Lohn, Preis und Profit‘, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Werke (MEW), Volume 16, Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl   1867 [1962b], ‘Das Kapital – Erster Band’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Werke (MEW), Volume 23, Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl 1894 [1964], ‘Das Kapital – Dritter Band’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Werke (MEW), Volume 25, Berlin: Dietz.

McCarthy, Michael A. 2016, ‘Silent Compulsions: Capitalist Markets and Race’, Studies in Political Economy, 97, 2: 195-205.

Miles, Robert 1987, Capitalism and Unfree Labour: Anomaly or Necessity?, London/New York: Tavistock.

Miles, Robert 1993, Racism after Race Relations, New York/London: Routledge.

Miles, Robert / Malcolm Brown 2003, Racism. Second Edition, New York/London: Routledge.

Müller, Jost 1995, Mythen der Rechten. Nation, Ethnie, Kultur, Berlin: ID-Archiv.

Pashukanis, Evgeny 2003, The General Theory of Law & Marxism, New Brunswick/London: Transaction Publishers.

Post, Charles 2020, ‘Beyond “Racial Capitalism”: Toward a Unified Theory of Capitalism and Racial Oppression’, Brooklyn Rail, <https://brooklynrail.org/2020/10/field-notes/Beyond-Racial-Capitalism-T…;.

Postone, Moishe 1980, ‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to "Holocaust"’, New German Critique, 19, 1: 97-115.

Preston, John 2010, ‘Concrete and Abstract Racial Domination’, Power and Education, 2, 2: 115-125.

Roediger, David 2007, The Wages of Whiteness. Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London/New York: Verso.

Sayer, Andrew 1981, ‘Abstraction: a realist interpretation’, Radical Philosophy,28: 6-15.

Sayer, Derek 1979, Marx’s Method. Ideology, Science and Critique in ‘Capital’, Sussex: Harvester Press.

Schmitt-Egner, Peter 1975, Kolonialismus und Faschismus. Eine Studie zur historischen und begrifflichen Genesis faschistischer Bewußtseinformen am deutschen Beispiel, Gießen/Lollar: Verlag Andreas Aschenbach.

Schmitt-Egner, Peter 1976, ‘Wertgesetz und Rassismus. Zur begrifflichen Genesis kolonialer und faschistischer Bewußtseinsformen’, Gesellschaft. Beiträge zur Marxschen Theorie, 8/9: 350-405.

Schmitt-Egner, Peter 1980, ‚Zur historischen Kontinuität und strukturellen Affinität kolonialer und faschistischer Gewaltformen‘, Das Argument, 121: 378-388.

Schnädelbach, Herbert 1968, ‘Was ist Ideologie? Versuch einer Begriffsklärung’, available at: <http://www.rote-ruhr-uni.com/cms/IMG/pdf/Schnadelbach_Ideologie.pdf&gt;.

Shilliam, Robbie 2018, Race and the Undeserving Poor, Newcastle upon Tyne; Agenda Publishing.

Ten Brink, Tobias and Oliver Nachtwey 2008, ‘Lost in Transition: The German World-Market Debate in the 1970s’, Historical Materialism, 16: 37-70.

Terkessidis, Mark 2004, Die Banalität des Rassismus: Die Migranten zwetier Generation entwickeln eine neue Prespektive, Bielefeld: Transcript.

Terkessidis, Mark 2018, ‘Neo-Racism without Racism Theory: The Reception of "Race, Nation, Class" in Germany’ in Race Nation Class: Reading a Dialogue for Our Times, edited by Manuela Bojadzijev and Katrin Klingan, Hamburg: Argument.

Van der Linden, Marcel 1997, ‘The Historical Limit of Workers‘ Protest: Moishe Postone, Krisis and the "Commodity Logic"’, International Review of Social History, 42: 447-58.

Virdee, Satnam 2021, ‘The Longue Durée of Racialized Capitalism: A Response to Charlie Post’, Brooklyn Rail, <https://brooklynrail.org/2021/02/field-notes/The-Longue-Dure-of-Raciali…;.

White, Hylton 2020, ‘How is Capitalism Racial? Fanon, Critical Theory and the Fetish of Antiblackness’, Social Dynamics, 46, 1: 22-35.

Wolfe, Patrick 2016, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, London/New York: Verso.

[i] Preston 2010; Chen 2013; Bhandar/Toscano 2015; White 2020.

[ii] Postone 1980. The works of Day 2016 and White 2020 are particularly closely based on Postone.

[iii] For an overview of the development of the new reading of Marx in Germany see Elbe 2013 and Hoff 2016. Postone and Schmitt-Egner together with other scholars such as Dan Diner, Barbara Brick and Helmut Reinicke belonged to the same discussion circle in Frankfurt in the 1970s (Van der Linden 1997, p. 449).

[iv] Schmitt-Egner 1980. On the Namibia-conflict and its importance for German politics of memory, see Brenke 1989.

[v] Ten Brink and Nachtwey (2008, p. 37) call the German world market debate in their introduction to it an ‘almost forgotten debate’.

[vi] The neo-Marxist debates on racism that were in full swing in France and Great Britain in the late 1970s were conducted only belatedly in Germany after reunification. The nationalist waves and racist rampages in the former GDR in 1991 and 1992 sparked a theoretical import of works by scholars such as Étienne Balibar, Stuart Hall or Robert Miles to try to make sense of what was happening (see Terkessidis 2018). Schmitt-Egner got some honorable mentions in these discussions by Althusserian and Foucauldian scholars such as Jost Müller (1995, pp. 91-93) and Mark Terkessidis (2004, p. 78), but his work was only engaged with superficially.

[vii] See for instance Heinrich 2004 or the translations of works by Backhaus and Reichelt in Bonefeld/Gunn et al. 1992 and 1995.

[viii] Schmitt-Egner 1975, pp. 5-8. All quotes by Schmitt-Egner and Marx in this article are my own translations.

[ix] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 350.

[x] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 351.

[xi] Ibid. – This is of course an observation that only applies to the German debates of the 1970s, especially around the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt where Schmitt-Egner was situated. The Freudo-Marxist tradition developed by Reich and the Frankfurt School was to my knowledge nowhere else as widespread in leftist circles.

[xii] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 351.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Heinrich 2012, p. 56; Marx 1964, p. 839.

[xv] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 364.

[xvi] Marx 1983, pp. 34-42.

[xvii] Some examples of power-centered understandings of racism and a defense of an understanding of racism as ideology can be found in Miles/Brown 2003, pp. 66-72.

[xviii] The best introduction to this understanding of ideology in German language, which is also quoted by Schmitt-Egner, is still Herbert Schnädelbach 1968. In my eyes, the Marxian understanding of ideology used in these German debates is very similar to the conception developed by Derek Sayer 1979.

[xix] Marx 1962, p. 74.

[xx] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p.

[xxi] Pashukanis 2003; Gonzalez 2013.

[xxii] Marx 1962, pp. 189-91.

[xxiii] Schmitt-Egner, 1976, p. 363. I will come back to Schmitt-Egners distinction between racism and what he calls ‚chauvinism‘ further below.

[xxiv] Marx 1981, p. 364.

[xxv] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 358.

[xxvi] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 359.

[xxvii] Marx 1983, p. 170.

[xxviii] Marx 1983, p. 539.

[xxix] Schmitt-Egner 1976, pp. 362-3.; Marx 1962, p. 562.

[xxx] Schmitt-Egner 1976, pp. 370-1.

[xxxi] Fields/Fields 2012, p. 123.

[xxxii] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 366. On this see also Malik 1996, pp. 61-68.

[xxxiii] Fields/Fields 2012, p. 144.

[xxxiv] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 369.

[xxxv] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 367. As I will discuss further below, Schmitt-Egner uses a very narrow definition of the term racism, under which he only understands the ‚scientific‘ racial doctrines that were formulated from the 19th century onwards.

[xxxvi] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 372.

[xxxvii] Schmitt-Egner is not referring here to the notion of ‚unequal exchange‘ put forward by dependency theory, but he is referring to the critique of this notion developed within the German world market debate. There it was argued, that there was no unequal exchange of values but only of magnitudes of labour between metropoles and peripheral countries, because there was no equalisation of profit rates on a world scale, as was asserted by dependency theorists. See Nachtwey/ten Brink 2008, p. 52-4.

[xxxviii] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 373.

[xxxix] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 375. – Later in the text Schmitt-Egner formulates the same point differently, when he argues that it was ‘the exchange value who gives itself a feudal form, while its essence remains determined by capital (formal subsumption).’ (Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 386)

[xl] Marx 1962, p. 187.

[xli] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 377. It is one of the major weaknesses of his text, that it is almost never clear which geographical spaces and time periods are actually addressed when Schmitt-Egner talks about ‚the colonies‘. In his dissertation he mostly analyses the German colonial ventures in Africa, while at some points in both his dissertation and the article he is obviously talking about South Africa. The huge differences of these colonial trajectories are glossed over. This imprecision shows up with even more severe consequences, when he uses ‚colonised‘ and ‚black‘ as well as ‚coloniser‘ and ‚white‘ as synonymous terms, not accounting for class differences within those populations or the differing colour-coded ascriptions imposed on colonised peoples.

[xlii] Ibid.

[xliii] Ibid.

[xliv] He sees this idea anticipated in Hobbes‘ argument according to which, ‘[t]he value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependent on the need and judgement of another.’ (Hobbes 1996, p. 59). Marx already referred to this passage inValue, Price and Profit, see Marx 1962a, p. 130.

[xlv] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 379.

[xlvi] Wolfe 2016, p. 8.

[xlvii] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 390.

[xlviii] Marx 1972, p. 107. Schmitt-Egners argument is therefore comparable to that of Barbara and Karen Fields who have described as racecraft as the repression of racist violence and the transplantation of its effects onto its victims, whose inner traits then seem to have caused their pernicious situation in the first place, see Fields/Fields 2012.

[xlix] White 2020, p. 31.

[l] Marx 1968, pp. 510-22.

[li] White 2020, p. 32; Heinrich 2012, p. 50. Even in places, where Marx falls back on a – in my eyes mistaken – physiological definition of abstract labour as ‘the productive expenditure of human brain, muscle, nerve, hand etc.’ (Marx 1962, p. 58) this still wouldn’t fit Whites theory, because through racism black people may be seen as storages of muscle, nerve and hand, but not of brain, which explains why according to racists they needed a master to direct the expenditure of their unbridled labour power.

[lii] Bonefeld 2014, pp. 199-200. A similar critique could be made of Iyko Days work on anti-Asian racism. She understands the racialization of Asians in the sense that their bodies are seen as the “temporal embodiment of abstract labor”, i.e. as machine-like, see Day 2016, p. 56. This also seems to be an identification of abstract labour with a specific form of concrete labour.

[liii] White 2020, p. 30.

[liv] Fanon 2008, p. 127. The longing for a lost concreteness by workers who were absorbed into industrial capitalism, which is repressed and therefore projected onto black people, who are seen as still closer to nature, to indulgence and unrestrained sexuality, was for the US-case also recognised by Roediger 2007, pp. 95-7.

[lv] Grigat 2007, p. 314.

[lvi] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 366.

[lvii] Virdee 2021.

[lviii] Even if Edmund Morgans (2003) seminal study on the colonial history of Virginia, which firmly established the centrality of Bacon’s Rebellion, was only released shortly before Schmitt-Egners article was published, he still could have learned about the event and its significance for instance through Timothy Breens work from 1972, who already highlighted the importance of the rebellion for the emergence of colour-coded oppression in Virginia.

[lix] Banton cited in Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 364.

[lx] Miles 1993, pp. 88-97; also more recently Virdee 2021. On the definition and theorisation of so called ‚absolutist‘ states as ‘states of the type of Ancien Regime’, see Gerstenberger 2007, pp. 645-62.

[lxi] Hund 2010, p. 65.

[lxii] Martinez 2008.

[lxiii] Demel 2016. The reification of blackness as the substance of slavery has completely escaped Schmitt-Egners attention, which lead him to view the existence of black and white ‚races‘ as self-evident. It would therefore be worthwhile to rectify his approach by incorporating Harry Changs ingenious short notes on the reification and fetishization of blackness through slavery, see Chang 1985.

[lxiv] Marx 1980, p. 91.

[lxv] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 387.

[lxvi] Schmitt-Egner 1976, pp. 388-89.

[lxvii] A somehow comparable argument was made more recently by Grant 2015, who sees a dualism between civilisation and savagery as an intermediary step between religious and racial status hierarchies as politico-ideological safeguards of the slave system in eighteenth century South Carolina.

[lxviii] Wolfe 2016.

[lxix] For translations of some of the most important works of this debate see Holloway/Picciotto 1978.

[lxx] Pashukanis 2003.

[lxxi] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 383.

[lxxii] Fredrickson 2002, pp. 100.

[lxxiii] Schmitt-Egner 1976, pp. 379-83.

[lxxiv] Schmitt-Egner, pp. 396-97.

[lxxv] Balibar 1991b, p. 54.

[lxxvi] Balibar 1991c, p. 15.

[lxxvii] Miles 1987, pp.143-67.

[lxxviii] Miles 1993, p. 187.

[lxxix] Miles 1993, pp. 162-73.

[lxxx] Brenner 2006.

[lxxxi] Clegg/Usmani 2019, p. 51.

[lxxxii] McCarthy 2016.

[lxxxiii] Haug 2000, p. 91; Balibar 1991a. Although I would disagree with the idea that culturalism and class-racism are in any way a new phenomenon. Rather neoliberal capitalism in this case marks a return to older dividing lines between the ‚deserving and undeserving poor‘. On this see Shilliam 2018.

[lxxxiv] Botwinick 2017.

[lxxxv] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 395.

[lxxxvi] Post 2020.

[lxxxvii] Gerstenberger 2007, p. 7-8.

In the late nineteenth century freedpeople rescued from slaving boats on the Indian Ocean by British anti-slavery cruisers were sent to Bombay, where many of the young men found employment as stokers in the stokehold of P&O steamships. British administrators discussed the future of freed “Africans” strictly as profitable sources of labour. Freedpeople however went on to form their own Muslim communities or jamãt in Bombay known as Sidis or Habshis. While colonial “liberation” was bound up with ideas of race, Sidis rejected ideas of singular racial biological origin with their itinerant notion of a community descending from the Prophet. This article is a historical critique of the terms of the colonial racecraft that gives us the category of “African” and the natural division of humans into races, and an effort to read the colonial archive against the grain for the explication of a subaltern Sidi or Habshi notion of jamãt.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

The 1840s were marked as a significant decade in the history of the western Indian Ocean by two concurrent developments: the British Empire’s campaign against the slave trade in those waters and the introduction of transoceanic steam travel. In 1841 a British Agency was established in Zanzibar under the control of Bombay[i] and in 1843 the first slave trade prohibition treaty was signed between the Sultan of Zanzibar and Britain.[ii] The primary interest of the British Foreign Office in Zanzibar, apart from keeping the French out of East Africa, was to maintain it as a base for its anti-slavery crusade in the Indian Ocean.[iii] At the same time, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company was constituted by a Royal Charter of incorporation (1840) and in 1842 they sailed the first steamer, SS Hindostan, from Southampton to Calcutta, inaugurating the first Indian mail service across the Indian Ocean. By 1853 the P&O had acquired the mail contract for India through the overland route via Suez and at the height of the British Empire’s grip over the ocean it ferried mail, passengers and cargo all across the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean and beyond. When theP&O was acquired in 2006 by Dubai Ports World for nearly £4 billion the New York Times described it as “a sinew of empire, a shipping line that ferried soldiers and diplomats, even royalty, on the Victorian mail runs that tied Britain to its outposts far to the east and beyond.”[iv]

These two developments- the abolition of slave trade and the rise of steam capital- were not coincidental but complementary pillars of the career of Victorian era imperialism in the Indian Ocean. The British East India Company had already begun converting its fleet to steamships in the 1830s, provoking the colonial Government of Bombay to conquer Aden on the southern Arabian coast as a coaling station in 1839. They were joined in the 1840s by the British Admiralty[v] and together these three steam-powered wings of empire- imperial navy, company fleet and merchant navy- laboured to claim the Indian Ocean as a “British lake”[vi] the way they feared the Mediterranean was becoming a “French lake” after the occupation of Algeria in 1830 and the Black Sea a “Russian lake”.[vii] These early steamships required huge amounts of coal to burn fires for adequate steam and the consequent expansion of overseas trade in coal spurred industrialization in Britain.[viii] Coal from Wales and northern England but also Bengal, Borneo and Natal[ix] flowed into Aden, Basra, Bombay and other imperial ports along the ocean rim, and goods, capital and labourers poured in and out of them.[x] Even before the opening of the Suez Canal, which gave yet another boost to British shipping and trade, the net tonnage of British goods transported by steamships had increased from 168,474 to 948,367 between 1850 and 1869.[xi] Alongside the explosion in trade and shipping the power of steam gave British gunboats in the IO a new force, a power not infrequently used to force new treaties on the Sultans of Zanzibar, Oman and chiefs of the Arabian coast, including the treaties for the abolition of slave trade.[xii] British ships-of-war were also deployed to patrol the waters off the coast of Zanzibar and Muscat on the lookout for dhows carrying people from Africa as slaves for sale in violation of the treaties.

The abolition of slave trade and the “liberation” of enslaved humans from dhows in the Indian Ocean became a boon for companies like the P&O. Men, women and children from Africa, emancipated by British steamers from the dhows of slavers were frequently sent to Bombay, between 1843 and 1890, where many of the men found employment as stokers and firemen in the stokeholds of steamships, both naval and commercial.[xiii] While Pathans and Punjabis from the Northwest Provinces of British India, and Yemeni Arabs and Somalis from Aden were also employed in the stokehold, companies like the P&O appear to have preferred Sidis and occasionally Yemenis. Sidis (likely derived from the title “sayyid”, signifying eminent descent from the Prophet Muhammad), variously known as Habshis, Seedees, Sheedis or Siddis, are identified in scholarship as South Asians of African descent whosejamāts (caste-like communities) are spread across Gujarat, Sindh, Baluchistan, Karnataka, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.[xiv] An 1890 collection of drawings by W.W Lloyd published for the company under the name P&OPencillings included a drawing of Sidis labouring in the stokehold.[xv] In 1986 a book commemorating the hundred and fifty year history of the P&O Company included Llyod’s sketch with the caption, “For steamers, you had to have coal. That was difficult and dirty enough. Then you had to have stokers, frequently ‘seedies’ from East Africa, and the ‘stokehole’ where they had to work was indescribable.”[xvi] Even as late as 1921 when the value of coal had been diminished by the discovery of oil, the Shipping Master of Bombay reported that “approximately three to four hundred a year of Arabs and East Africans [found] employment annually in P. and O. ships”.[xvii]

The elision between “Sidi” and “East African” is common in colonial archives, because to colonialists Sidis were of interest for their presumed racial identity, a typology which linked Africa as a place to “African” as a race of human beings. Nineteenth century colonial and missionary discourses on emancipated Africans, indeed on emancipation and slavery itself, were steeped in ideas about racial “types” that linked human behaviour and abilities to biology and place of birth.[xviii] They insisted on the defining African-ness of the Sidis they encountered in Bombay, despite the fact that many Sidis had spent greater portions of their lives on Arabian and South Asian shores than on the continent of Africa, or were even born in the subcontinent. S.M. Edwardes, the Commissioner of Police in Bombay in 1912 knew better when he wrote in his book By-Ways of Bombay about the “Sidis or Musulmans of African descent, who supply the steamship companies with stokers, firemen and engine-room assistants, and the dockyards and workshops with fitters and mechanics.”[xix] In reality the Sidis whose labour powered the steamers were probably as mixed as the jamāts on shore themselves- a combination of people from Central and East Africa (including Zanzibar and Madagascar) who had been recently “liberated”, freedpeople from Africa who had lived for years in Aden and other ports of the Gulf, and descendants of older Sidis born in Bombay Presidency. Unlike the homogenizing racial category “African”, “Sidi” or “Habshi” (derived from the Arabic “al-Habash” or Abyssinia) in nineteenth and twentieth century Bombay marked a diverse and itinerant Muslim community with semi-porous borders. This article is a historical critique of the terms of colonial racial discourse that gives us the category “African”,[xx] and an effort to read the colonial archive against the grain for the explication of a subaltern Sidi or Habshi notion of jamāt, illuminated further in conversation with Sidi Abdul Rauf, themaqwā or head of Mumbai’s present-day community of Sidis.[xxi]

Sidis and freedmen aboard steamships were almost always employed in the stokehold, the boiler and the engine room[xxii]- the lowest, hottest and most manually exacting parts of the vessel. This was a direct consequence of the racialization of labour by colonial administrators, steamship companies and missionaries in the Indian Ocean alike. Labour aboard the nineteenth century steamship was severely hierarchized (even where the element of race was absent) and the stoker, fireman and trimmer came to occupy the lowest of these positions. The position was not automatically inferior- though it required extremely difficult and dirty work under very painful circumstances, British stokers in the early days of the Royal Navy’s conversion to steam were not only paid more than their seamen counterparts, they were also recognized as being crucial to the powering of ships and their smooth running, in some cases serving as effective engineers before the post of artifice engineer was formally introduced.[xxiii] In the Indian Ocean however commercial companies like the P&O (and their rival French Messageries Maritime Steam Navigation Company, as well as Dutch, Italian, Austro-Hungarian and German steamers[xxiv]) discovered the benefit of employing non-European men as seamen and stokers at far cheaper rates than Europeans, introducing a racial hierarchy of labour. In the mid-nineteenth century predominantly South Asian seamen known as lascars (which also sometimes included Adenese, Yemeni, Chinese, Malay and East African sailors) received between one-fifth and one-third the pay of European “able bodied seamen”[xxv] and made up roughly a quarter of the workforce on British merchant ships well into the 1960s.[xxvi]

While lascars manned the decks the position of stokers, firemen and coal trimmers were filled predominantly by Sidis, freedmen and Yemeni Arabs, and increasingly by Pathans and Punjabis as the nineteenth century wore on. Even though legally all these non-European seamen were often included under the category “lascar” when shipping from British colonial ports, in practice stokehold Sidis were ranked below decklascars. The racist colonial imaginary could ascribe some kind of skill to the labour of “Asiatic” decklascars, but Sidis were seen as valuable for some imagined raw, bodily strength and resistance to high temperatures. As commercial shipping companies strove to maximize the traveling speed offered by the “technology” of steam engines, the highest possible extraction of labour from stokers and firemen to maintain consistent fires became of utmost importance. The same racializing colonial discourse that permitted Asian, African and Middle Eastern seamen to be hired at substantially lower rates of pay than European seamen and have discriminatory legal restrictions imposed on their freedom of movement and employment on foreign shores, also classified “Africans” and “Yemenis” as more adept at grueling manual labour and inexplicably more acclimatized to the extreme heat of the stokehold. These ideas of body types predestined for certain kinds of labour became so ingrained as the century progressed that in 1872 an Admiral in the Royal Navy mourned the “well known inferior physique” of British stokers, saying that if the numbers of these stokers could not be increased or replaced by “the services of the same class and style of men that are to be found in the stokeholes of the great steam companies”, the navy would have to run ships-of-war at speeds far less than what they were capable of keeping.[xxvii] Thus what appeared as a purely technological “capability” for greater speed could only be realized by more intensive exploitation of labour.

As Andreas Malm has demonstrated so well for the history of the transition to steam power in the cotton mills of nineteenth century England, the real advantages of steam power lay in its mobility and ability to facilitate the extraction of ever greater rates of surplus value from human labour in less and less time (i.e., relative surplus value).[xxviii] In the case of steam companies plying the Indian Ocean greater traveling speeds meant greater profits, which they maximized not only by hiring lascar, Sidi, Somali and Adenese seamen at cheaper rates of pay, but also by subjecting some sections of that racialised labour force to particularly grueling intensive work to maintain the constant production of steam from coal. In other words, if capital’s drive for endless valorization was the motor for the explosion of steam technology in the nineteenth century, this technology in turn had to be attended by a hierarchical set of labours aboard the steamship at sea- a hierarchy that the colonial social order organized by the artifice of race.

By the late nineteenth century the job of the stoker had been rendered so menial in colonial imagination that even British naval stokers, no less educated or more alcoholic than British seamen (the much beloved “bluejacket”), came to be looked down upon as the sooty “black gang”, a drunken, insubordinate class of workers constituting “the lowest of the low”.[xxix] This article argues that the steamship which was a particularly globalized, mobile form of factory, produced and perfected in seas off colonized shores, created a racial hierarchy of labours, differentiating not only European seaman from non-European lascar as extant scholarship[xxx] has pointed out, but also between lascar and Sidi. This particular differentiation was made possible when colonial administrators engaged in the task of apprehending and freeing enslaved humans in the mid nineteenth century Indian Ocean were confronted with the “disposal of emancipated Africans” as a problem. To the colonial mind freedmen’sbodies, though no longer acceptable to be exploited under the whip of the slave master, were nevertheless still the most valuable thing about “Africans”. “Liberation” therefore transferred many enslaved humans from the dhows of slavers to the stokeholds of steamers, providing in effect a stable source of manual labour for burgeoning steamship companies.[xxxi]

Indrani Chatterjee describes this as a process of primitive accumulation.[xxxii] Marx’s idea of primitive accumulation specifically refers to the violent alienation of people from land by the creation of enclosures thereby producing a landless proletariat “doubly free” to become a source of capitalist accumulation. I interpret Chatterjee’s use of this term to mean that the “liberation” of bondsmen from Africa created a maritime proletariat which became a source for the production of surplus value for colonial capitalists, a description which is certainly accurate. However, the use of primitive accumulation as an analytical concept to describe this process does not adequately address the question of race. This article is concerned with explaining how strategies of “liberation” were integral not only to capital accumulation but also to the remaking of race in the maritime British Empire as nature’s way of ordering the social division of labour. Chatterjee’s article demonstrates very well how categories of race derived from Atlantic slavery have been erroneously superimposed on the study of “Afro-Asian” populations in pre-colonial South Asia. However, the study of colonial “liberation” discourse/practice and Sidi jamāt formation in nineteenth century Bombay has more to say not only about the history of South Asians of African descent but about the socio-historical underpinnings of the idea of race itself in imperial Britain.

While colonial discourse and policy corralled all freedmen in the Indian Ocean into their distinct racial identity as “Africans”, on the ships and shores of Bombay city the categories of living and association were not so neat. Newly “liberated” “Zanzibaris”, “Nubis” (Sudanese), “Habshis” (Ethiopians) and people from other parts of Africa were welcomed into Muslim communities of Sidis to form a particularly working class Muslimjamāt (caste-like community).[xxxiii] The jamāt’s origin narratives connected them to the continent of Africa through saints (Sidi Mubarak Nobi of Nubia or Sudan, Bava Habash of Ethiopia and Mai Misra of Egypt), but also to Arabia through Hazrat Bilal, a manumitted habshi who became a companion of the Prophet and the firstmuezzin (one who gives the call to prayer) of Islam.[xxxiv] Often, the introduction of newly arrived freedmen in the streets of Bombay to Islam was by way of the poor Arabs of the city, an ever-looming thorn-in-the-side for missionaries eager to bring these Africans under the fold of Christianity. As Yemenis and Sidis sometimes worked side by side in the stokeholds, so they lived and prayed side by side in the chawls (tenements) of the city.[xxxv] In 1874 Sidis and Arabs of Bombay, many of them shipworkers, certainly rioted together as they clashed against their Parsi (Zoroastrian) neighbours. Opposed to the racial colonial and missionary discourse of identity based on singular biological and geographical origins by birth, the fragmentary documentation on the Sidis of Bombay city in the nineteenth century offers an itinerant’s map of belonging: one that links Zanzibar and Kilwa to Ethiopia and Sudan, and also to Mecca, Medina, Aden, Muscat, Karachi and Bombay. These many stops of enslaved Africans’ journeys before “liberation” and arrival at Bombay were grafted into ritual narratives of kinship and belonging that united Africa, Arabistan and Hindustan and are performed through Sidi rituals and storytelling even today.  

Liberation as racecraft

The question of what was to be done with enslaved humans rescued from slaving boats in the Indian Ocean was not decided by asking those who had been “liberated”. The first freedpeople started arriving at Bombay city in the 1830s, with numbers picking up after the signing of the treaty with the Sultan of Zanzibar in 1843. In 1847 Reverend Eisenberg of the Bombay Mission of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) sought to bring as many of these Africans under the care of the society as possible. However, the government of Bombay refused his offer of asylum and Christian instruction to the former slaves, “having preferred to place some of the boys into the Mechanic’s Institution, the rest of the boys in the Indian Navy and to distribute the females indiscriminately among Christians, Mohammedan and other families in the island.”[xxxvi] While this policy was largely followed through the next few decades, in 1860 the Government sanctioned the formation of an African Asylum under the auspices of the CMS in Sharanpur, a hundred miles north of Bombay city. Between 1860 and 1872 the Asylum received about two hundred youth, while much larger numbers of people from Africa continued to be set free in Bombay city itself[xxxvii], either distributed amongst families in the city, employed in the navy, sent to institutions for vocational training like the Indo-British Institution or the Robert Money School, or left to their own devices.[xxxviii] 

It was not until the 1890s that manumitted individuals were given the choice to return to Zanzibar. By then those being freed were rarely youth from Africa who were rescued off boats taking them for sale. Instead they were people from Africa who had long been enslaved and lived along the Arabian coast, often since childhood, and who sought out the support of the local British consulate when they wanted to be manumitted. Many such people chose not to return to Africa after manumission but to continue working where they lived or travel to Bombay. In 1900 the Political Agent and Consul at Muscat informed the Political Resident in the Persian Gulf that manumitted slaves mostly preferred to remain in Muscat or go to Bombay where there was a greater possibility of employment, rather than returning to Zanzibar:

Once armed with a manumission Certificate these freed men have no wish as a rule to return to Zanzibar or their own forgotten country. There is a large negro population in Muskat among whom they apparently prefer to remain. Full grown men can command better wages in Muskat, as coolies or boatmen than they could in Zanzibar, and if they desire to leave Muskat at all it is generally for Bombay, which the description of their friends imbues them with a curiosity to visit, and about 20 find their way thither annually. Very few ask to be sent to Zanzibar and those that do go not unfrequently return.[xxxix]

Similarly for the Persian Gulf the Political Resident observed that based on his experience and his study of the slave trade files for the past five years, very few freedmen wished to go back to Zanzibar, preferring to stay on in Bandar Lengeh or Bushehr (in Iran) where they had been living, or go away to Muscat, Basra or Jeddah. “At the most 5% will like to go to Zanzibar unless we send the slaves there without consulting their wishes.”[xl]

The offer to return freedmen to Zanzibar instead of sending them on to Bombay came after the governments of both Bombay and Muscat objected to their increasing presence in their cities. In 1889 Bombay’s Commissioner of Police complained that “the number of Africans in the city [was] already considerable” and any expansion of this “excitable and turbulent element in the population” might become a source of danger. Besides, “the cost of maintenance of freed slaves who [were] too young to earn a living” was a drain on the government’s resources, and older youth with “insubordinate spirit[s]” posed a further problem when they had to be dismissed from the care of missionary societies.[xli] Accordingly, the Government of Bombay inquired if the Government of India might be able to suggest any way of “disposing of these slaves in other parts of India” or if “in regard toslaves landed at Aden, Her Majesty’s Government, which directs the East African policy, cannot be moved to arrange for theirdisposal, especially in the event of largecaptures being made, otherwise than by sending them on to Bombay or leaving them in Aden.”[xlii]

The racialized association of freedmen with “excitability,” “turbulence” and “insubordination” was echoed by both missionaries and mainstream English media in Bombay. The annual report of the CMS African Asylum in 1861 commented on the ease with which “Africans and Native Christians” in their care were getting along, adding that each “race” was benefitting the other:

No disagreements between the races; on the contrary much mutual benefit has resulted from their close connexion. The greater energy of the Africans has to a certain extent roused the feebler Indians, who on their part are exercising a somewhat softening & polishing influence on the moreuncouth sons of Adam.[xliii]

After the riots in 1874 when crowds of poor Sidis and Arabs from the chawls of Umerkhadi in Bombay city clashed with their Parsi house and shop-owning neighbours, Parsi English language media in particular took a withering stance against the Sidis of the city. An anonymous correspondent to theTimes of India wrote about the Sidis:

“If they are to be emancipated from the shackles of perpetual slavery let them be sent to some other place not so thickly inhabited as Bombay is, for we do not want such illiterate rif-rafs to break occasionally our public peace through the instigation of some of their co religionists.”[xliv]

This image of freedmen and Sidis as strong and “excitable”, “uncouth” “rif-rafs”, in essence an unintelligent but dangerous tinderbox waiting to be ignited at the will of more scheming others, became more popular among administrators and city elites after 1874, eventually provoking the Police Commissioner’s remarks quoted earlier. We encounter here the image of the fearful black man of the racist imagination[xlv], a human being reduced to the simple “cycle of the biological” as Frantz Fanon described in a different colonial context: “To have a phobia about black men is to be afraid of the biological, for the black man is nothing but biological. Black men are animals. They live naked. And God only knows what else.”[xlvi]  

The reverse side of this characterization of “Africans” as unmitigated bodily forces prone to being exploited by scheming anti-socials was the belief that if controlled by the right forces, these strong bodies could be put to work towards “profitable” ends.[xlvii] The Bombay Government’s reluctance to keep harbouring freedmen opened a conversation among the colonial administrators of the Indian Ocean rim about the most “profitable” ways in which to “dispose” of emancipated slaves. This discourse is remarkable because it begins to clarify the skeleton of what I call racecraft following the formulation of Barbara and Karen Fields: first, for colonial administrators the “liberation” of humans from slavery was seen as a problem of disposal; second, the disposal of humans was evaluated in terms of labour and its profitable use; and finally, the question of how and where to dispose of these displaced people as labour was solved by race, reducing hundreds of people to their bodies and their presumed capacity for grueling labour.

After making its plea to the Government of India for help in 1889, the Government of Bombay wrote to the Colonial Secretary in Fiji, asking if the government there would be willing to receive the rescued Africans “with the view of utilizing their services in the Fiji Islands”[xlviii]. In response the British government at Fiji asked a list of questions to decide if these Africans were fit “for the work required and the cost of their introduction as free (agricultural) labourers” in Fiji. The questions and answers of this interaction classified the humans in question through a taxonomy of “higher” and “lower” body types or “classes” that were valued according to their ability to do different kinds of work and be “amenable to discipline”: 

1. Are the Africans referred to mentally and physically of a low class or otherwise? Mostly of good type mentally and physically.
2. Are they inclined to good order and amenable to discipline? Yes. How do they compare with the average Seedee or Kruman?Many are similar. Some are of higher type as the Abyssinian.
3. To what extent numerically is it likely they could annually be availed of? Impossible to say now as all the conditions are altered and are still in course of rapid alteration.
4. Are they males or females or of both sexes? If the last in what proportion? Of both sexes—the proportion has been about 33 females to 100 males for 5 years from 1883 to 1887.
5. Are they fit for service as agricultural labourers? The males doubtless would be. Most of those imported into Oman are employed on date plantations. Both males and females usually make excellent domestic servants.[xlix]

The fate of a person born on the African continent or to African parents was simply limited to the realm of physical labour or service (domestic service or spiritual service in the case of Christian missionaries) by colonial administrators, missionaries and “liberators”. Any education, in the few instances that it was provided (mostly by missionaries), was either vocational (as blacksmiths and carpenters for men, and needlework for women) or spiritual, with a view to using these “Bombay Africans” as assistants to preachers and explorers in East Africa. If the “African” was useful in the colonial view only for their capacity to do labour, often grueling labour of the kind performed in the stokehold or on plantations, or to serve the will of others, it was important for them to be “inclined to good order and amenable to discipline”, a function which missionary institutions such as the African Asylum served. And yet at the same time, “excitability” or “docility” were treated as inherent nature-given, race-bound traits. Africans were “strong” but “excitable” while Indians were “feeble” but “docile”, a pattern replicated in the characterization of obedient lascars and undisciplined Sidis on board ships as we shall later see. In practice, a refusal by those who had been “liberated” to cooperate with the plans of “liberators” branded them as being “insubordinate”, a familiar complaint about Sidis in the reports of missionaries and the police.

Of course, the “excitable” Sidi or African existed no more than did the supposedly “docile coolie”[l] or lascar. For example, as Ravi Ahuja has shown in great detail, any lack of trouble for shipowners (such as desertion or protests) on the part of South Asian seamen orlascars was to be attributed to the severe set of discriminatory labour and immigration laws that were in place for “coloured seamen” well into the twentieth century, as well as informal networks of power used by shipping companies to ensure obedience.[li] For example, under special “lascar agreements” of shipping laws, lascars were denied the customary right to shore leave on African and North American ports, or the right to gain employment with a different shipping company than the one with which they left South Asia. Additionally, desertion bylascars was punished by incarceration, a rule abolished for European seamen in the twentieth century but not until well after Indian independence forlascars. In effect therefore, alascar or Sidi could not leave a ship at a foreign port in order to escape harsh working conditions or seek better employment under European rates.“A South Asian seaman’s only chance to terminatea contract outside South Asia was to break it, thereby committing thecriminal offence of ‘‘desertion’’ and forfeiting all payments due from hisemployer.”[lii] Therefore, in reality not only were Sidi shipworkers circumscribed by the same set of legislations and extra-legal restrictions as their other lascar shipmates, the supposed “insubordination” of one race of workers and the “docility” of another were complementary racial fictions.

In other words, there was a disjunct. On the one hand was the capitalist claim to discover in nature the perfect brute labourer in the figure of the “African”- the adequate amount of biological strength untethered by will embodied in a human, to supply the necessary labour-time required to produce the maximum possible surplus value given the current level of technological prowess (to run the ship at maximum possible speed, for example). On the other hand was the effort and intricate system of regulations and domination that went into disciplining and creating workers in the image of these racial types (“African” and “Asiatic”) that did not in reality exist. Borrowing from the conceptual labours of the Fields siblings[liii], if racism describes the latter set of actions which treated a certain group of people according to a separate set of standards from other humans based on assumptions about their different “physical and mental characteristics” (i.e., colonial administrators sending freedmen to work in the stokeholds of steamships, and the legal racism of shipping laws), the former social structure that enabled colonialists and missionaries to see in nature that which did not really exist (i.e. racial types that fit different classes of workers) and had to be produced through a regime of discipline can be called racecraft.

After the refusal of Bombay’s government to keep harbouring rescued slaves the conversation about the “profitable” use of freedmen’s labour continued, echoing similar ideological assumptions. In 1897 the India Office in London took up the Government of India’s suggestion that “the slaves freed in Turkish Arabia might with advantage be sent to the British possessions in East Africa.”[liv] The Foreign Office inquired of the British Agent and Consul in Zanzibar if these men may be employed in the building of the Uganda Railway.[lv] The British government in Zanzibar responded with a range of options- agricultural holdings on government estates at Zanzibar and Pemba (cultivated half the week gratis for government), or paid labor as “hamals or carriers” for European mercantile firms in Zanzibar, or as town laborers for the Railway, Public Works and Shipping Departments at Mombasa. He added that “The domestic slave born and bred in an Arab household in Arabia proper…and trained to follow their masters…as armed retainers, would probably not be very suitable for any kind of agricultural or porterage work, and any importation of freed slaves of this class would indeed constitute a very undesirable addition to our population both here and on the mainland. But ordinary agricultural freed slaves, employed in the date plantations, or accustomed to manual labour, whether born or not in Arabia, would probably be very useful, and both here and at Mombasa we would gladly arrange for their reception.”[lvi]

The classification of physically “strong” Africans into two “types” or “classes”- the manual labourer and the military man- characterized this racecraft. While some like the British Agent at Zanzibar feared the presence of men trained in the use of arms as social “undesirables”, others thought they could be a valuable addition to the cause of empire. Reverend Price of the African Asylum wrote in 1872 that it was better to give freedmen in Bombay a military training instead of leaving them free in the city, “strangers in a strange land” waiting to “fall into the hands of Arabs of Bombay whose first care is to turn them into Mussulmans, and then to use them for their own purposes.”[lvii] For one accusing Arab Muslims of having ulterior motives for fraternizing with freedmen, the missionary goes on himself to transparently state his case for military training: “Many of them would make capital soldiers, and the time may come when an African Battalion, inspired with gratitude and loyalty towards Government, might be felt to be an element of safety in the country.”

The British anti-slavery crusade in the nineteenth century Indian Ocean was therefore far from anti-racist. To the contrary, it was undertaken by both colonialists and missionaries as part of a civilizing project (different motivations but similarly conceived) that took race to be a given reality. This racecraft not only structured the question of freedom from slavery as an imperial project of liberation and disposal of labour (i.e., something that is done to the enslaved), it also set the limitations on the available futures for freedmen, destining them to nothing more than a life of difficult manual labour, (or in the case of a limited few a life in the service of the Christian Missionary Society’s East Africa Mission). At the same time the ideology of liberation, as an element of racecraft, obscured the fast-expanding relations of capital in the Indian Ocean that, coupled with the abolition of slavery, produced the need for large numbers of workers, human beings who would labour in the “indescribable” conditions of stokeholds and other “hidden abode[s] of production”[lviii] to enable the technological marvels of the century to perform to their fullest capacity. This is therefore in part a story of how “liberation” became a boon for companies like the P&O and how the recruiting practices of such companies and maritime law reinforced in turn the fiction of race.

The stokehold and the reification of race

Both the colonial government of Bombay and company administration of the P&O were responsible for tethering the future of male Sidis and freedmen to the steamship. Early records indicate that the Bombay police, when saddled with the problem of arranging for the futures of newly arrived freed youth in the city, sent them either to serve as domestic help in local households or to work in the Indian Navy.In October 1853 the Senior Magistrate of Police in Bombay sent five young men who had been rescued from a Portuguese brig to serve in the Indian Navy. He claimed that he had “consulted their own wishes on this subject, and they have all expressed their willingness to enter the Indian Naval Service. They are remarkably fine youths; and I am of opinion that they would be much better provided for in that service than in the families of Portuguese and others, as domestic servants.”[lix] He had earlier noted that all communications with the five youth (“boys”) had been conducted by “a Negro Seaman of the Indian Navy named Parry Williams, who interpreted in the preliminary investigations at this office, and also in the Supreme Court yesterday. He was the only medium we could obtain of communicating with the boys in their own language.”[lx] Sidis or freedmen on Indian Navy ships thus appear to have been a common feature by the mid nineteenth century.[lxi] Accordingly, the Commander in Chief of the Indian Navy wrote back that “The African Boys attested to in the accompanying letter can be received into the Indian Navy, and I have to recommend that they be sent to this office in order that their physical capabilities for sea service may be inquired into.”[lxii] The police magistrate’s promise of the “remarkable fineness” of the youths in question (presumably he was referring to their physical build, considering he could not have learnt much about their mental universe given the language barriers) had of course to be confirmed by a physical examination by the navy itself.

As the Sidi and the freedman became a common feature on Indian Navy ships, so did he on passenger and mail ships, especially of the P&O. Even British passengers who were disgruntled about the increasing employment oflascars and Sidis on board British shipping lines agreed that “A certain number of lascar seamen are of course required in a service like the P.&O., as in the Red Sea no European could face the engine room.”[lxiii] The idea that “Africans” and Sidis were somehow more naturally able to withstand the terrible high heat of the stokehold captured the colonial imagination. Frank Thomas Bullen, an officer on several British merchant ships who became a novelist, dedicated an entire chapter in his book about the merchant marine to the firemen and trimmers of steamships. After describing at length and with great sympathy and admiration the difficulty, skill and danger of these labours that were conventionally seen with much prejudice amongst sailors, he observed that “the engine-room of a large steamship is a terrible place”[lxiv] and that “no man with longings for decent life would or could remain in such employment”[lxv]. From this utterly humane observation he went on to remarkably conclude that since the job of firemen and trimmers in “tropical seas was so utterly unfit for white men to do… it would be a good thing if stokeholds were entirely manned by negroes, who from their constitutional experience of heat must be far better fitted to endure the conditions of the stokehold. Many southern-going ships carry them now. I should not be sorry to see them the rule, and my countrymen doing something better.”[lxvi] The need for speed dictated the need for a certain kind of extreme labour which in turn produced the desire in the metropole to seek in nature bodies “constitutionally” suited for that kind of labour.

Both deck and engine room labour for steamships in the Indian Ocean came to be recruited on an explicitly ethnic or regional basis. Companies established relationships via shipping agents and port officials with “licensed shipping brokers” and various other middlemen (recruitment agents called ghat serangs, trade unions, village clubs, boarding house keepers and moneylenders, village elders, andserangs or boatswains)[lxvii] to recruit particular groups for particular jobs on board. The French Messageries Maritime Steam Navigation Company employed Yemeni Arabs as stokers;[lxviii] the P&O preferred Sidis and sometimes Arabs as stokers, trimmers and firemen for most of the nineteenth century, until they began to be pushed out by Punjabis and Pathans[lxix], deckhands from coastal Gujarat and Ratnagiri, and Catholic stewards from coastal Goa; the Clan, British India and other companies preferred firemen from the “seaman’s zone” of central Sylhet; others hired Maldivian deckhands frequently.[lxx]

Romantic colonials who approved of the employment of non-European labour on British shipping lines described this diversity of labouring people as though the ship were a veritable garden of differently coloured animals “amicably” working away at their own tasks. An article in the Daily Telegraph in 1885 described the crew and passengers aboard a newP&O ship, theParamatta in pointedly “pleasant” and colourful terms that illustrate the fantasy of racecraft: an image of perfect harmony between the order of the division of labour in society and the order of racial types supposedly given by nature.

Everybody knows and does his duty, from the veteran commander to the little Bengali boys scouring the screws of the Parramatta’s steam pinnace and the jet-black Seedees glistening like the coal they shovel into the huge furnaces. It is pleasant to observe how well the native sailors are treated, and how satisfied they appear with their service. The “tindal”, a small, wizened, wiry, indefatigable low-caste from Chittagong, withsparse beard reddened by lime and grizzled by many tempests, might have been boatswain to Sinbad, he has such a weather-beaten look. There arebrown lively Bombay men, coffee-coloured Malays,ink-dark Africans, and most curious of all an Afghan stoker, while the quietpatient ayahs glide about like cats,purring Hindustani songs, and ceaselessly watching and fondling theblue-eyed English children, the tender shipmates of ourbronzed colonels and captains, married Indian ladies, unmarried belles on their first visit, and travellers for pleasure.[lxxi]

The hierarchy in the ranks was smoothly glossed over by the praise that “everybody [knew] and [did] his duty”- that is they knew their place- and even the difficult, often dangerous task of the stokehole was rendered picturesque in this narration. Another account in the Times of India in 1892 similarly noted the many kinds of people who took refuge in theStranger’s Home for Asiatics in London, and emphasized “how amicably they all [got] on together”:

The Home, however, is not only used by “Asiatics” but by Japanese, Chinese, Malays, Arabs, Seedees, and Africans of all sorts, the majority, of course, being lascars and firemen discharged from ships and steamers from India…..There are stewards, who maintain order without any difficulty, and see that each man has access to the particular kitchen of his race, where he can cook his own particular mess very savoury no doubt to his palate, but generally very unappetising to English taste, and fearfully high smelling withal. The “Surtee” apparently finds no difficulty in London in obtaining his favourite half rotten fish, or the Seedee his hideous offal, which he seems to prefer to anything else that can be bought. … It is wonderful how amicably they all get on together, and how they manage to make themselves understood, by the medium of “pigeon English”, which, though it differs from every port, has still a great many words in common.[lxxii]

The commentary on Sidi steamship labour has either been subsumed under this colonial gaze that saw the racial division of labour as a sign of necessary and harmonious diversity, or by scholarship that has pointed out the racist hierarchy between European seamen and lascars but included Sidis aslascars since they shipped underlascar articles on British ships.[lxxiii] The latter is obviously correct in some regards: in the administrative debates over the definition of “lascar” in 1921-22, the Shipping Master at Bombay argued that “the most suitable formula for the definition of “Lascar or other native seaman” would be—(1) Natives of India including the Native States and foreign possessions in India, and(2) Arabs or East Africans generally.”[lxxiv] Sidis, counted as lascars, had legal restrictions on foreign ports that did not apply to Somalis and other East African seamen because they did not ship underlascar agreements.[lxxv] The experience of all “Africans” at sea in the nineteenth century Indian Ocean were therefore not generalizable.

However, at the same time, the nature of labour aboard the steamship in the era of coal was undeniably organized on a steep ladder, a hierarchy that was spatially enforced, with the labours of the engine room and stokehole occupying the very bottom. The earliest seamen’s unions in Bombay— the Goa Portuguese Seamen’s Club (1896) and the later Asiatic Seamen’s Union (1918)— both excluded engine-room workers (stokers, coal trimmers, naval engineers) and were limited to saloon workers. Even the Indian Seamen’s Union formed as a merger of all existing seamen’s unions in 1919 limited its membership to saloon workers until 1926. When deck and engine room workers were welcomed into this union it caused a rupture and the Bombay Seamen’s Union was formed to maintain the old distinctions- a rupture that was not healed until 1931 when a single National Seaman’s Union of India Bombay came into existence.[lxxvi] In the context of a steeply hierarchized workplace such as this, the consistent hiring of particular regional or “racial” groups to fill particular rungs of the ladder not only reified such identities, making them appear natural, but also marked the groups thus formed by the kind of labour they performed. Thus, the figure of the “jet-black Seedee” was produced in the nineteenth century as synonymous with the stokehold and the “glistening coal” that it was full of, in colonial imagination and in the operations of the P&O. As these displaced humans of diverse origins, languages and itineraries gathered in Bombay city were incorporated into the capitalist labour market, they came to form a community known as Sidis[lxxvii], sharing origin stories and cultural practices with the Sidi communities of Gujarat, Sindh and Karnataka, but also unusual in its association with the steamship industry.  

Compared to the scholarship on lascars, their service on board steamers and their lives as immigrants in London, Wales and Tyneside, that on Bombay’s Sidi stokers, firemen and trimmers is negligible. This invisibilizing of Bombay’s maritime Sidi community in scholarship is owed in part to the barely visible (to passengers, officers and deck crew) nature of the work they performed at the very bottom of the ship. It was a function of the spatial ordering of power that rendered the Sidi or on board the ship invisible on the scene of history, except when he violated this spatial prescription, as when faced by death on the shipwreckedTasmania. On 17^th April 1887 aP&O steamer,Tasmania, sailing from Bombay to London was wrecked by a reef off the coast of Corsica. Though of the total loss of life numbering thirty-four not a single person was a passenger, and most were lascars and Sidis (apart from the European captain and a few officers), an outraged passenger wrote a letter to theStandard in London about the general failure of discipline amongst the crew of the ship and specifically about the “utter and lamentable collapse” of the predominantly “lascar crew”[lxxviii]. According to the correspondent, Mr. Allen, not only had several of the lifeboats been lost in the process of lowering them due to the inefficiency and “panic” of the lascar crew, who were “impervious alike to order, remonstrance or threat”, but more inexcusably, a few Sidi firemen had “calmly cut the rope before [their] eyes” and stolen one of two improvised rafts, in a bid to escape before their turn.

The debate that followed in British and colonial newspapers between supporters and critics of lascar labour made clear not only the lines that separated European passengers, officers and saloon crew from the Asian crew who manned the decks but also the further lines that separated the latter from the Sidi crew of the stokehold in moments of crisis. Mr. Allen, the outraged passenger ended his letter to theStandard with the accusation: “The deaths were almost wholly among the Seedee boys and lascars, from cold and exposure.”[lxxix] Another passenger, Mr. Roughton bemoaned that the native crew “began to die in the most horrible manner, quite early in the afternoon of the 17^th, and the contemplation of their sufferings must have added infinitely to the horror of their position to those of us (the great majority) who were unused to such sights.”[lxxx] A woman, Miss Habgood, who had partaken of that “delightful passage from Bombay until the calamity occurred”, volunteered that “the lascar crew were worse than the ladies would have been in their places—completely lost their heads and thought only of saving themselves.”[lxxxi] Yet another passenger scoffed that “it [was] well known what sort of men these lascars [were], and that from the first moment that any danger assailed the vessel they would be wholly devoid of even the show of discipline.” “Of course,” he added, “we are well aware that for stoking the furnaces during some portions of the passage, and especially through the length of the Red Sea, the assistance of lascars is very desirable, and, indeed, almost imperative. Still, for the safety and comfort of the passengers, a fair proportion of white men ought to be a sine qua non.”[lxxxii]

Not only were the native crew blamed by passengers for trying to save themselves or for losing the lifeboats to a rough sea, they were, as one advocate for the lascars wrote, simply blamed for dying. If hot weather was an acceptable explanation for why Englishmen were poorly able to serve in the unbearable conditions of the stokehold in the Red Sea, the same compassion was not extended tolascars and Sidis who suffered, half-clothed, in the cold rain and storm of the deck. Accusations flew that “lascars have no stamina, and …. [they] die off like rotten sheep, in cold weather… and in any serious case of emergency they are worse than useless”.[lxxxiii] In response, several Englishmen who had served on P&O steamers, fierily rejoined that they had never seen a lascar dying from exposure, that they “stand cold quite as well as Europeans” and “that they do our work better than any European crew could is beyond question.”[lxxxiv] More importantly, their defense of lascars came at the cost of the reputation of the Sidis. A commodore of theP&O Company’s fleet pointed out in his letter to theStandard on April 30, “I fancy that it will be proved, when the trial takes place, that the men who misbehaved at the trial of the Tasmania were not lascars, but the native firemen and the Seedee, or African coal trimmers.”[lxxxv] Another article in the Globe which described the history and utility of lascars in favourable terms emphasized this distinction: the deck crew ofP&O steamers consisted oflascars, “used to designate native Indian and Malay seamen generally”, while their engine room crews consisted of “coal trimmers, mostly African “seedie boys”; and stokers native of Bombay, amounting in all to about 50 more.”[lxxxvi] A few days later another sympathetic passenger reiterated that “it was the Seedee boys and not the lascars who died of cold.”[lxxxvii]

The lascar crew of theTasmania gave an interview to a bilingual journal, which while it was sympathetic to the plight of their Sidi shipmates and not racist like the English commentators, participated nevertheless in distinguishinglascar from Sidi in trying to defend themselves. Thelascar narrative of the incidents on board described how they had attempted to lower the boats successfully, at risk to their own lives as per orders and even going further. They then went on to clarify that the seamen who tried to escape on the stolen raft were Sidi firemen and coal trimmers. Their interview, published as an English statement in theTimes, declared their loyalty to the company and explained why some Sidis died:

With such encouragement and guidance from officers, if we, who have eaten the salt of the company for so many years, were called upon to risk our lives in perilous times to save our ships, we would work away cheerfully and manfully, not caring a jot for the consequences. We remained without food or water, unsheltered and unprotected, for  nearly twenty-seven hours. Some of the men of the engine-room crew, the Seedee firemen and the coal-trimmers, began to die in the evening. They were necessarily very scantily clothed, as they had to work near the hot furnaces, as were also those men who came to relieve them when their watch for the day was over. Of the lascars only two men died doing their duty, and yet we have heard that on the representation of one or two of our passengers, the English Press raised a cry and denounced us as a class.[lxxxviii]

The lascars were the first to hint at the true plight of the Sidis on board, taking into account the conditions in which they worked, their scanty clothing and the biting cold as reasons for death instead of some inherent racial weakness. Nevertheless, despite their understanding, the racialized hierarchy of the ship reinforced itself in thelascars’ defense of their “class”. ATimes of India editorial a few days later came once again to the defense of this “gallant class of men [who] were unwittingly wronged”, and reinforced the racial distinction: “Seedee boys and lascars are a different class of men altogether, almost as different as are English sailors from lascar sailors.”[lxxxix] The same author then put in a word for the Sidis who died on board:

On the steamer striking they came up to the deck with hardly a loin cloth to cover their bodies, from a temperature of some 150° to a cold wind of 46° and a still colder sea. In this sorry plight, shelterless and provisionless, for seven and twenty hours, it is cold hearted brutality to speak of them as having “died off like rotten sheep.” Taking the correspondent who denounced in the most uncompromising terms the mortality among the native crew, we can show even from his words that no European could have survived under similar circumstances. Describing the scene in the smoking room, he spoke of “the pitiful cry of the lascar or Seedee boy, who would force himself desperately into the doorway… and who was in mercy to the rest ejected only to die of exposure in the open.” It is to be remembered also that even the brave first officer had to be nursed back to life in the arms of some of his companions after twelve hours’ continuous exposure on deck. As for the other Seedee boys who cut the rope of the raft, we need only say now that they paid dearly for their treachery, all but one of their number perished from cold before they reached the shore.[xc]

The Sidi was thus either consigned to work under insufferable conditions, or die on board, clinging to the rigging, soaked and scantily clothed in the cold and forbidden to enter the dry smoking room where the European passengers and crew were sheltering with warm blankets, or to die at sea as punishment for their “treachery” and “cowardice” in seeking to save themselves out of turn.[xci] Space aboard the steamship was no simple metaphor for power. It was rigidly apportioned according to class, “race” and labour and held the power to decide over life and death in emergencies like shipwrecks.

Jamāt: producing likeness among itinerants

“Habshi, Arabi baddu sab ek hi hai.” “Habshis and Arab Bedouins are one and the same.”[xcii]

Branching off amongst the many by-ways of Dongri in South Mumbai is a lane that is easy to miss- Sidi Mohalla (Urdu or Hindi word for neighbourhood). On this lane stands a long low-ceilinged room, Arabic lettering on the front announcing the shrine of Bava Gor. The room is divided into two. The front room hosts the shrine of the saint, Bava Gor himself. In the longer backroom two more shrines- to Mai Misra and Bava Habash- share space with the family of the caretaker (mujāwar) of the shrine, Maqwa Sidi Abdul Rauf. That is their home. Sitting on the floor in the front room in July 2016, Sidi Rauf tells me about Sidi saints and ancestors, their history, their music and theirjamāt. For months after we speak I struggle to fit the story he tells me with what ethnographic studies and archives have painted to me as “true”- that the history of the Sidis, Siddis, Sheedies, Habshis or “Africans” of South Asia begins in Africa.[xciii] Sidi Rauf however insists that I begin the story of Sidis with Bilal ibn Rabih (“Hazrat Bilal se hi shuru karna”) singing the first call to prayer (āzān) in Mecca. Confused by his narration of beginnings in Arabia, I ask naively what he makes of the books saying that Sidis hail from Africa. “The books are wrong,” he tells me confidently. “They don’t know. Where Saint Bilal and Islam begins, that is where we are from too.”

I learn later that the story of Bilal ibn Rabih, the Habshi who was manumitted by the Prophet and became one of his first companions and the first mu’ezzin (one who gives the call to prayer) of Islam was shared as an origin narrative by Sidijamāts across the subcontinent. This origin story coexisted with the story of the three founding saints from Africa- Bava Gor or Mobarak Nobi of Abyssinia (though the name “Nobi” also suggests Sudan), his brother Bava Habash of Abyssinia and his sister Mai Misra of Egypt (Misr).[xciv] These descendants of Habshi Bilal, Sidi Rauf explained to me, came to Mumbai 780 years ago, a divinely pure land (pākīzāh sarzamīn). He does not deny hisjamāt’s origins in Africa, but situates both Africa and his origin in an itinerary of places that were accrued through a collective, mobile past of slavery, manumission and Islam. “Africa” was tied to “Arabistan”, “Bambai” and “Hindustan” in this lineage of places.[xcv] The story of British anti-slavery cruisers or steamship stokeholds were nowhere present in this historical narrative. Instead, a past of violent individual displacements and slavery was reclaimed through an illustrious collective lineage of kinship and service that created a community. As Sidi Rauf said to me with pride, “Thanks to Allah we have three gifts: voice (āwāz), strength (tāqat), and loyalty (wafādāri).”

Sidi Rauf’s narrative of multiple origins and belonging importantly pointed to the dispersed and itinerant pasts of those who came under the wing of this jamāt in colonial Bombay, and to affinities built beyond race. Archival records amply suggest that many freedmen who arrived in Bombay in the nineteenth century spent great parts of their lives in ports of the Arabian coast. Upon landing in Bombay many among them preferred to socialize with “Arab Mussalmans” and adopt Islam instead of remaining under the care of missionaries, as betrayed by the reports of missionaries like Reverend Price. Shipping records indicate that companies like theP&O hired not only Sidis but also poor, itinerant Yemenis to work in their stokeholds, possibly often together. Above all, the colonial records on the Bombay 1874 riots repeatedly describe crowds composed of “Seedees and Arabs” rioting on the streets, either when leaving the Jama Masjid together after Friday prayers, or rushing out together from the same congested city circle of Chakla and attacking the liquor shops and temples of Parsi petty bourgeois neighbours on Abdul Rohimon Street. In the sparse and fragmented archival footprint of “liberated Africans” and Sidis in nineteenth century Bombay, the figure of the “Arab” frequently appears alongside.

I stumble upon a possible explanation for this recurring archival proximity of “Sidi” and “Arab” when I ask Sidi Rauf where most Bombay Sidis live today. He answers that most Sidis have dispersed to different parts of the city and elsewhere, but his description of his neighbourhood defies the automatic affinity of identity assumed by race as an objective category and suggests one built on shared religion, habitation and language. He says that the neighbourhood is all Sidi Mohalla, even though the only remaining Sidi family there is theirs. “The others are all Arabi Baddus (bedouins).” I ask who the Baddus are and he explains that they are the same as Habshis, adding “Those who were negroes in Arabistan, they came to be called Habshis. And those who were not, those who were sheikhs, they came to be called Arabi. They’re all one and the same.” While Sidi Rauf notes “Habshis” and “Arabi Baddus” as distinct to some extent, he fundamentally identifies the kinship or sameness between them. Itinerant Habshis and Arabs are “all one” (sab ek), united by an illustrious genealogy of place (Arabistan and Bambai) and Islam, in this twenty first century Sidi’s representation of himself and hisjamāt. It is possible that because the colonial census apparatus never counted Sidis as a separate community because of their small numbers, including them variously under the category of “Other Mussalmans”, “Negro Africans” or “People from Africa”, thisjamāt was able to elude objectification and retain its porous identity under the modern state.[xcvi] 

Another complementary explanation for the affinity between Sidi and “Arab”, emphasizing occupational solidarities, may be arrived at by way of speculating with the grain of the archives. The shared experience of working to load coal onto steamships, firing, stoking and cleaning large fires in the awful heat and sound of the engine room, and shoveling coal into the stokehold from the dusty darkness of the bunkers, all amidst the unpredictable roiling of the ship and with the many layers of the ship- physical and social- bearing down upon them, could conceivably have contributed to creating a sense of kinship not imitable by race. Such solidarity would have been produced not by the automatic fact of doing a difficult job together but by the recognition of the precarity of their lives and the racist structure that made them invisible and derided as a “class” even if indispensable to the working of the ship.  The extraordinary memoir of Ibrahim Ismaa’il, a Somali seaman in the early twentieth century, describes an event in the stokehold that gives us a rare glimpse of how solidarities may have been built by the structure of hierarchy aboard the ship instead of automatically following from racial identities.

Ismaa’il was born into the Warsangeli tribe who inhabited what was then the British Somaliland Protectorate. He was Somalian and had never been enslaved, but like many Sidis he spent much of his youth in Aden, working odd jobs with and for Arabs, and was Muslim himself. A friendly observer in England once described him as being “rather like an Arab in appearance”[xcvii]. The exact meaning of that statement is unclear. Once when employed on a ship to Liverpool and Lisbon he was put to work stoking fires with “a West Indian called Moses”[xcviii]. Besides them the crew consisted of “a German, a Pole and two jolly Irishmen.” Ismaa’il starts this tale by telling us that he became “great friends” with the German, while Moses developed an inexplicable animosity for him. What began as an argument over who would use the better shovel developed into a violent situation when Moses threw a red hot slice (a long tool for cleaning ashes from the fire) at Ibrahim, saying “Take it you Arab bastard.” Whatever Moses’ reasons for thinking of Ismaa’il as an Arab may have been, it is clear that he considered Ismaa’il more foreign than familiar. There was no natural alliance, liking or friendship between the two men of colour on board the ship by virtue of a shared “race”.

An alliance, a friendship, was forged nevertheless. After retaliating at Moses by trying to kill him with a hammer, missing and then fighting him until they were both exhausted, Ismaa’il wrote:

At the same time we realized what fools we had been. If one of us had killed the other, he would have been hanged, and nobody would have cared about either of us. And after that we became good friends.[xcix]

Affinity was born not from spontaneous liking or recognition of sameness, kinship did not follow from nature-given bodily characteristics (if anything Ismaa’il’s physical appearance seems to have misled Moses), but from the understanding that society valued both their lives equally poorly and on the ship they were allies. Sidis and itinerant Arabs hired as coal loaders, trimmers, stokers and firemen working together at sea, praying together and living as neighbours in Bombay could very well have been allies, kin and friends in much the same way.

The jamāt offered a way for a community of formerly enslaved itinerants in colonial Bombay to cohere around a collective prideful identity in a way that made room throughout the nineteenth century for new arrivals from distant shores. While this article has offered thejamāt as a concept for expressing affinity and likeness used by Muslim freedmen in South Asia that rejects the colonial taxonomy of race, and the locally familiar identifiers Sidi or Habshi instead of the homogenizing “African”,jamāt is by no means a simple alternative to race which we should uncritically embrace. While the Sidi’sjamāt is a critique of racecraft, it is similar to caste orjatī in many ways, and thus a part of a rigid structure of social hierarchy that serves to disenfranchise and impoverish Sidis in contemporary South Asia.  The research on the cultural and spiritual universe of the Sidis of South Asia is rich and complex and this article is not intended to address those questions. It is instead the study of how a specific set of modern subaltern subjects were interpolated as members of a race of brute labourers by colonial “liberators” on the one hand, and as kinfolk of a Muslimjamāt on the other by the subjects themselves. This juxtaposition allows us to examine the socio-historical production of race as something that appears to be natural (as opposed to racism which is conventionally treated as social discrimination between nature-given races). I hope this will encourage further critical research on concepts of collective identification such asjamāt used by subjects who continue to be incongruously treated in scholarship as specimens of a given racial entity.[c]

The British colonizer liked to view the nineteenth century Indian Ocean as an arena populated by slavers (“Arabs”), slaves (“Africans” or “negroes”) and liberators (secular English servants of the Queen or Christian missionaries). These roles were racially scripted and the British anti-slavery crusade sought only to end the trade in enslaved human beings and rewrite the role for formerly enslaved Africans as “free” labourers, not question or demolish race or racism. Instead, a belief in the existence of racial “types” or “classes” watered the capitalist desire for tailormade labouring forces, particular forms of abstract labour given human form by nature so to speak. The displacement of formerly enslaved people from East Africa to colonial Bombay via the Arabian coast and their incorporation into a burgeoning steamship industry as stokers, firemen and trimmers reinforced a racial identity that was created in the first place by European racism. The categories of race thus sought to be definitive in their characterization of human beings, leaving little scope for expression outside of their own terms. As Fanon asked of the colonized in a different colonial context (North African “Arabs” and Algerian subjects of the French empire specifically): “Who are they, in truth, those creatures, who hide, who are hidden by social truth beneath the attributes of bicot, bounioule, arabe, raton, sidi, mon z’ami?”[ci]

The Sidis of Bombay however, while accepting the racialized futures prescribed to them of manual labour in steamships and dockyards and domestic labour in households, appear to have tried to answer Fanon’s question by moving beyond race. Africa, the continent, is an important part of the Sidi jamāt’s ritual construction of kinship, origins and self, but so is Arabistan, the land of Hazrat Bilal the Habshi, Prophet Muhammad and Islam, and Bambai, thepākizāh sarzamīn (pure land) where their ancestors arrived. “Negro”, Sidi Rauf tells me, is an insult that the English created. He refers to himself as a Habshi, sometimes as Sidi.  “I will tell you things that you will not find in books, things that only the poor, that fakirs know.” Perhaps Sidi Rauf is right and the Sidijamāt, in ways that are alien to the taxonomy of race, has always had room to encompass Muslim Habshis and Arabis alike.

Bibliography

Ahuja, Ravi 2006, ‘Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, c. 1900-1960’, International Review of Social History 51: 111–41.

Ahuja, Ravi 2012, ‘Capital at Sea, Shaitan Below Decks? A Note on Global Narratives, Narrow Spaces and the Limits of Experience’, History of the Present, 2/1: 78–85.

Ali, Omar, Robbins, Kenneth, Graves, Jazmin and Shroff, Beheroze (eds.) 2020, African Diasporan Communities Across South Asia, Greensboro, North Carolina; Gujarat: University of North Carolina.

Alpers, Edward 2013, ‘On Becoming a British Lake: Piracy, Slaving and British Imperialism in the Indian Ocean During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’ in Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition, edited by Robert Harms, Bernard Freamon & David Blight, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Banaji, D.R. 1932, Bombay and the Sidis, Bombay: Macmillan.

Banerjee, Milinda 2020, ‘How dynasty became a modern global concept: intellectual histories of sovereignty and property’, in Global Intellectual History, DOI: 10.1080/23801883.2020.1796232.

Banerjee, Milinda and Afanasyev, Ilya 2020, ‘The modern invention of ‘dynasty’:

              An introduction’, Global Intellectual History,

              DOI: 10.1080/23801883.2020.1796231.

Barak, On 2015, ‘Outsourcing: Energy and Empire in the Age of Coal, 1820-

1911’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 47/3: 425–45.

Barak, On 2020, Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Basu, Helene 2001, ‘Africans in India- Past and Present’, Internationales Asienforum 32: 253–274.

Basu, Helene (ed.) 2008, Journeys and Dwellings: Indian Ocean Themes in South Asia, Hyderabad: Orient Longman.

Bullen, Frank T. 1900, The Men of the Merchant Service, London: Smith, Elder and Co.

Campbell, Gwyn (ed.) 2005, Abolition and its Aftermath in the Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, London; New York: Routledge.

Campbell, Gwyn 2013, ‘Servitude and the Changing Face of the Demand for Labor in the Indian Ocean World, c. 1800-1900’ in Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition, edited by Robert Harms, Bernard Freamon & David Blight, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Catlin-Jairazbhoy, Amy and Alpers, Edward (eds.) 2004, Sidis and Scholars: Essays on African Indians, Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press.

Catlin-Jairazbhoy, Amy & Jairazbhoy, Nazir Ali 2023, From Africa to India: Music of the Sidis and the Indian Ocean Diaspora, Van Nuys, CA: Apsara Media.

Chamberlain, Tony 2013, “Stokers: the Lowest of the Low? A Social History of Royal Navy Stokers”, PhD Diss., University of Exeter.

Chatterjee, Indrani 2005, ‘Abolition by Denial: The South Asian Example” in Abolition and its Aftermath in the Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, edited by Gwyn Campbell, London; New York: Routledge.

Chatterjee, Indrani 2018, ‘Afro-Asian Capital and its Dissolution’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38/2: 310-29.

Cohn, Bernard 1987, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’, in An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays, Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press.

Cowell, Alan and Timmons, Heather 2005, ‘Britain, the Continent, and the Issue of Foreign Ownership’, New York Times.

Edwardes, Stephen M. 1912, By-Ways of Bombay, Bombay: D.B. Taraporevala Sons and Co.

Ewald, Janet 2013, ‘African Bondsmen, Freedmen, and the Maritime Proletariats of the Northwestern Indian Ocean World, c. 1500-1900’ in Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition, edited by Robert Harms, Bernard Freamon & David Blight, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Ewald, Janet 2000, ‘Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and Other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1914’’, American Historical Review, 105/1: 69–91.

Fanon, Frantz 1952/2008, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz 1964, ‘The “North African Syndrome”’, in Toward the African Revolution, New York: Grove Press.  

Fields, Barbara J. and Karen 2012, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, London: Verso.

Fletcher, Max E. 1958, ‘The Suez Canal and World Shipping, 1869–1914’, The Journal of Economic History 18/4: 556.

Ghosh, Kaushik 1999, ‘A Market for Aboriginality: Primitivism and Race Qualification in the Indentured Labour Market of Colonial India’, in Subaltern Studies X. Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by G. Bhadra, G. Prakash, and S. Tharu, New Delhi, 1999.

Headrick, Daniel R. 1988, Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, New York: Oxford University Press.

Hood, W.H. 1903, The Blight of Insubordination: the Lascar Question and Rights and Wrongs of the British Shipmaster, Including the Mercantile Marine Committee Report, England: Spottiswoode.  

Hope, Ronald 1990, A New History of British Shipping, London: John Murray.

Hopper, Matthew 2015, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Africa in the Age of Empire, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hoskins, Halford Lancaster 1928, British Routes to India, New York: Longman Greens and Co.

Howarth, David and Stephen 1986, The story of P&O: the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Hyslop, Jonathan 2014, ‘‘Ghostlike’ seafarers and sailing ship nostalgia: the figure of the steamship lascar in the British imagination, c. 1880–1960’, Journal of Maritime Research 16/2: 212–28.

Ismaa’il, Ibrahim 1928/1977, ‘An Early Somali Autobiography (II)’, presented and annotated by Richard Pankhurst in Africa: Rivista trimestrale di studi e documentazione dell'Istituto italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente 32/3: 355-84.

Jaffer, Aaron 2015, Lascars and Indian Ocean Seafaring, 1780–1860: Shipboard Life, Unrest and Mutiny, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer.

Jayasuriya, Shihan de Silva and Pankhurst, Richard (eds.) 2003, The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Jones, Stephanie 1989, ‘The Role of the Shipping Agent in Migration: A Study in Business History’, in Maritime Aspects of Migration edited by Klaus Friedland, Cologne: Bohnau.  

Khalili, Laleh 2020, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, London; New York: Verso.

Kia, Mana 2020, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Lawless, Dick 1994, ‘The Role of Seamen’s Agents in the Migration for Employment of Arab Seafarers in the Early Twentieth Century’, Immigrants and Minorities 13/2&3: 34–58.

Malm, Andreas 2013, ‘The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry’, Historical Materialism 21/1: 15–68.

Malm, Andreas 2016, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, London; New York: Verso.  

Marx, Karl 1976/1990, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume I, translated by Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin Books.  

Mathew, Johan 2016, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea, Oakland: University of California Press.

Obeng, Pashington 2007, Shaping Membership, Defining Nation: The Cultural Politics of African Indians in South Asia, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Prasad, Kiran Kamal 2005, In Search of an Identity: An Ethnographic Study of the Siddis in Karnataka, Bangalore: Jana Jagriti Prakashana.

Seddon, Mohammed Sidiq 2014, The Last of the Lascars: Yemeni Muslims in Britain, 1836–2012, Leicestershire: Kube Academic.

Shaw, Nellie 1935, Whiteway. A Colony on the Cotswolds, London: C.W. Daniel Co.

Sheriff, Abdul 1987, Slaves, Spives and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873, Athens: Ohio University Press.

Sherwood, Marika 1991, ‘Race, nationality and employment among lascar seamen, 1660-1945’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 17/2: 229–44.

Shroff, Beheroze 2013, ‘‘Goma is Going on’: Sidis of Gujarat’, African Arts 46/1: 18–25.

Shutzer, Matthew 2021, ‘Subterranean Properties: India’s Political Ecology of Coal, 1870-1975’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 63/2: 400–32.

Turner, Sasha 2017, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing and Slavery in Jamaica, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Visram, Rozina 1986, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947, London: Pluto.

White, Hylton 2020, ‘How is Capitalism Racial? Fanon, Critical Theory, and the Fetish of Anti-Blackness’, Social Dynamics 46/1: 22–35.

Wolf, Eric 2000, ‘Incorporation and Identity in the Making of the Modern World’, in idem, Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World, Berkeley: University of California Press.

[i] In 1840 the sultan of Oman shifted his capital to Zanzibar, his East African dominion, and the British agent reluctantly followed. The establishment of the British consulate at Zanzibar in 1841 marked the inauguration of a dual role for the British agent stationed there- Political Agent of the Bombay Government and British Consul of the imperial government in London. The British Agency at Zanzibar was under the command of the colonial government in Bombay from 1841 to 1873, when administrative control was transferred to Delhi and eventually to London in 1883. In 1890 Zanzibar became a British Protectorate and remained so until 1963.

[ii] While slavery had been abolished in Britain in 1833 it was not until 1843 that it was abolished in the colonial territories of the British East India Company, which is also when the British campaign against slave trade in the Indian Ocean began in earnest. See Campbell 2005.

[iii] It is important to not be misled, however, by the rhetoric of this abolitionist crusade- that tireless British abolitionism ended Indian Ocean slavery by the end of the nineteenth century. As Matthew Hopper’s work (Hopper 2015) demonstrates in detail, slavery in some parts of the Indian Ocean such as Arabia and the Gulf began to thrive in the late nineteenth century, driven by the demands of the expanding global capitalist market for commodities such as pearls and dates, and persisted into the 1920s. He attributes the incoherence of colonial policy with regards to slavery in the Indian Ocean to the fact that the aims of imperial abolitionism were often contradicted by the imperatives of empire’s economics. For the halting history of colonial abolitionism and the end of slavery in the Indian Ocean also see Campbell in Robert Harms (eds.) 2013, pp. 23–44.

[iv] Cowell and Timmons 2005.

[v] Khalili 2020, p. 23.

[vi] Alpers in Harms (eds.) 2013, pp. 45–54.

[vii] Hoskins 1928, pp. 140–41.

[viii] Barak 2015, pp. 425–45.

[ix] Headrick 1988, p. 44. 

[x] Barak 2020.

[xi] Fletcher 1958, p. 556.

[xii] Sheriff 1987, pp. 223–38.

[xiii] Chatterjee in Campbell (ed.) 2005, pp. 150–68. Also, Mathew 2016, pp. 76–9. A large number of freedpeople were those coded as women, though they are not the subject of this essay, largely due to their relative absence in archival records. Freedwomen were usually employed as domestic labourers in Bombay households, or sought to be married off to “respectable gentlemen” (Mathew 2016, p. 78), or when possible to Christian “Bombay Africans” who were tutored as wards of Christian missionaries.

[xiv] Janet Ewald writes at length about Sidis and seafaring in the northwestern Indian Ocean from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, tracing the changing meanings of the term. However, despite the incredible range of her historical knowledge and observations, the geographically located identifier “Sidi” does not cause her to reconsider the use of “African” as a descriptor of the historical subject. “Sidi” appears as a local variation of an universal category “African”. Here I make a conceptual and historical argument for why that is incorrect. See Ewald in Harms (eds.) 2013, pp. 200–15.

[xv] The P&O heritage website offers this drawing for sale, describing it as “View inside the “Stokehole” with “Seedie boys” “Firemen at work””.https://www.poheritage.com/the-collection/galleries/Prints-and-Drawings/Pencillings/The-Stokehole---Seedie-boys

[xvi] Howarth & Howarth 1986, p. 82.

[xvii] Letter from the Shipping Master, Bombay to the Secretary to Government, Marine Department, Bombay, 24^th February 1921, in “Seamen: Definition of the term “Lascar or other native seamen”,” File no. 193. 1921- 22, Marine Department, MRA, Mumbai.

[xviii] Indeed, British ideas of slavery were so centred around the figure of the “African” they often neglected the Indian Ocean trade in enslaved people, frequently women, from Balochistan, the Arabian peninsula and Circassia. Johan Mathew describes how it was easy for slavers to pass off enslaved women as their wives as long as they were not “African” because colonial administrators were inclined to suspect the latter of being enslaved subjects by virtue of their Africanness, and not others. Mathew 2016, pp. 67–73.

[xix] Edwardes 1912, p. 88.

[xx] When I use the word “African” in quotation marks I am referring to the colonial category of African as a race. In my own usage I try to use Sidi or Habshi to be specific, except in cases where I am speaking of recently enslaved people who were rescued and sent to Bombay, whom I describe as freedmen. The implication is that such people may not have yet been incorporated into the Sidi jamāt or were assigned to Christian missionaries, many of whom tutored their wards to think of themselves as “Bombay Africans”.

[xxi] I met Sidi Abdul Rauf in the summer of 2016, when I visited the Sidi shrine of Bava Gor in Mumbai for research. We conversed in Hindi or as he called it “Bambaiyya”. I knew from the work of ethnomusicologist Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy about Asumaben, the previous mujawari (head and caretaker) of the shrine, who had recently passed away. Sidi Rauf introduced himself to me as the currentmujawar (caretaker) of the shrine andmaqwa (“patel” or head) of the Sidis of Bombay. His detailed narrative of the pasts and present of the Sidis of Bombay enhanced the lens through which I analyzed and interpreted the fragmentary evidence of the archives.

[xxii] Ewald 2013, pp. 211–12.

[xxiii] Chamberlain 2013, pp. 30–2.

[xxiv] Lawless 1994, p. 35.

[xxv] Ahuja 2006, p. 112.

[xxvi] The strict hierarchy of steamship labour and wage discrimination continues into contemporary times, though modified by significant changes in the nature of shipping technology and maritime law. Most shipping companies based in Europe depend on Filipino crew, for example. “The processes of cost-cutting, the trough in shipping business, and the national deregulations of the 1970s saw an exponential expansion of ships sailing under flags of convenience. The latter came about when European states established a secondary or ‘international’ registry to relax crewing rules and slacken health and safety standards aboard ships. The requirement to hire nationals to staff the ships was also set aside under deregulation and with the open or international registries. From the 1970s onwards, the number of foreign crews on ships proliferated, and some countries began to specialize in supplying shipboard labour. While the top five ship-owning countries- Greece, Japan, China, Germany, and Singapore- together marshaled 49.5 per cent of all shipboard tonnage, in 2015, the five largest suppliers of officers and crew, were China, the Phillipines, the Russian Federation, Ukraine and India. The number of seafarers in that year was estimated at 1.6 million, and Chinese officers surpassed the number of Filipino officers, though the latter still dominated among crews. Filipino seafarers are an astonishing 14 per cent of all seafarers. Arbitrage on the international wages of crews earns shipowners handsome profits.”  Khalili 2020, p. 239.

[xxvii] Report by Admiral George Elliot and Rear-Admiral A.P. Ryder, Members of the Committee Appointed to Examine, 'The Designs Upon which Ships of War Have Recently Been Constructed,' (London, HMSO, 1872), House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, C. 489, 31–2. Quoted in Chamberlain, pp. 68–9.

[xxviii] Malm 2013. For a much more extensive treatment of the subject see Malm 2016.

[xxix] Chamberlain 2013.

[xxx] Ahuja 2006 & 2012; Seddon 2014; Sherwood 1991; Visram 1986; Hyslop 2014; Jaffer 2015.

[xxxi] It is likely that the Bombay government referred freedmen to P&O recruiting agents. Jones 1989, p. 339.

[xxxii] Chatterjee 2018.

[xxxiii] As mentioned before, this community of Sidis being formed in abolition era Bombay comprised not only of recently emancipated “Zanzibaris”, “Nubis”, “Habshis” and others, but also incorporated those who had arrived from the shores of Africa in the preceding century, mostly as slaves brought by the Portuguese and British. (Archival evidence suggests the presence of a “Madagascar Town” in eighteenth century Bombay in “Dungaree” or Dongri, the neighbourhood where Mumbai’s Sidi shrine still stands today. I am grateful to Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy for drawing my attention to this evidence.) These mid-to-late nineteenth century “liberated” arrivals in Bombay are also not to be confused with the Sidi rulers of the neighbouring princely state of Janjira- South Asians of Ethiopian lineage who first arrived on the subcontinent in the medieval period as military slaves and administrators. (See Banaji 1932). The Sidi jamāt of Bombay city was diverse, and accrued over time with multiple waves of arrivals, acquiring a historically specific form through their incorporation into the world of steamship labour in the nineteenth century. This is the process that this article sheds light on.

[xxxiv] As told to me by Sidi Abdul Rauf in Mumbai, 2016. Also see Basu 2001, pp. 3–4.

[xxxv] Ewald points out that by and large Sidis were employed as stokers on large British steam liners while Yemenis and Somalis were employed on smaller tramp steamers. Ewald 2013, p. 212. However, her own archival evidence suggests that while the numbers of Adenese employed alongside Sidis in British steamship stokeholds were few, they nevertheless occurred (footnote 84). As the evidence cited in this article also suggests, the P&O Company itself hired both Sidis and “Arabs”. Thus stokehold socialization between Sidis and Yemenis was certainly possible, and on land in Bombay it was certain.

[xxxvi] Letter from Reverend Eisenberg to the Bombay Corresponding Committee, 15^th December 1847. CMS/B/OMS/CI3/01/11. Cadbury, Birmingham.

[xxxvii] Report on the African Asylum by Reverend Price, 30^th June 1872. CMS/B/OMS/C I3 O61/261C.

[xxxviii] The Sidi population of the city is hard to estimate because Sidis were usually subsumed in the category “Other Mussalmans” in the census. In 1872, the population of “Negro Africans” was 2074, which was 0.3% of Bombay city’s population (644,405). The 1901 census lists the population of “People from Africa” as 694, or 0.08% of the city’s population (776,006). S.M. Edwardes, Census of India-1901, Vol. XI:Bombay (Town and Island). Part VI: Tables (Bombay: Times of India Press, 1901), 128–129.

[xxxix]  Letter No. 351 of 1900 from the Political Agency and Consulate, Muskat to the Political Resident in the Persian Gulf, Bushire, 4th  July 1900. ‘File 5/65 I. Question of disposal of emancipated slaves and proposal to check traffic between Muscat, Oman and Zanzibar’. IOR/R/15/1/200: 18 Jan 1889-14 Jul 1905, pp. 96–8. BL, London.

[xl] Note from the Political Resident in the Persian Gulf, 27th May 1900. Ibid., p. 91.

[xli] Letter from Secretary to the Government of Bombay to the Foreign Department of the Government of India, 2^nd February 1889.Ibid., p. 5–7

[xlii]Ibid. Italics mine.

[xliii] Copy of report on the African Male Asylum at Sharanpur, Nasik to the Director of Public Instruction, Poona. September 13, 1861. CMS/B/OMS/C I3 O38/65A. Italics mine.

[xliv] Common Sense, writing on the “Mahomedan riot” of 1874, The Times of India, Bombay, Feb 19, 1874, p. 3, (ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Times of India).

[xlv] For a very illuminating, parallel discussion of abolitionists’ preoccupation with the body of the enslaved African woman see Turner 2017. Turner demonstrates the centrality of childbearing Jamaican women’s bodies and reproductive abilities to the plan of abolitionists like Wilberforce to produce an industrious and moral new population of “free” labourers who would keep England’s West Indian colonies running profitably and blamelessly after slavery had been phased out. She also argues that the struggle between enslaved mothers, midwives and caregivers on the one hand and slaveholders, doctors and abolitionists on the other, over control of reproduction on the plantation, displays the resistance offered to the imperialist and capitalist purposes attributed to birthing and raising children by the latter.

[xlvi] Fanon 2008, p. 143.

[xlvii] Hylton White argues that the racist caricature of “the Black of anti-blackness… as a brute biological force that lacks self-governing will and is thus in need of socializing violence to make it useful to civil society” is the fetish form of abstract labour that is produced by the alienated structure of social action in a capitalist society. White 2020.

[xlviii] Letter No. 2233 of 1889 from Colonial Secretary’s Office, Fiji to the Acting Secretary to Government of Bombay, 19^th August 1889.File 5/65 I, IOR/R/15/1/200: 18 Jan 1889–14 Jul 1905, pp. 12–13. 

[xlix]Ibid., pp. 15–16.

[l] Ghosh 1999.

[li] Ahuja 2006.

[lii] Ahuja 2006, p. 119.

[liii] Fields & Fields 2012.

[liv] Enclosure No. 1, letter from India Office to Foreign Office, 16^th February 1897.File 5/65 I, IOR/R/15/1/200: 18 Jan 1889–14 Jul 1905, p. 17, BL, London. Italics mine.

[lv] Enclosure No. 2, letter from Foreign Office to India Office, 24^th February 1897,Ibid.

[lvi] Enclosure in No. 3, letter from A.H. Hardinge, British Agent and Consul General at Zanzibar, to the Marquis of Salisbury, Foreign Office, 14^th April 1897,Ibid., pp. 18–19. Italics mine.

[lvii] CMS/B/OMS/C I3/O61/261 C.

[lviii] “The consumption of labour-power is completed, as in the case of every other commodity, outside the market or the sphere of circulation. Let us therefore, in company with the owner of money and the owner of labour-power, leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production… The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man... When we leave this sphere of simple circulation or the exchange of commodities, which provides the ‘free-trader vulgaris’ with his views, his concepts and the standard by which he judges the society of capital and wage-labour, a certain change takes place, or so it appears, in the physiognomy of ourdramatis personae. He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker.” Marx 1976/1990, pp. 279–80.

[lix] Letter from Senior Magistrate of Police, Bombay to J.G. Lumsden, Secretary to Government, 6^th October 1853, inSlavery. Vol. 95, No. 1048, 1853, Judicial Department. MRA, Mumbai.

[lx] Letter from Senior Magistrate of Police to Secretary to Government, 5^th October 1853,Ibid.

[lxi] A Times of India article from 1882 describes an athletic entertainment event for seamen of the Indian squadron, both British sailors and native lascars. The man who is noted as having won the flat race as well as the sack race for sailors of the Indian Marine is described as a “Seedee, who took to the race with considerable jollity”, “made a very favourable impression” on the onlookers, and “once his feet were off the ground, … ran along with amazing rapidity, and, excepting in one instance, outdistanced his competitors.” He is depicted as a figure of entertainment, an “irrepressible” “son of Ham”, but his appearance in the ranks of the sailors is not treated as an anomaly (“Entertainment to the Indian Squadron,” The Times of India, Bombay, November 20 1882, p. 5). Another article from 1903 mentions a row in Bombay involving “Seedee seamen” from “His Majesty’s Ship Perseus”, with the man who died being described by one of the European witnesses as a “Seedee seaman in man-of-war costume” (“Row in Bazaar Gate Street. Alleged Assault on a Seedee,”The Times of India, Bombay, July 24 1903, p. 6).

[lxii] Report of the Commander in Chief of the Indian Navy, Bombay to Secretary of Government, 18^th October 1853,Slavery. Vol. 95, No. 1048, Judicial Department, 1853. MRA, Mumbai.

[lxiii] Letter in the Standard, reprinted under the heading “The Wreck of the Tasmania” inThe Times of India, Bombay, May 17 1887, p. 5.

[lxiv] Bullen 1900, p. 317.

[lxv] Bullen 1900, p. 324.

[lxvi] Bullen 1900, p. 327.

[lxvii] Ahuja 2006, p. 129.

[lxviii] Lawless 1994, p. 35.

[lxix] Hood 1903, p. 11. Also, Hope 1990, p. 324.

[lxx] Ahuja 2006, p. 130.

[lxxi] “India Revisited,” The Times of India, Bombay, December 10 1885, p. 5. Italics mine.

[lxxii] “Talk Of the Town. An old Anglo Indian. The Wanderer,” The Times of India, Bombay, May 4 1892, p. 4.

[lxxiii] The exception to this pattern is Janet Ewald who points out in detail that “the P&O Company displayed particularly sharp divisions between almost exclusively Indian deck crews and often predominantly African engine room crews.” Ewald however speaks of Sidis often as synonymous with Africans, pointing to the birth or departure from Zanzibar of many stokers in the crew lists of P&O ships. Part of this problem is a result of grappling with the difficulty of knowing which terms to use to designate groups in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that did not fit the moulds (“African”, “Arab”, “Indian”) which we use for categorization today or simply accepting colonial terminology when they used those categories of identification for “native peoples”. Ewald 2000, p. 87.

[lxxiv] “Seamen: Definition of the term “Lascar or other native seamen”,” File no. 193. 1921–22, Marine Department, MRA, Mumbai.

[lxxv] Ewald 2000, p. 88.

[lxxvi] “National Seaman’s Union of India Bombay, Constitution and Rules,” 1933, in ‘Bombay’, IOR/Q/IDC/6: 1913–1935, BL, London.

[lxxvii] Wolf 2009, pp. 353–69.

[lxxviii] Letter from G.W Allen in the Standard, reprinted under the heading “The Wreck of the Tasmania” inThe Times of India, Bombay, May 17 1887, p. 5.

[lxxix]Ibid.

[lxxx] Letter from James W. Roughton in The Times of India, Bombay, May 24 1887, p. 5.

[lxxxi] “The Wreck of the Tasmania” in The Times of India, Bombay, May 17 1887, p. 5.

[lxxxii]Ibid.

[lxxxiii]Ibid.

[lxxxiv] Letters in The Times of India, Bombay, May 24 1887, p. 5.

[lxxxv] Letter from Fred Cates, Commander of Steamship Rome and the Commodore of the P&O Company’s Fleet, in ibid.

[lxxxvi] Republished in The Times of India, Bombay, May 17 1887, p. 5.

[lxxxvii] “The Wreck of the Tasmania: The Vexed Points Cleared up by a Passenger,” in The Times of India, Bombay, May 31 1887, p. 5.

[lxxxviii] “Statement by the Lascar Crew of the Tasmania,” in The Times of India, Bombay, June 16 1887, p. 4.

[lxxxix]The Times of India, Bombay, June 27 1887, p. 4.

[xc]Ibid.

[xci] The same coal and steam-powered process of accumulation premised on the abstraction of labour and time that did this violence to Sidi men’s bodies in steamship stokeholds, also destroyed the landscape of the coal-rich Chhota Nagpur plateau in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Matthew Shutzer writes in detail about how colonial law, in its effort to legitimize mining since the coal boom of the 1890s, abstracted land from its crop and tree bearing concrete attributes into a space governed by the value of minerals beneath it. Shutzer 2021, pp. 400–32.

[xcii] Notes from the author’s interview with Maqwa Sidi Abdul Rauf, 24^th July 2016. Mumbai, Sidi Mohalla, shrine of Bava Gor.

[xciii] Catlin-Jairazbhoy & Alpers 2004; Jairazbhoy & Catlin-Jairazbhoy 2003; Shroff 2013; Obeng 2007; Basu 2008; Jayasuriya & Pankhurst 2003; Prasad 2005; Ali (eds.) 2020.

[xciv] Helene Basu’s detailed work on the Sidis of Gujarat also explains the importance of Bava Gor and his siblings, Bava Habash and Mai Misra, in the construction of a Sufi, African-Gujarati jamāt united by ties of kinship. Basu 2001, p. 265. Unlike the Sidis of her study however, who disliked the use of the term “Habshi” to describe themselves because of its connotations with slavery, Sidi Rauf of Bombay proudly laid his claim to “Habshi”, using it to denote his jamāt more frequently than “Sidi”, and also explicitly claiming a past of slavery through a narrative of strength and loyalty.

[xcv] Sidi Rauf’s representation of Sidi origins through a lineage of travel and service to Islam resonates in many ways (though not all) with Mana Kia’s description of itinerants in the early modern Persianate world (Iran, Turan, Hindustan) and their articulation of origins not in simple terms of birth but as lineages of place, service, achievements and learning. While the many individual subjects of Kia’s study are scholars and administrators who authored histories and commemorative texts unlike working class Sidis, her description of lineages as “polyglot, multiple, aporetic, and contextually determined” still apply to Sidi Rauf’s origin story. Names, she says, were “condensed narratives of origin” that accrued over time and changed contextually, taking a fixed form only when demanded by the modern state. (Sidi Rauf initially introduced himself to me as Abdul Rauf, then added, “Please write Sidi. And before that write Maqwa, which means the leader (patel) of thisjamāt.” “Maqwa Sidi Abdul Rauf” was thus how he chose to represent himself to me, an interviewer seeking to write about the history of his community.) “Although place was part of origin, it did not by itself structure origin’s meaning. Even in lineages of place a person’s birthplace and subsequent homes constituted a list, along with other types of places, such as ancestral homelands, … destinations marking passages, or locations of… devotional apogee.” Kia 2020, p. 104.

[xcvi] Cohn 1987, pp. 224–54.

[xcvii] Shaw 1935, p. 208.

[xcviii] Ismaa’il 1928/1977, p. 375.

[xcix] Ismaa’il 1928/1977, p. 376.

[c] I am grateful to my anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to the work of Milinda Banerjee on the violence done by the abstract, patriarchal and bourgeois notion of “dynasty” globalized and imposed by European colonialism (similar to that of “race” in this article), and the more collective forms of regality (such as ‘rajvamshi’ and ‘Kshatriya’) embraced by subaltern communities of Tripura in resistance against both colonisers and upper caste elites. Banerjee 2020. Also see Banerjee & Afnasyev 2020.

[ci] Fanon 1964, p. 4. I know from Fanon that “sidi” was used by French colonialists to refer to Algerians, but am unaware of the history of that name in the Algerian context.