Effervescent Seas

Abstract Just before the First World War, the largest French shipping line operating in the Indo-Pacific, the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, reported that 44 percent of its personnel were non-Europeans. Made up of French colonial subjects and foreign citizens, this workforce hailed from across the layover ports of the empire's Indo-Pacific steamship highways. Portrayed by French labor leaders as strikebreaking scabs, and by the large shipping companies as docile peons, these “indigenous” seafarers were largely erased from French imperial and labor history before the First World War. Mobilizing archives from France, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam, especially ships’ logs from the 1880s to the 1910s, this article reassesses the place of the French empire's Asian and African seafarers within an intensifying labor movement and an incipient imperial security state. Revisiting everything from mobile acts of outright rebellion to subtly assertive practices of placemaking, the article argues that indigenous seafarers had begun forging a disruptive politics of mobile labor well before the First World War. Their ability to wield power in the face of stigmatization and precarization, the article suggests, points to the underexplored tensions between the “New Imperial” French state and the subcontracted shipping lines on which it depended.