- Title
- 'On their own element': nineteenth-century seamen's missions and merchant seamen's mobility
- Creator
- Atkinson, Justine
- Relation
- Empire and Mobility in the Long Nineteenth Century p. 92-111
- Relation
- Studies in Imperialism
- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- In the early nineteenth century, evangelical seamen’s missions began to appear in Britain, tending to the spiritual and material needs of the sailor class. Fundamental to the movement’s belief in the seaman’s potential to demonstrate British and Christian values to non-Christian exotic communities was the assumption that sailors were a transient people, considered most useful to the empire when travelling ‘on their element’, the sea. Sailors’ behaviour on shore, however, could be detrimental to the empire’s image, often impacting on both settled and indigenous communities. Attempts by colonial missionaries and merchants to direct the sailor’s movements while in port sought to allay local anxieties by reaffirming his place on the sea. The mobility of seamen in China’s Guangdong Province and efforts to provide them with spiritual welfare reveal the anxieties of colonists where the British Empire was yet to have a firm foothold. Over the course of the nineteenth century, attitudes towards the permanence of sailors changed as the relationships between British traders and Chinese authorities shifted, demonstrating conditional acceptance as colonies became more self-assured of their place within empire, or came to regard the presence of seamen as confirmation of their own right to occupy a peripheral space.
- Description
- 1st
- Subject
- representation; mobility history; imperial history; british empire; transport history
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1444867
- Identifier
- uon:42431
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781526126382
- Language
- eng
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