Global Forces and Local Responses: The Case of the Mongolia ‘Riot’, Sydney, 1908

Abstract

Australian press reports of a ‘riot’ between two groups of Indian lascars at Circular Quay and subsequent demonstration through Sydney streets in 1908 illustrate the collision between the forces of globalisation – in the form of the transoceanic passage of South Asian seafarers – and those of nation formation and white racial identity, in the response of the local authorities. Australian anxieties over the transgression of space by mobile South Asian labour were confirmed. The incident was a reminder that the ambition of establishing a White Australia behind secure borders had not been achieved successfully.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Tony Martin-Jones who first alerted me to the newspaper reports, and to Heather Goodall, Gopal Balachandran and Ravi Ahuja who made helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 179–80.

2 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 184. This is a major theme in Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1870–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), and echoed in Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 492–6, in particular (‘ … the global sharpening of the struggle between the races’).

3 Lake and Reynolds, 10–11. See also Bayly, 1–11, 237–8; Osterhammel, 112–21, 371–4, 495–6.

4 Osterhammel, 112–13.

5 Chang, Pacific Connections, 158–9.

6 Nadia Rhook, ‘“Turban-clad” British Subjects. Tracking the Circuits of Mobility, Visibility and Sexuality in Settler Nation-Making’, Transfers 5, no. 3 (2015): 104–22; Andonis Piperoglou, ‘Vagrant “Gypsies” and Respectable Greeks: A Defining Moment in Early Greek-Melbourne, 1897–1900’, in Reading, Interpreting, Experiencing: An Inter-Cultural Journey into Greek Letters, eds M. Tsianikas, G. Couvalis and M. Palaktsoglou (Adelaide: Modern Greek Studies Association of New Zealand, 2015), 140–51, dspace.flinders.edu.au (accessed 12 May 2021); Ian Simpson, ‘“Decent Fellows, Making an Honest Living”: Indian Hawkers in White Australia’, History Australia 13, no. 3 (2016): 321–4.

7 Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Countries (Vancouver: UCB Press, 2010), 17, 56, 66, 113, 242–3.

8 Ibid., 12.

9 Ibid., 5–6, 15, 113, 239.

10 Ibid., 182. See also Penelope Edmonds, ‘“I Followed England Round the World”: The Rise of Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism, and the Spatial Narratives of Nineteenth-Century British Settler Colonies of the Pacific Rim’, in Re-Orienting Whiteness, eds Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 99–115; Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3–4.

11 Bayly, 2.

12 Osterhammel, 461.

13 Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher and Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘Re-Orienting Whiteness: A New Agenda for the Field’, in Boucher et al., 4; Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers, 100–1.

14 Jane Carey and Frances Steel, ‘Introduction: On the Critical Importance of Colonial Formations’, History Australia 15, no. 3 (2018): 399–412, 401, 409, 411.

15 Rhook, 105.

16 Margaret Allen, ‘Otim Singh in White Australia’, in Sea Changes, Beaches and the Littoral in the Antipodes, eds Susan Hosking, Rick Hosking, Rebecca Pannell and Nena Bierbaum (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2009), 195–212.

17 Piperoglou, 140–51.

18 This account of the ‘riot’ and the events that followed has been constructed from the following: Sydney Morning Herald, 16 December 1908, 7; 17 December, 7; 18 December, 4; 19 December, 6, 9; 21 December, 9, 14; Australian Star, 17 December 1908, 7; 18 December, 6, 7; Daily Telegraph, 18 December 1908, 5; 19 December, 5; Evening News, 16 December 1908, 6; Bulletin, 24 December 1908, 7. The reports were widely reproduced in regional and interstate newspapers in the following days.

19 Seedies, or sidis – possibly a corrupted form of sayyid – had their origins among the Bantu peoples of East Africa. They arrived in India with the first waves of Arabic Islamic invasions in the eighth century CE, and then at various intervals as merchants, sailors, indentured servants and escaped or freed slaves. Dargahs (shrines) of sidi sufi saints, such as the Sidi Saiyyid Mosque in Ahmedabad, are widely venerated; sidis served as military leaders and politicians in the Maratha state of the seventeenth century, but the community itself occupied an ‘in-between’ position in Indian society. Helene Basu judges their present situation as ‘neither completely isolated from the host society, nor have they completely merged with the host population’. Estimates number the contemporary community in Pakistan and the west coast of India at between 50,000 and 60,000. Helene Basu, ‘Slave, Soldier, Trader, Faqir: Fragments of African Histories in Western India (Gujarat)’, in The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean, eds Shihan de S. Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003), 241–6.

20 The Mongolia’s crew list indicates about 130 Punjabi and Seedie lascars were on board; the newspapers’ figures suggest roughly 100 of these men took part in the ‘riot’. NRS 13278 Shipping Lists, Shipping Master’s Office, State Archives New South Wales, Sydney.

21 George Rudé notes that working-class crowd protests commonly demand some form of elementary ‘natural’ justice. George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (London: Serif, rev. edn, 2005), 238–9. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 178.

22 Rupert Lockwood has described the 1945 protest march in Sydney by Indian seamen in support of the boycott of ships supplying the former Dutch colony of the East Indies as ‘the first great demonstration of Asians ever seen in the streets of Sydney’, while Heather Goodall has termed the same march ‘an unprecedented event’. Rupert Lockwood, Black Armada: Australia and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1942–49 (Sydney: Halstead Press, 1982), 164; Heather Goodall, ‘Port Politics: Indian Seamen, Australian Unions and Indonesian Independence, 1945–47’, Labour History 94 (2008): 60. The events described in this article suggest these claims should be reconsidered.

23 Daily Telegraph, 18 December 1908, 5; Evening News, 16 December 1908, 6.

24 Sydney Morning Herald, 17 December 1908, 7; Australian Star, 17 December 1908, 7; 18 December, 6, 7.

25 As well as the work of Bayly, Lake and Reynolds, Chang, Pacific Connections, and Osterhammel, cited previously, important contributions include Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

26 Kornel Chang, ‘Enforcing Transnational White Solidarity: Asian Migration and the Formation of the U.S.-Canadian Boundary’, American Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2008): 686, 691; Chang, Pacific Connections, 124–5, 147, 157–60.

27 G. Balachandran, Globalising Labour? Indian Seafarers and World Shipping, c. 1870–1945 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6–8, 51. The mail subsidy on the route to Australia was 14 pence per pound.

28 W. Hughes, ‘Post and Telegraph Bill’, Commonwealth of Australia, House of Representatives, Debates, 14 August 1901, 3735, http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22hansard80%2Fhansardr80%2F1901-08-14%2F0045%22 (accessed 6 December 2021).

29 Hughes, ‘Post and Telegraph Bill’, 4 September 1901, 4489.

30 For other examples of Australian opposition to lascar labour, see Diane Kirkby, ‘“The Sailor Is a Human Being”: Labour Market Regulation and the Australian Navigation Act 1912’, in Past Law, Present Histories, ed. Diane Kirkby (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2012), 179–81.

31 Janet J. Ewald, ‘Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen and Other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1914’, American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (2000): 87–8.

32 Ravi Ahuja, ‘Subaltern Networks under British Imperialism: Exploring the Case of South Asian Maritime Labour (c. 1890–1947)’, in Space on the Move: Transformations of the Indian Ocean Seascape in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, eds Jan-Georg Deutsch and Brigitte Reinwald (Berlin: Schwartz, 2002), 45–50; Ravi Ahuja, ‘The Age of the “Lascar”: South Asian Seafarers in the Times of Imperial Steam Shipping’, in Routledge Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora, eds Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook (London: Routledge, 2013), 112–13; Balachandran, Globalising Labour?, 75.

33 Gopal Balachandran, email to the author, 1 June 2019.

34 Gopal Balachandran, email to the author, 17 April 2019. See also Balachandran, Globalising Labour?, 98–9; Ravi Ahuja, ‘Networks of Subordination – Networks of the Subordinated: The Ordered Spaces of South Asian Maritime Labour in an Age of Imperialism (c. 1890–1947)’, in The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia, eds Ashwini Tambe and Harald Fischer-Tine (London: Routledge, 2009), 13–48; Ewald, 84–8.

35 Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive (London: John Murray, 1903), 507; Balachandran, Globalising Labour?, 27–34.

36 Ahuja, ‘Age of the “Lascar”’, 115; Ahuja, ‘Networks of Subordination’, 14.

37 Caroline Adams, ed., Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers: Life Stories of Pioneer Sylhetti Settlers in Britain (London: THAP Books, 1987), 117.

38 G. Balachandran, ‘South Asian Seafarers and Their Worlds: c. 1870–1930s’, History Cooperative. Conference Proceedings. Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges (2005), 3–4, http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/ebook/p/2005/history_cooperative/www.historycooperative.org/proceedings/seascapes/balachandran.html (accessed 12 May 2021).

39 For example, see Australasian, 3 February 1900, 44; and Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, 7 March 1902, 7. Similarly, Vivek Bald has described how American journalists filled the imaginations of their readers with ‘fantastical ideas about “the East”’ when describing Indian lascars. Vivek Bald, Bengali Harem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 55, 95–6.

40 Examination of Captain H. Henderson, in Report of the Mercantile Marine Committee, Vol. II: Evidence (no details of publication), 21, cited in Ravi Ahuja, ‘A Freedom Still Enmeshed in Servitude: The Unruly “Lascars” of the SS City of Manila or, a Micro-History of the “Free Labour” Problem’, in Working Lives and Worker Militancy: The Politics of Labour in Colonial India, ed. Ravi Ahuja (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2013), 123. For similar, Australian views, see Critic (Adelaide), 2 February 1901, 12; Northern Star (Lismore, NSW), 24 August 1901, 4.

41 Balachandran, Globalising Labour?, 76, 111. See also L.G.W. White, Ships, Coolies and Rice (London: Sampson Low, Marton and Co., Ltd, 1936), 64–5.

42 Some examples are: ‘An Asiatic Problem: Rebellious Lascars’, Evening News (Sydney), 6 January 1900, 5; ‘Trouble on the Spithead’, Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, 23 October 1900, 4; Telegraph (Brisbane), 19 January 1901, 4; ‘Lascars at Loggerheads’, Australian Star (Sydney), 22 December 1904, 1; Richmond River Herald and Northern Districts Advertiser (Coraki, NSW), 23 December 1904, 7; Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 28 December 1906, 6. This is not to obscure the fact that concerns about the perceived threat lascars posed to the working conditions and pay of white seafarers were typically inseparable from concerns about racial purity.

43 For reports of previous fights involving lascars at Circular Quay, see Australian Star, 22 December 1904, 1; Sydney Morning Herald, 28 December 1906, 5.

44 Rudé, 12. Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ravi Ahuja have made similar comments about Indian working-class histories. See Chakrabarty, 65; Ahuja, ‘Introduction’, in Working Lives, xiv.

45 Adams. See also Ravi Ahuja, ‘Capital at Sea, Shaitan Below Decks? A Note on Global Narratives, Narrow Spaces, and the Limits of Experience’, History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 2, no. 1 (2102): 79; Ali Raza and Benjamin Zachariah, ‘“To Take Arms Across a Sea of Trouble”: The “Lascar System”, Politics and Agency in the 1920s’, Itinerario 36, no. 3 (2012): 19; Hasan N. Gardezi, ed., Chains to Lose: Life and Struggles of a Revolutionary: Memoirs of Dada Amir Haider Khan (Karachi: Pakistan Study Centre, 2007).

46 Raza and Zachariah, 19; Balachandran, ‘South Asian Seafarers’, 3–4, 6. See also Chakrabarty, 65.

47 Balachandran, Globalising Labour?, 68, 94, 224.

48 ‘It is clear from the narratives in pigeon [sic] English given by the Seedie-boys, who were gathered at the end of the wharf after the melee that the fight was of a sanguinary character’. This information was helpfully reported verbatim by the Sydney Morning Herald, 17 December 1908, 7.

49 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978), 94. In this, Said draws on Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2002), especially 142–8.

50 Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), 6–7.

51 Ibid., 3–8; Alan Lester, ‘British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire’, History Workshop Journal 54 (2002): 25–31.

52 Geoffrey Blainey, Black Kettle and Full Moon: Daily Life in a Vanished Australia (Melbourne: Penguin, 2003), 134–7, 336–8. On the nineteenth-century growth of newspapers, see also Osterhammel, 25–39.

53 For example, see Gustave le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 32–3. See also the discussion in George Gaskell and Robert Benewick, ‘The Crowd in Context’, in The Crowd in Contemporary Britain, eds George Gaskell and Robert Benewick (London: Sage, 1987), 1–7; and Rudé, 237–9, 252–7.

54 Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), 24. For examples of contemporary British reports of Indian riots, see the Times of India, 14 January 1908, 7; 15 February 1908, 10; 6 March 1908, 8. Ravi Ahuja has made similar comments about British interpretations of riots involving lascars; Ahuja, email to the author, 16 April 2018.

55 ‘Lo! The Gentle Indian’, Bulletin, 24 December 1908, 24.

56 Australian Star, 18 December 1908, 6, 7; Bulletin, 24 December 1908, 5, 24.

57 The term ‘riot’ to describe the Circular Quay events was taken up and repeated by regional newspapers. See, for example, Grafton Argus and Clarence River General Advertiser, 17 December 1908, 5; Goulburn Evening Penny Post, 17 December 1908, 2; Wingham Chronicle and Manning River Observer, 19 December 1908, 5. For reports on the Washington and Vancouver events, see Sydney Morning Herald, 9 September, 1907, 1; 11 September, 8; 14 September, 13; Daily Telegraph, 5 October 1907, 9. For an overview of the Bombay riots, see Richard I. Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya: Tilak and Mass Politics in Maharashtra (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 173–84. For discussion of the various implications of the term ‘riot’, see Jim Masselos, ‘The City as Represented in Crowd Action: Bombay, 1893’, in The City in Action: Bombay Struggles for Power, ed. Jim Masselos (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 104–24, especially 108. Both the Sydney Morning Herald of 17 December 1908 and the Daily Telegraph of 18 December 1908 headlined the disturbances as a ‘riot’. For further coverage of the Bombay events, see the following: Daily Telegraph, 22 July 1908, 9; 27 July, 6, 8; Australian Star, 25 July 1908, 1; Sunday Times, 26 July 1908, 12; Sydney Morning Herald, 27 July 1908, 7; 29 July, 9; Evening News, 27 July 1908, 27.

58 Rudé, 8–9. The comments about generalising members of a crowd are from Masselos, ‘Crowd Action’, 115–19.

59 I thank Heather Goodall for her insights here. Email to the author, 8 March 2019. The march to the company’s office is strikingly similar to the events in 1945 when Indian seamen with a few Indonesians protested at the KPM shipping line offices. See Goodall, 60–4.

60 Sydney Morning Herald, 17 December 1908, 7. Similar reports appeared in the Daily Telegraph, 18 December 1908, 5, 19; Bulletin, 24 December 1908, 24.

61 As an example of how P&O stage-managed lascars for the occasional public display, see the photograph of company lascars visiting Taronga Zoo in Sydney in the Sydney Mail, 26 December 1906, 1636. The description of lascars as ‘picturesque trophies’ is from Balachandran, Globalising Labour?, 6.

62 Louis Stone, Jonah (London: Methuen, 1911), ch. 19. For lascars in Sydney during the early colonial period, see Grace Karskens, The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997), 18–19, 40–3, 190–1; for the 1930s and 1940s, see Goodall, 46–51.

63 White, 64–5.

64 Daily Telegraph, 18 December 1908, 5.

65 Masselos argues British documentation of rioting crowds in colonial Bombay served a similar purpose. See Masselos, ‘Crowd Action’, 113.

66 Masselos, ‘Crowd Action’, 113. Kipling’s story, On the City Wall, provides a fictional case study of imperial fears of the Indian mob. See also Ewald, 75.

67 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar maintains that paranoia was ‘the hallmark of the British colonial imagination’. Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 195.

68 Piperoglou, 147–8; Rhook, 108–9.

69 Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers, 139–40.

70 Jim Masselos, ‘Appropriating Urban Space: Social Constructs of Bombay in the Time of the Raj’, in Masselos, City in Action, 290–1.

71 Lake and Reynolds, 3–4.

72 Truth (Brisbane), 3 January 1909, 12.

73 Said, 94.