13177gHU

SoSe 20: On the Seven Seas. A Global History of Maritime Labour and Shipping Industry (with particular attention to Africa)

Daniel Tödt

Information for students

This is an online-seminar that includes asynchronous and synchronous elements. The main platform for the teaching is Moodle. Please send me an e-mail asap so that I can give you the Moodle password (the course will be accessible on 15 April at the latest) and possible updates: daniel.toedt (at) staff.hu-berlin.de. I would also send you an invitation for the introductory meeting (via video conference) on Wednesday, 22 April (14:15-15:45 CEST). close

Additional information / Pre-requisites

Course Requirements: A. In order to have active participation (5 ECTS), you need to fulfill the following requirements: 1) Reading texts for every session; 2) writing reading responses; 3) comments, discussions and presentations; 4) general discussions; 5) other tasks (listening to screencasts, analyzing sources). For all these requirements, there will be fixed time slots and deadlines, but no synchronous teaching. There will be also synchronous teaching like video conferences. Participation is highly recommended but not mandatory. I will also offer individual online meetings in order to discuss aims, challenges, and questions. B. You can also write a Research Paper in this seminar (5 ECTS). In addition to 1)-5), you will write a seminar paper related to the topics of the class (about 6,000 words, including the footnotes, but excluding the bibliography). We will discuss the challenge of access to primary and secondary sources and surely find solutions. Being a staff member of the Humboldt-Universität, I will follow the Corona-related instructions of this university for preparing and conducting this seminar (including provided software for online-teaching such as Zoom for video conferences). Teaching online is totally new to me, and I invite you to join this experiment. Please be assured that I’m willing to find flexible, pragmatic and supportive solutions. close

Comments

Maritime workers such as seafarers and dockworkers have recently attracted much interest in global labour history. Maritime Transport in the ‘age of steam’ relied on cheap and unskilled manpower underdeck and on the quays. Reproducing hierarchies of class and race, it was primarily workers from the colonies that performed under-appreciated and dangerous tasks such as unloading cargo and heaving coal in the oven of the steamship. Furthermore, shipping and trading companies as well as port cities came into the focus of scholars that seek to understand the intertwined processes of global capitalism, urbanization, industrialization and colonial imperialism. This course brings into dialogue the dispersed historical research on seafarers and dockworkers, steamship companies and port cities while focusing on the period roughly between the early 19th and mid-20th century. We will follow the paths and lifecycle of Indian, Senegalese and Chinese seafarers. We will deal with casual labour and struggles of dockworkers in Mombasa, Marseille, and San Francisco. We will comprehend the world-spanning maritime network of shipping companies such as Elder Dempster and Woermann. By discussing and reframing recent case-studies dealing with different parts of the world (with particular attention to Africa), the course seeks to sketch a global history of maritime labour and shipping industry. close