In this energetic and easily digested study, Ravi Ahuja combines a micro-historical focus on the unfolding and implications of a single event—the 1922 shipwreck of the Royal Mail steam vessel SS Egypt that killed 87 passengers and crew—with a labour historian’s penchant for more than just narrative history. Ahuja is committed to exploring ‘the labour process’, harkening back to celebrated figures in the Marxist tradition from Harry Braverman to E. P. Thompson. In Ahuja’s hands, however, doing labour process history provides a way not only to reckon with the ‘momentous shifts in the composition of the maritime workforce’ in the early twentieth century but also to chart the ‘heightened importance of “race” in the management of ship-work in an age of steam’ (p. 12). In this respect, the Egypt’s more than just ‘proverbial “motley crew”’ of subordinated, engine room Indian ‘Lascars’ was characteristic of the age of steam that Shipping Lords and Coolie Stokers seeks to spotlight. Through maritime capital’s ‘ethnically segmented’ rather than ‘cosmopolitan’ steamship workforce, Ahuja zeroes in on the connection between a vessel like the Egypt’s particular brand of hierarchical labour organisation and shifting material circumstances. On the technological front, he argues, this made for a link back to the spread of new propulsion mechanisms; on the more strictly ‘economic’ front, he argues the link was to the demand side increase in passenger traffic on the high seas (p. 12).

As the word order in the subtitle of Shipping Lords and Coolie Stokers suggests, the book’s point of departure also finds Ahuja pushing off from what he sees as a still prevailing historiographical status quo that has been too content to ‘study merely the most overtly abusive linguistic expressions of maritime racism’ to ‘expose their evident irrationality’ (p. 13). The seeming slight made here to the would-be exponent (bogey?) of treating discourse as all-in-all is supplemented by Ahuja’s channelling of—even while standing somewhat askew from—Stuart Hall’s famed idea of race as the modality in which class is lived. For Ahuja the key watchword is thus ‘racial management’, which he more specifically defines as ‘a modality of class relations buttressed by racist status ascription’ (p. 15). In this understanding, race/racism’s foundational logic within maritime capitalism in the age of steam was to obviate and/or delay the need for ‘heavy investment’ in more ‘advanced fixed capital’ by ‘providing the imperial British shipping industry with a feasible alternative to regularized and more expensive forms of employment’ (p. 15).

With much of the above analytical heavy lifting set forth in the book’s short introduction, subsequent chapters are shaped much more directly by a method that borders on the micro-historical. Both in its voice and chapter structure, Ahuja’s study thus tends towards the narrative, with details often unfolded with vivid colour and at a rapid fire pace. With 12 chapters delivered over roughly 200 pages, the study rushes forth in a series of small chunks that come at a brisk pace. We thus begin on 20 May 1922, with the Egypt’s collision with SS Seine, as the latter emerged from the fog and sent a ‘jolt’ into the former. Ahuja colourfully depicts the panic and rapid demise of the Egypt. In subsequent chapters, he charts the reception of these events in the larger metropolitan public sphere, bringing us to the front pages of the New York Times and the French tabloid Le Petit Press. It is here, also—beyond the ship’s own system of ‘racial management’—that the book’s reckoning with race further comes to the fore, as Ahuja offers his own analysis of the news coverage, shot through with a racialised cast, complete with condemnations of the resort to ‘cheap’ non-white labour. He points out that, in such coverage, it was the ‘“savagery” of the Indian seafarers’—all supposedly irrational and in an ‘indescribable panic’ once the collision took place—to which blame for the disaster was to be assigned (p. 31).

This concern with the reception and racialised parsing of the Egypt’s demise proves one of Shipping Lords and Coolie Stokers’ running preoccupations. In chapter nine, for example, the narrative lingers in 1922 to consider Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, which premiered in New York City the same year as the shipwreck of the Egypt. A play about encountering ‘the maritime underworld’, O’Neill’s expressionist work revolves around ‘“[t]he filthy beast”’—of ‘menacing physicality and sexualized abusiveness’—of its main character, the Yank, ‘the stokers’ muscular and sooty boss man’ (p. 140). Ahuja cuts through the many interpretations to argue that a shadow of racial difference fell over the play, given a ‘cultural milieu where the image of the human “ape” or “gorilla” appeared in various shades oscillating between stigmatizations of race and class’ (p. 143). The parsing—or giving lie to—racialised discourse and its filters appear as the task in a number of other chapters as well.

Questions about language and expression are also at the heart of chapter seven, which returns us to the unfolding of the shipwreck itself. More specifically, the chapter is devoted to reconsidering the ‘starkly irreconcilable accounts’ of the failure of the ship’s crew to sound the ‘boat station’ signal that was supposed to be initiated after collision (pp. 105–106). Ahuja eschews both of the two key accounts offered in British and Indian testimonies to the Board of Trade inquiry on the Egypt disaster alike: a first, that pointed to the idea of a ‘miscommunication at a basic linguistic level’ and, a second, to the alleged failure on the part of the Indian seaman to ‘pay attention to the officers’ commands in their state of panic’ (p. 106). In its place, Ahuja offers a fascinating alternative interpretation of the communication breakdown that takes the reader through what its author calls the ‘specialized and simplified language of command’ known as ‘Lascari bat’ that the Indian crew used and that Ahuja likens to ‘the latinized “military Hindustani” that was studied and used by the British officers of the “British Indian Army” during that period’ (p. 115).

It may be in the book’s other chapters where Shipping Lords and Coolie Stokers best follows through on its idea of ‘racial management’ as a ‘modality’ of class relations. It is in these chapters that the labour process aspect of the study most truly comes alive. Insofar as this means the book reflects something of a bifurcation—in which some chapters are more clearly about race/racialisation and others about class, there may be a certain structural irony in how the book cannot but end up reintroducing a conceptual (and, hence, possibly causal) divide between the two historical concepts. That said, in the parts of the book focusing more intently on the labour process, Ahuja proves more than capable of maintaining the brisk pace through short and narratively rich chapters packed with vital analytical and historiographical insight.

The most exemplary of these is perhaps chapter eight, which begins with Marx’s claims about how the technological requirements of the propulsion machinery of steamships had revolutionised industrial production itself. Marx’s image of the ‘cyclopean machines’ required to build ‘the enormous steel hulls of steamers’ (and that displaced the skilled artisans who handled pre-industrial shipping technologies) is one Ahuja returns to several times (p. 122). From here, Ahuja comes to later scholarship—especially the work of Raphael Samuel (as well as Heide Gerstenberger and Ulrich Welke)—complicating Marx’s picture by emphasising how in point of fact cyclopean dependence was ‘limited and patchy’. This creates a point of entry into the complex questions around the extent to which it was mainly ‘technological compulsions’ that necessitated ‘excessively steep hierarchies’ within the shipping economy, like those between engineers and firemen (p. 123). Be this as it may, it also leaves open related questions about how unskilled the ostensibly ‘“raw” muscle power’-based work of labour in the coalbunkers and stokeholds really was (p. 125). Eventually, chapter eight reaches the ‘socially engineered divisions’ that ‘went along with … expectations regarding the social profile of the various status groups’ who worked steamship capital. Above all, for Ahuja, this included the racially ‘stigmatized labour’ of trimmers (viz., those who ensured that coal was evenly distributed within a ship to guarantee it remained ‘trim’ in the water) and firemen (viz., stokers) (p. 138).

Extending these general historiographical points into the more specific context of Indian ‘lascars’ is the task of chapter ten. The express aim here is to fill the gap left by other works on labour history, including Ahuja’s own, that have addressed ‘[m]erely one side of the racialization of maritime labour in the age of the steamship’. That is, namely, the side that was constituted by the labour market where labour power was sold and that has generally been examined through the study of labour relations (p. 164). Chapter ten, by contrast, is focused upon the other side of the racialisation of maritime labour, the labour process through which labour power was extracted. This can best be examined, Ahuja argues, through the study of the work site. In lieu of a ‘comprehensive analysis’ of the various labour processes in a steamship’s ‘three departments, which would require a book of its own’, Ahuja focuses on the engine room, ‘the department below decks where the increase in the employment of Indian seafarers had been most dynamic’ (p. 164).

The overarching question chapter ten probes—concerning the managerial advantages of racialising stokehold labour on vessels like the Egypt—thus proves emblematic of the book’s more general raison d’être. It is especially fitting, then, that the chapter should eventually lead us back to the ‘Indian seafarers’’ own ‘aware[ness] of’ what the ‘management model’ to which they were subject was all about (p. 180). Here, Ahuja makes use of a typescript of Amir Haider Khan to raise the issue of how one might raise a counter-hegemonic narrative. Taken together, then, in so many words the last two chapters ask if we cannot leave aside newspaper reports and official letters to restore voice to the seemingly voiceless whose pleas are otherwise liable to be ‘muffled’ under the ‘thick filters of legal proceedings and translations’ (p. 204). The final chapter of the book is meant to steer us past ‘the Scylla of “victimology”’ and ‘the Charybdis of “agenciology”’ (p. 205). Here Ahuja uses Amir Haider Khan’s voice to navigate us through this perilous strait. In commending these closing chapters, then, it is ironic that the attentive reader might find themselves with plaudits to spare for work less trained than Shipping Lords and Coolie Stokers for synthesising race and class. After all, scholarship more exclusively focused than Ahuja’s upon race as a discursive construct has clearly made its own contribution to rendering the subaltern labourer’s echoes audible and, in the process, pushed back on race’s silencing effect in a way not unlike Shipping Lords and Coolie Stokers concludes by doing.