The Chinese Maritime Workforce in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Community Building and Cross-Cultural Interventions

My paper examines the influx into Britain of Chinese maritime labor from the Indian Ocean and South China Sea during the long eighteenth century.  Rather than a discrete, bounded workforce, this maritime labor constantly overflowed the ship onto land with a proportion establishing the ethnically diverse environment of the London maritime community. I give examples of how the maritime community in the London dockland areas recognized and negotiated cross-cultural differences in the resulting social encounter and analyze the constellation of governmental and local interests involved.