Subsidising Whiteness: British Shipping and Racialised Politics after the Great Depression

In this blog post Shagnick Bhattacharya (Independent Scholar) presents their research, which was supported by the 2026 Joint BME Small Research Grant.

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Following the Great Depression, British shipowners were in a desperate situation. The shipping industry was a highly competitive market; in 1935 within just the tramp shipping sector responsible for the flow of essential goods like coal, grain, timber, and iron across the world, there were 960 operational companies in the world of which 675 were small-scale enterprises owning either four ships or less. Market competition was so severe that even the largest companies never controlled more than two per cent of the entire market supply of any commodity. Large quantities of tonnage were being sold abroad to foreign owners for trading, which was also perceived as a potential security risk to the UK. Between October 1933 and July 1936, in fact, the number of foreign-going tramp vessels owned in the UK fell from 1,046 to 908. The industry faced a ‘considerable’ loss of employment, and the British Mercantile Marine was estimated at the time to have shrunk by over 3 million gross tons.

Against this backdrop, the British government saw it necessary to set up subsidies for stabilising the shipping industry, as well as providing for fleet modernisation—akin to the government’s aerospace subsidies today. Consequently, during 1935–37, the tramp shipping sector alone received subsidies worth £4,002,183 under the British Shipping (Assistance) Act, 1935. According to the Conservative MP for Barkston Ash, Leonard Ropner, it had ‘saved the British Mercantile Marine from its rapid approach towards disintegration’. However, even as the National Union of Seamen described 1936 as a ‘wonderful year of achievement,’ race seems to have quickly become a battleground within this political economy of crisis management.

Thus, in February 1935, when the President of the Board of Trade and the National Liberal MP for St Ives, Walter Runciman, was asked in the House of Commons if ship owners were being encouraged to employ British seamen, he replied, ‘Certainly. That is what we are doing’. However, official correspondence from within the Board of Trade just three months later shows a very different stance:

‘So far as the Subsidy Committee are concerned, owners would not put themselves in a more favourable position by giving preference to white British seamen over British Indians. Whenever they are asked for an opinion, you may be assured that the Committee will make this clear.’

And yet, while the biggest of the shipping companies like the Clan Line continued to employ Indian seamen—at times with crews consisting almost entirely of them—many other Indian seamen were actually being turned away from British ships. Although it was not a provision of the Act, many shipowners did seem to take the view that they were expected to employ more white British sailors over those who were British subjects, British Protected Persons, or foreign-born. This also seems to have been an important aspect of contemporary political rhetoric, as highlighted by the Labour MP for Hammersmith North, Fielding West, asking Runciman in the House of Commons if it was costing the state over £2,000,000 a year ‘to subsidise’ (in lieu of unemployment benefits given to white seamen) the employment of ‘cheap coloured labour’.

After some time, the fact that non-white seamen were still being employed saw growing political support for proposals to end the shipping subsidies altogether. Politicians like the Labour MP from Seaham Harbour, Manny Shinwell, were declaring subsidies to be ‘the biggest swindle perpetrated on the British public’. Taking example of the Clan Line, he pointed out that there was ‘no case for a subsidy’: In 1935, whereas the company had received a subsidy of £17,608, the next year it had earned a profit of £644,511—making the subsidy worth just a meagre 2.73 per cent of the company’s profit. Important for him, though, was that this company did not employ any white seamen ‘except for four quartermasters.’ Hence, while the races of seamen were not at all an official or legal factor determining subsidies, racial prejudice was nevertheless widely understood as an implicit expectation in its implementation.

Meanwhile, however, according to data presented by Shinwell himself, the combined profits of the forty-one biggest British cargo companies had gone from around £3.14 million in 1927 and £4.99 million in 1928 to £1.08 million by 1936—which shows a drastic decline in the industry’s profits by 74.3 per cent since the Great Depression. The British government’s subsidies might have appeared as nothing compared to the profits still being made in the industry, but it did genuinely suffer and, overall and especially for small-scale companies, might have desperately needed those subsidies. Shinwell’s critique therefore betrays a different story from what he tries to tell: that financial support from the state was meant to be covertly conditional upon racial hierarchies being maintained, even when the objective was a broader economic rescue operation rather than one instigating a socio-cultural confrontation.

This research was supported by the 2026 Joint BME Small Research Grant administered by the Social History Society in partnership with the Economic History Society, History UK, History of Education Society (UK), History Workshop Journal, Royal Historical Society, Society for the Study of Labour History, and the Women’s History Network.

 

To contact the author:

Shagnick Bhattacharya

shagnickbhattacharya@gmail.com

Independent Scholar

 

References:

Books

Gripaios, Hector. 1959. Tramp Shipping. Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd.

Tabili, Laura. 1994. ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain. Cornell University Press.

India Office Records, British Library, London

Parliamentary Notice, 19 February 1935, IOR/L/E/8/673.

Correspondence within India House, G.76738, 9 April 1935, IOR/L/E/9/955, p. 434.

Letter from Carter to Turner, Mercantile Marine department, Board of Trade, M.7787/35, 9 May 1935, IOR/L/E/9/955, pp. 426–427.

Transcripts of the UK Parliament from Hansard

‘British Shipping (Assistance) Money,’ House of Commons, 4 December 1934.

‘Coloured Seamen (Wages),’ House of Commons, 19 February 1935.

‘British Shipping Continuance of Subsidy,’ House of Commons, 1 February 1937.

‘Tramp Shipping Subsidy,’ House of Commons, 20 July 1939.