Resumen de A working alias: African seafarers and fungible identities across European empires in the early twentieth century
During the first half of the twentieth century, the labour of sailors from colonial Africa was essential to the European shipping industry. These seafarers laboured mostly as firemen and coal trimmers (in French, they were called chauffeurs and soutiers), shovelling coal and stoking fires in the engine rooms of the steamships that transported the world's people and goods. To secure this work, African sailors sometimes adopted aliases. They commodified their names and identities as part of an alternative, extralegal economy that also benefitted the broader ‘legitimate’ shipping industry. Their identities, however, were deeply suspected by the empires that claimed them – France and Great Britain. Significantly, black sailors adopted aliases to engage with and circumvent the economic and political regimes that employed and policed them.
