Colonial naval culture and British imperialism, 1922–67

By Daniel Spence

Naval forces from fifteen colonial territories fought for the British Empire during the Second World War, providing an important new lens for understanding imperial power and colonial relations on the eve of decolonisation.

With sources from Britain, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, this book examines the political, social and cultural impact of these forces; how they fortified British ‘prestige’ against rival imperialisms and colonial nationalisms; the importance of ‘men on the spot’, collaboration, ‘naval theatre’, and propaganda in mobilising colonial navalism; the role of naval training within the ‘civilising mission’ and colonial development; and how racial theory influenced naval recruitment, strategy and management, affecting imperial sentiment, ethnic relations, colonial identities, customs and order.

This book will appeal to imperial, maritime and regional historians, by broadening our understanding of navies as social and cultural institutions, where power was expressed through the ideas and relations they cultivated, as well as their guns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781526102348

Daniel Spence

Daniel Owen Spence is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Africa Studies at the University of the Free State

Book preview

General editor: Andrew S. Thompson

Founding editor: John M. MacKenzie

When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded more than twenty-five years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

Colonial naval culture

and British imperialism, 1922–67

SELECTED TITLES AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES

OCEANIA UNDER STEAM

Sea transport and the cultures of colonialism, c.1870–1914

Frances Steel

THE VICTORIAN SOLDIER IN AFRICA

Edward M. Spiers

EMPIRE CAREERS

Working for the Chinese Customs Service, 1854–1949

Catherine Ladds

FROM JACK TAR TO UNION JACK

Representing naval manhood in the British Empire, 1870–1918

Mary A. Conley

IMPERIAL SPACES

Placing the Irish and Scots in colonial Australia

Lindsay Proudfoot and Dianne Hall

Colonial naval culture and British imperialism, 1922–67

Daniel Owen Spence

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Daniel Owen Spence 2015

The right of Daniel Owen Spence to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

OXFORD ROAD, MANCHESTER M13 9NR, UK

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN    978 0 7190 9177 3           hardback

First published 2015

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset

by 4word Ltd, Bristol

For my grandparents and others who fought and lived

through the Second World War

CONTENTS

List of figures

List of maps

List of tables

Founding editor’s introduction

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

MAPS

TABLES

FOUNDING EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

In 1923–24, the Royal Navy indulged in what was probably the most dramatic piece of imperial ‘naval theatre’ in its history. A Special Service Squadron comprising two battle cruisers, Hood and Repulse, and four light cruisers (often augmented to five en route) spent nine months sailing around the Empire. The ships called at Sierra Leone, major ports in South Africa, Zanzibar, Kenya, Ceylon, Malaya, Singapore, Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales, Queensland, several ports in New Zealand, Fiji, Western Samoa, British Columbia, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Quebec, with additional calls at various ports outside the British Empire, including Honolulu and several in South America.

The object of this extraordinary global display of naval might was described as being to meet ‘our kinsmen overseas’, emphasise the ties that bound them to Britain, as well as express renewed hope after the First World War and the depression that had followed it. The ‘kinsmen overseas’ seemed overjoyed to be visited, judging by the vast crowds that turned out everywhere to greet the ships, the festivities that occurred in every port, the ceremonies that accompanied the visits, as well as the large processions of sailors and marines (often more than a thousand men) that were hailed in the streets, together with lavish hospitality and seemingly endless sporting events. The speeches of governors, colonial prime ministers and the Vice-Admiral in command were redolent of imperial patriotism and efforts to reconcile it with a new sense of Dominions’ nationalism. Astonishingly, it was claimed that no fewer than 1,936,717 people visited the ships in the ports of call, in some places including indigenous chiefs and sultans. Of the total, 1,423,157 were Australians and New Zealanders. For their part, the crews showed their allegiance to empire by deserting in considerable numbers – 151 in the first six months, of whom 141 decided to be illegal immigrants to Australia and New Zealand!¹

In British Columbia, the newspaper the Vancouver Sun astutely put a number of questions to the commanding Vice-Admiral including enquiring about British expenditure on the navy, its continuing cost and commitment, the extent to which the empire should help, and the guarantees that might be given that colonies and Dominions could expect the Royal Navy to protect them in any future conflict.² Western Canada, like territories elsewhere, must have been well aware that this ‘Empire Cruise’ had come in the wake of the Washington Naval agreement, which had destroyed both the British navy’s ‘two power standard’ and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902. The Admiral’s answers were reassuring enough, but politicians and the public must also have been well aware of the fact that this display of might actually masked considerable weaknesses that were likely to be exacerbated in the future. In any case, these big ships, as lauded by Kipling and others, served to obscure the fact that empire had actually invariably been about small ships – the gunboats which had established British authority in African rivers, on the Persian Gulf, on the coasts of Southeast Asia and the Far East. Small ships had been important in port protection, in minesweeping and in many other of the offensive and defensive precautions of wartime. The First World War had actually seen naval campaigns against the Germans on the East African lakes, campaigns that had not been unimportant in the securing of the German colonies that were subsequently transformed into League of Nations mandated territories.³

The ‘Empire Cruise’ had, however, revealed the importance which politicians and naval authorities attached to propaganda and to what might be called the ‘social and cultural outreach’ that the navy could achieve in the maintenance of imperial sentiment. They were also alert to the ways in which this considerable flotilla could overawe indigenous peoples in West and East Africa, as well as in Asia and the Pacific, where ‘native’ rulers and members of the elite were welcomed on board. This book by Daniel Owen Spence does indeed adopt a social, cultural and racial approach to the founding of naval reserve units in various colonies when ‘overstretch’ and apparent weakness became more obvious during these inter-war years. Such reserve forces were founded in some of the colonies which the Special Services Squadron included in its ‘Empire Cruise’ – in Trinidad and the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean (although only the larger units of the flotilla visited Jamaica with the light cruisers circling South America), in East Africa in Zanzibar and Kenya, in Ceylon, in the Straits Settlements and Malaya, and also, importantly, in Hong Kong (which the squadron did not visit). The creation and continuing history of these units has never been fully explored and Spence acutely examines the cultural and racial perspectives and tensions that went into their founding and organisational histories. He also demonstrates the manner in which these units contributed to what I once called ‘invented traditions of ethnic specialism’, while his interesting exploration of the concept of seafaring or maritime races or nations would repay further study to match the extensive work that has been done on martial races.⁴

He additionally examines both the performance of these units in war time and the ways in which they were transformed in the post-war era. In some cases they contributed to the foundation of modern small navies. In others, they were ultimately laid down because the political units upon which they were based emerged in different formations in the decolonisation era. He pays particular attention to the case of Hong Kong, both because of the invasion and occupation by Japan, and also because of the manner in which the focus shifted to the People’s Republic of China in the aftermath of the Communist revolution. The fate of Hong Kong was, of course, ultimately to be handed back to mainland China, whereas elsewhere the various territories became part of independent, post-colonial countries.

Spence’s study is grounded in extensive archival research in the United Kingdom, in the Caribbean, East Africa, Australia, and Hong Kong. He has also used oral history collections and his work is further illuminated by interviews conducted by himself. This is indeed a landmark book, innovative in the range of its field, in its research, in its cultural perspectives, and in its breadth of vision. It represents a further significant contribution to the ‘cultural turn’ in naval studies.⁵

John M. MacKenzie

Notes

1   V.C. Scott O’Connor, The Empire Cruise (London 1925). For the purposes of the cruise, see pp. 13–14. For the numbers visiting the ships, see p. 275. And for the desertions, see p. 228.

2   The interview between the newspaper and the Admiral can be found in O’Connor, Empire Cruise, pp. 248–9.

3   John MacKenzie, ‘The Tanganyika Naval Expedition of 1915-16’ in The Mariner’s Mirror, Vol. 70, no. 4 (November 1984), pp. 397–410; John MacKenzie, ‘The Naval Campaigns on Lakes Victoria and Nyasa, 1914–18’ in The Mariner’s Mirror, Vol. 71, no. 2 (May 1985), pp. 169–183.

4   John M. MacKenzie, ‘Lakes, rivers and oceans: Technology, ethnicity and the shipping of empire in the late nineteenth century’ in David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby (eds.), Maritime Empires; British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge 2004), pp. 111–127, particularly p. 125.

5   In this series, see also Mary A. Conley, From Jack Tar to Union Jack: Representing naval manhood in the British Empire, 1870–1918 (Manchester 2009) and, for the merchant marine, Frances Steel, Oceania under steam: Sea transport and the cultures of colonialism, c. 1870–1914 (Manchester 2011).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to a number of people who have contributed to the making of this monograph. First, those at Manchester University Press; ‘Studies in Imperialism’ editors John M. MacKenzie and Andrew Thompson, Emma Brennan, and the reviewers, for agreeing to publish my work, their constructive evaluations, and making the production process a smooth one. The overseas primary research fundamental to this project would not have been possible without generous funding from Sheffield Hallam University, the University of the Free State, the Royal Historical Society, and the National Research Foundation of South Africa. I am hugely indebted to my PhD supervisors Bruce Collins and Clare Midgley, who first gave me the opportunity to become a historian, and devoted countless hours to drafts, meetings, and feedback; Peter Cain and Ashley Jackson, for doing me the honour of examining my thesis (upon which this book is based), and providing such inspiring academic examples to aspire to; Ian Phimister, for having the faith to provide me with an opportunity when others did not, and whose support continues to be hugely valuable and appreciated; Jan-Bart Gewald and Leiden University’s African Studies Centre for sponsoring the Visiting Fellowship in which I finished the book; I express deep and heartfelt thanks to my interviewees, Chitharanjan Kuttan, William Harvey Ebanks, Carley Ebanks (may they rest in peace), Tan Sri Thanabalasingam, Jaswant Singh Gill, Peter Fosten, Thomas Ewart Ebanks, Karu Selvaratnam, C.S. Nathan, and Neville Tan, for their warmth and openness in sharing their life stories with me to bring the history alive; Mudzaffar Alfian Bin Mustafa, Datuk Hamid Ibrahim, Jerome Lee, C. Charles Adams, Dale Banks, Mishka Chisholm, and Tricia Bodden, for facilitating my overseas research; academic colleagues Barbara Bush, Kate Law, Andy Cohen, Merv Lewis, Miles Larmer, Roger Lloyd-Jones, Nir Arielli, Matthew Roberts, Robbie Aitken, Chris Corker, Clement Masakure, Rosa Williams, Juanita Cox Westmaas, Bridget Brereton, Moses Mwangi, and Jacob Stoil, for their collegiality and helping refine my ideas with their expertise; and lastly, to those friends and family who have supported, encouraged, believed in me and my work, and continue to do so.

ABBREVIATIONS

Archives

Map 1 Colonial naval forces in the British Empire, c.1941

Introduction

During the Second World War, over 9,000 men from fifteen colonies, protectorates and mandate territories fought for the British Empire in locally raised naval forces. These were established in Trinidad, Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Mauritius, Ceylon, Burma, Malaya, the Straits Settlements, Hong Kong and Fiji, between 1933 and 1941. Their relatively small size has meant that up to now they have remained a footnote within the historiography of that conflict, despite being present at many notable flashpoints, particularly in Asia. Yet, if examined beyond naval strategy and more in relation to the cultural turn, they provide an important new lens for understanding the dynamics of imperial power and colonial relations at the twilight of the British Empire. Created within a period of just eight years, these forces represented a significant shift in naval policy towards the recruitment of colonial manpower at a time of distinct internal and external pressures on British imperialism. This prompts a reconsideration of ‘imperial overstretch’ as a concern for naval and colonial officials in the interwar years, and how it forced a cultural change in British attitudes towards colonial subjects and their ‘racial’ suitability for naval service.

Through a transnational and comparative analysis of ‘official’ and ‘subaltern’ sources in the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, East Africa, Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, this book examines for the first time the political, social and cultural impact of colonial naval forces. It explores their emergence in a climate of ‘imperial overstretch’ and geopolitical tensions, as bulwarks for preserving British prestige against rival imperialisms and anti-colonial nationalisms; the importance of ‘men on the spot’,¹ ‘collaboration’, ‘naval theatre’,² ‘invented traditions’,³ and propaganda in mobilising colonial navalism; the role of naval paternalism and training within the ‘civilising mission’, and its social and economic development of colonial ‘character’; and how racial ideology and discourses of power fostered a ‘seafaring race’ theory,⁴ influencing naval recruitment, strategy and management, and affecting imperial sentiment, ethnic relations, colonial identities, customs and order.

It is commonly acknowledged that naval history has been relatively late in engaging with the cultural turn in historical scholarship. While some notable exceptions successfully situated the senior service’s significance to broader society,⁵ education and the history of ideas,⁶ many traditional practitioners of the discipline adopted ‘top-down’ approaches, focused on strategy and technology, which emphasised the Navy’s importance to international diplomacy, national politics and economics. As late as 2002, Quintin Colville concluded that ‘the overriding concern of most of the existing academic literature on the Royal Navy in the twentieth century, has been to assess the organisation’s performance of its stated duties: the protection of British interests and sovereignty in peace and war’.⁷ While naval historians may have traditionally exhibited a reluctance to engage with cultural history’s methodology and themes, cultural historians were equally guilty of not applying their conceptual frameworks to the Navy. Max Jones observed that ‘practitioners of the new cultural history have devoted surprisingly little attention to maritime life after 1850’; in surveying over 650 publications between January 2003 and October 2007 under the heading of Naval Forces in the Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History he found that fewer than twenty texts deployed cultural-historical method.⁸

In the wake of Jan Rüger’s pathfinding The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire (2007), more culturally informed naval historians have redressed this historiographical oversight. One of Rüger’s most novel contributions is the concept of ‘naval theatre’, where public rituals surrounding the ‘cult of the Navy’, such as fleet reviews and warship launches, contributed to identity and power politics at the turn of the twentieth century. While focusing on pre-1914 Anglo-German rivalry, he notes that the Royal Navy was ‘one of the principal factors in promoting and maintaining the unity of Empire’, with the Admiralty ‘adamant that the naval theatre should be exploited for the fostering of imperial sentiment’.⁹ This book will build on his idea by analysing the effects of naval theatre within Britain’s colonies, showing that it was still deployed to these ends during the 1930s and 1950s, and played an important role in cultivating colonial navalism in support of indigenous naval forces.

Since Rüger, other cultural-naval historians have emerged from the woodwork, injecting dynamism and fresh ideas into a field undergoing a renaissance. This should not be surprising considering how the Royal Navy interacted with almost every aspect of British imperial life, and the multi-disciplinary avenues this opens up for research. Explorations of maritime history and identity have flourished.¹⁰ Duncan Redford has developed the fleet review motif to explore the cultural impact of the submarine service upon British national identity in the twentieth century.¹¹ Studies of material culture have inspired both James Davey’s assessment of the naval heroic influence in early eighteenth-century British identity¹² and Quintin Colville’s examinations of how male social class was projected through naval uniforms and officers’ quarters.¹³ Mary Conley has developed these connections between heroism, masculinity, gender and naval identity at the height of the British Empire,¹⁴ while Cindy McCreery’s visual and discourse analysis has elucidated imperial relations and identities through the Navy’s Royal connections.¹⁵ Mediterranean Studies has been enriched by the naval lens Robert Holland has applied to the development of colonial societies and cultures within that sea.¹⁶ Jonathan Rayner has analysed the impact of the naval war film on cinema and popular culture,¹⁷ while documentary films of naval shipyards shape Victoria Carolan’s examination of regional and national identities.¹⁸

Despite imperial identity appearing prominently within these new cultural analyses of the Royal Navy, the majority of studies are still Euro-centrically focused on the British Navy and, to a lesser extent, the Dominions, with John C. Mitcham arguing that ‘Navalism, like other sacred privileges and responsibilities of imperial leadership, was to be a whites-only affair’.¹⁹ Britain’s Caribbean, African and Asian colonies have consequently been ignored. It took the postcolonial and subaltern studies movements before a better understanding of colonial military contributions emerged, led by David Killingray²⁰ and Timothy Parsons’s work on African regiments.²¹ A volume on Colonial Armies (2006) edited by Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig has compared different imperial experiences in Southeast Asia,²² but still with a military rather than naval focus. While the operational presence of colonial naval forces has been acknowledged by Ashley Jackson for the Second World War,²³ and James Goldrick and Jack McCaffrie in postwar Southeast Asia,²⁴ their cultural influence upon colonial society and British imperialism continues to be overlooked by academics. While commemorative commercial histories of contemporary navies examine their colonial roots, they serve a self-celebratory agenda, bearing jingoistic titles like Honour and Sacrifice (1994),²⁵ and Serving the Nation (2004),²⁶ and act as nationalistic propaganda for projecting national unity, as Chief Petty Officer Radiman proclaims in the latter:

I want the Malaysian Navy to be an example to the nation and to the whole world where unity is concerned. As Malaysia constitutes races of different religions and nationalities that have always lived in peace and harmony, we should extend this harmonic state of affairs more effectively whilst serving in … a Malaysian Navy that would consist of officers and men who possess a sense of loyalty and patriotism.²⁷

Such books are too subjective, lack academic rigour, and do not engage with larger historical, theoretical or comparative issues.

This monograph takes up a challenge laid down by Barry Gough in 1999. In the Oxford History of the British Empire (Volume V), he argued that ‘far from being an old-fashioned field of inquiry, naval and Imperial themes are rich in possibilities for studying the interface of societies, systems, and states’, and might be explored through ‘a study of how the Royal Navy influenced the course of the early history of colonial and Commonwealth navies’.²⁸ This book finally addresses this by taking the new cultural approaches to naval historiography beyond the metropole and into the multi-cultural dynamics of Britain’s global empire, demonstrating that the development of colonial navalism was far from a ‘whites-only affair’,²⁹ and was inextricably linked to British preoccupations about their imperial status.

Seafaring race theory

In developing the cultural interaction between imperial and naval identities, this book explores for the first time the influence of a ‘seafaring race’ theory upon colonial naval officials. Imperial discourses of power underpinned racial hierarchies that shaped colonial naval culture; Anglo-Saxonism and Orientalism delineated a chain-of-command where paternalistic British officers instructed ‘native’ ratings as part of their ‘civilising mission’ to develop the character of a ‘modern’ navy. Martial race theory heavily influenced the recruitment and management of colonial armies from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. It too was a discourse of power that contributed to a ‘colonisation of the mind’,³⁰ and legitimised British imperialism by giving them ‘just as much right to rule in India as any other of the conquering races that form the martial classes, in view of her own conquests’.³¹ The theory’s prominence in the subcontinent post–1857, when martial became synonymous for loyalty during the Mutiny/Rebellion, has fuelled Killingray’s argument that the belief ‘certain peoples or societies had a special capacity for military service – was largely a colonial construct’.³² Yet, Douglas Peers has shown these representations pre-dated the uprising as early as the 1830s.³³ Officers such as George MacMunn, who wrote The Martial Races of India (1933) following lengthy service in the Indian Army, were ‘invested in the truth of the martial race ideology’.³⁴ For MacMunn, it was not a colonial fabrication for dividing and ruling ‘natives’, but knowledge gained by personal experience.

Rather than simply being an imperial imagining, which ascribes a passive role on the colonised and overlooks their own agency, martial race identity, though manipulated and distorted, nevertheless held some element of empirical reality. David Omissi supports this by highlighting the ‘customs and self-image of Indian communities who had a martial tradition quite independent of the colonial encounter’.³⁵ In many instances, the people documented in colonial, anthropological and military surveys believed in their own martiality, having been personally involved in combat or had that group identity reinforced through the commemoration of ancestral battles, wearing it as a badge of honour for social or economic gain. Cynthia Enloe has termed this ‘Gurkha syndrome’, where poorer rural groups embraced martial identity to access military employment, and were ‘amenable to discipline’ because their community’s livelihood depended upon it.³⁶ It represented a form of imperial ‘collaboration’,³⁷ being mutually beneficial for both coloniser and colonised to cultivate that identity. This could produce ‘a circular, self-replicating effect’ whereby ‘supposed martial races became more warlike precisely because it was expected of them’.³⁸ These social pressures came from the community as well as the colonial power, reflected by Jaswant Singh Gill, the first Punjabi Sikh in the Malayan Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (MRNVR) and commander of Singapore’s independent navy:

I’m from the Punjab … My grandfather was the ADC [Aide-de-camp] to King George V, my grandfather fought in the First World War, my uncles fought in the Second World War … as a community, we are a martial race … it comes naturally to us … Our community says you are a martial race, you know, you are a soldier, you fight … The British never said ‘you are a martial race’ and therefore you become a martial race, no no, we were already a martial race, the only thing the British realised was that we were a martial race … soldiering comes to us naturally.³⁹

Heather Streets has confronted why martial race theory continues to provoke historical debate, concluding that, ‘the power of martial race ideology stemmed from its very flexibility and ambiguity: it was adaptable to a variety of historical and geographical situations and functioned alternatively to inspire, intimidate, exclude, and include’.⁴⁰ As Gill demonstrates, this geographical flexibility extended beyond land across the sea, so how did this military discourse affect colonial naval forces?

In 2004, reflecting upon the ethnic specialisation of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company and Straits Steamship Company, John M. MacKenzie postulated that ‘we are all familiar in imperial history with the theory of martial races, but what of the notion of maritime races?’⁴¹ This question has been left unaddressed, though work on Kru naval recruitment in West Africa⁴² and South Asian lascars⁴³ indicates that the theory holds some water. Frances Steel, in her pioneering study of Pacific maritime labour, has argued that in 1903:

Stokers who ‘belonged to the northern and warlike races’ impressed the [Mercantile Marine] Committee ‘with their manly character’ … As mercantile ships were likely to be requisitioned for fighting forces, questions of loyalty and strength were paramount … This created a tenuous position for Indian sailors: the traits that made them superior, favoured for their ‘submissive’ nature, also made them inferior, derided for lack of courage and tenacity under fire.⁴⁴

Such attitudes were reflected in 1934, when the auxiliary Royal Indian Marine became the Royal Indian Navy. Whereas Ratnagiri Muslims from the Konkan Coast were previously recruited, being fishermen descended from Indian Ocean traders who possessed an ‘old seafaring instinct’,⁴⁵ there was a shift after to more martial Punjabi Muslims, for ‘as a gunnery signal or any other kind of specialist the Punjabi Mussalman was way ahead of the Ratnagiri’.⁴⁶ Although they were acknowledged as ‘good seamen’, Ratnagiris were considered ‘of a low standard of education and with few natural martial qualities’,⁴⁷ and it was the Punjabi’s ‘better I.Q. plus guts which count[ed]’.⁴⁸ This was important for the Indian Navy’s combatant role, and its acquisition of more complex warships.

India will not feature prominently in this book as its navy had roots in the seventeenth century⁴⁹ and the country’s unique political and legislative position within the British Empire meant that the 1931 Colonial Naval Defence Act (CNDA) did not apply there. Other examples will be presented, however, that indicate a theory of seafaring races did influence naval officials involved in recruiting and managing colonial personnel, suggesting it was an imperial trend rather than a local anomaly.

Though similarities existed in the racial stereotyping and discourses used by colonial officials, naval recruiters did not automatically seek out the, predominantly rural, martial races. Logically, the Navy preferred to target coastal or riverine peoples who had nautical traditions in fishing and maritime trade. Not only did they already possess knowledge of seamanship and navigation, but it was also believed this elemental outlet for their energies gave them a healthier constitution and fortified their character. Environmental factors thus influenced racial identities, with these groups possessing a ‘call of the sea’ that beckoned them to life on the waves and made them willing naval volunteers. When martial races were recruited by the Navy, such as Punjabis and Kenya’s Kamba, while they offered redeeming qualities such as courage, they were primarily selected because the educational standard of local maritime communities disqualified them from operating technically sophisticated naval equipment. Therefore, just as ‘precolonial prowess was no guarantee of martial status under British rule’,⁵⁰ nor did colonial fishermen automatically represent ‘seafaring races’. Like martial race theory, naval recruits had to be disciplined, follow orders unquestioningly and, most importantly, be relied upon to support the colonial regime against internal as well as external enemies. Seafaring race theory was therefore used to strengthen British power by promoting imperially loyal groups at the expense of potentially anti-colonial ones, justified on grounds of ‘racial’ suitability for naval service.

Structure

The book’s first chapter contextualises the study by examining the nineteenth-century origins of naval volunteerism, the power of ‘prestige’, and how the Washington Naval Treaty and geopolitical tensions of the interwar years led to the formation of fifteen colonial naval reserves in rapid succession. In considering these developments, the long-running debates surrounding British imperial overstretch are reassessed. The book then explores different colonial naval experiences across four major regions of the Empire.

Part I focuses on the Caribbean. Britain’s West Indian colonies were an increasingly costly legacy of early imperial expansion as their value declined with market demand for traditional cash crops, a situation exacerbated by the Great Depression. Economic exploitation and poor social and working conditions fuelled labour unrest and nationalist agitation in the 1930s, raising internal defence costs. Yet the region was strategically important for containing the only oil-producing territory in the formal Empire, and Britain’s