The Ship as a Postcolonial Space

What is it about?

In this chapter, I will take up the theme of maritime spaces and society by exploring, from a postcolonial perspective, what characterises contemporary merchant ships as social spaces. Nowadays, shipowners mostly register their vessels under flags of convenience which provide optimal conditions for their economic utilisation. Thereby, the whole world becomes available as a market for maritime labour-power that shipowners can use under the aspect of cost-efficiency. That means that shipowners mainly only recruit captains and senior officers from their home country or another country of the global North. The remaining crew mostly originates from labour supply countries of the global South. The hierarchy among the crew thus mirrors the power relations between the core and peripheries of the world-system. Against this backdrop, maritime scholars have approached the question of what constitutes ships as social spaces drawing on different metaphors. For instance, Helen Sampson argues that ships are “hyperspaces” that are culturally indetermined and cannot be assigned any geographically localised ‘culture’. On a ship, whatever flag she may fly and wherever her management may be based, one does not feel to be in Europe, Africa or Asia, Germany, Liberia or the Philippines, but just on a ship. Therefore, all seafarers are ‘foreigners’ on the ship. Nevertheless, the question of who legitimately belongs and who does not is contested among members of international crews along national and racial lines. Seafarers from the global North, thereby, are usually in a dominant position of power and can thus enforce hegemony about issues of shipboard culture. In my contribution, I will show how colonial histories and postcolonial power structures permeate the social space ‘ship’ on the levels of socio-economic structure, symbolic representation and everyday interactions among seafarers. The empirical data stem from ethnographic fieldwork collected on six different ships over a total sea time of about fourteen months.

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Why is it important?

This article is important because it uncovers how merchant ships—while often imagined as neutral, technical workplaces—are in fact deeply social spaces shaped by global inequalities. In today’s shipping industry, vessels are commonly registered under so-called flags of convenience, which allow shipowners to draw on the cheapest possible labour markets worldwide. This practice produces crews that are highly international, yet not equal. Captains and senior officers are usually recruited from Europe and other parts of the global North, while the majority of seafarers come from labour-supplying countries of the global South. As a result, shipboard hierarchies reflect wider patterns of economic and political power in the world-system. The article contributes to debates about what kind of social space the ship represents. While some maritime scholars have described ships as “hyperspaces” that are culturally indeterminate, the findings presented here show that belonging and legitimacy are still contested along national and racial lines. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted on six different ships over more than a year at sea, the article demonstrates that postcolonial power structures continue to shape everyday life on board. These dynamics manifest in the division of labour, in cultural practices and symbols, and in the daily interactions between crew members. Understanding ships as postcolonial social spaces is crucial for both scholarship and practice. For academics, it provides a framework to connect maritime sociology with broader questions of global inequality. For the shipping industry, it highlights the need to recognize and address how structural divisions affect life at sea, crew cohesion, and ultimately safety and efficiency. More broadly, this article reminds us that the movement of goods across oceans is sustained by people whose working lives remain marked by enduring historical and geopolitical divides.