Yuntian (Chris) Xuan

Dissertation

Making Modern China at Sea: Liverpool and Chinese Seafarers in the British Merchant Marine, c. 1890–1972

My dissertation uses Liverpool as its principal point of observation to reconstruct a maritime labor world linking Britain to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, South China, and other ports. The labor demands and shipping routes of the British merchant marine structured the repeated departures, returns, transfers, and port-to-port movements of Chinese seafarers. By beginning with mobility rather than settlement, the project treats transnational connections not as a preexisting diaspora network but as something made through maritime movement itself.

That mobility generated—and was itself conditioned by—distinctive forms of brokerage and interracial intimacy. Shipping superintendents, labor contractors, interpreters, boarding-house keepers, wives, partners, children, and seamen created the relationships through which work, housing, credit, care, information, and belonging were organized across ports. In this way, the dissertation moves beyond a narrowly economic labor history and a male-centered history of seafaring by placing intermediary institutions, family life, women, and social reproduction within the history of maritime mobility itself.

These maritime and intimate relationships also produced political possibilities that exceeded the purposes of shipping capital. Routes, ports, lodging houses, families, associations, and channels of communication could be converted into commercial authority, nationalist organization, leftist activism, and competing claims to represent Chinese seafarers. The project therefore explains how a labor corridor created by British shipping became a social and political world through which a transnational “Global China” was continually made.