Studies in Urban and Social Change. Chichester, West Sussex: WILEY Blackwell, 2016. xvii, 284 pp. (Illustrations.) US$37.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-118-82773-4.
The main title of this fascinating book comes from the fact that Liverpool was already known as a “world city” in the late 1880s, although, as author Tim Bunnell points out, it wasn’t to be found in academic debates on “world cities” taking place a century later. With “hundreds” of Malayan seamen said to be living in the city of Liverpool (or specific parts of it) in the 1950s, our attention is immediately drawn to the multi-ethnic nature of the UK population, contradicting those scholars who hold that Britain has become a multi-racial society only in recent years. While much has been written on the role of empire in shaping metropolitan spaces, “very little … of that work has focused on the agency of colonial peoples in imperial cities” (8). Bunnell intends to rectify this. The rest of the book’s title, “The world in one city,” has now been officially adopted by Liverpool city as a marketing device.
The book focuses on the Malay ex-seamen and others who met at Liverpool’s Malay Club for over half a century. In particular, it examines the maritime linkages that made the Malay Club possible and also provided the main informants for the author’s investigative interviews conducted at the club between 2004 and 2008. These were the men who were part of the long-distance social networks, sailing the sea lanes and oceans linking one-time imperial Liverpool to the world region of Southeast Asia. In the early years of the author’s research there were perhaps only twenty ex-seamen still remaining, mainly in their eighties and nineties, so that in most cases Bunnell had to rely on prompted memories for much of his information.
From them, we learn of the various shipping companies registered in Liverpool in colonial times: the Blue Tunnel Line headquartered in Singapore, the Straits Steamship Company, the Prince’s Line, and other British companies, including those of prominent Liverpool ship owner, Alfred Holt, playing a key role in world commerce.
Malay seamen working for these and other companies came from the villages behind Kuala Lumpur or Singapore and were generally Muslim. They filled the roles of cook, fireman, quartermaster, bosun, and others, in some cases with as many as thirty working on a ship, knowing the routes and the routine. Malays, Mahrattas, Burmese, Siamese, Cingalese, were lumped together as lascars and, when not at sea, with their families occupied the ethnically segregated areas of Britain’s ports: Glasgow, Liverpool, Cardiff. The younger men could be seeking adventure in Australia or a place where they could jump ship. One of the more lucrative journeys for the shipping companies was the carriage of haji passengers in Liverpool-registered ships to the port of Jeddah, passing through Singapore twice (both outward and return journeys), taking their once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimages. According to Bunnell, such journeys formed a significant portion of the shipping companies’ income.
From the 1970s, the number of seamen using the club declined, increasingly outnumbered by the grandchildren and families of ex-seamen (some without indigenous language skills). With its rapid economic growth and expanding economy, the Malaysian government looked to educate its professional class outside the country so that, with an increased number of government scholarships available to study in Liverpool, university and other students increasingly took over the club, outnumbering the old seafarers. For the new arrivals, the Malay Club then became a place where children learned to be Malay.
There are many interesting themes in this occasionally dense and theoretical text, some of them pursued more deeply than others. Social networks, linkages, webs and “worlds of connection” figure frequently. Bunnell is a geographer who moves easily through different social, spatial, and political spaces and different divisions of labour: local, national, transnational, imperial, postimperial, postnational, supranational, etc. The political processes of Merdeka (independence) and Malaysianization are not mentioned in my review, though reports of ex-seamen seeing vessels in Liverpool belonging to the Malaysian International Shipping Corporation left vivid memories and impressions on the memories of many of the Malay ex-seamen.
Fluent in his subjects’ language, the author is clearly conscious of his own place in the fieldwork process; he is equally aware of the way his gender position may be affecting his interviewing, or how his own knowledge of what he is investigating influences what he records.
Bunnell has valuable comments to make on the subject of comparative studies, illustrated here with reference to the symbolic functions of buildings and comparing Liverpool’s Manhattan-inspired Royal Liver Building—in 1911 the tallest building in Europe and known as “the first British skyscraper”—with the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur (1990s), the tallest twin towers building in the world. Or again, when comparing Shanghai’s Bund waterfront with Liverpool’s Pier Head. Both looked to New York City for their models of modernity.
Not the least impressive aspect of the book is the very comprehensive forty-page index. Yet surprisingly, this doesn’t refer to one of the most advanced institutions in modern imperial governance, of critical importance in the long run to maritime service. I refer here to Liverpool’s School of Tropical Medicine, established a year before the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This is not to detract from what is an impressive, theoretically sophisticated, and methodologically challenging book which certainly succeeds in meeting the author’s intention of drawing attention to “yet another of (Liverpool’s) ethnocultural groups” (22). The study is based on an extensive bibliography, archives, and participant observation in Liverpool, Malaysia, and Singapore, and interviews with some twenty remaining Malay ex-seamen. It will be of interest, amongst others, to researchers in world/global cities, and relational geography.
Anthony D. King
Binghamton University SUNY, Vestal, USA
pp. 863-865