A working alias: African seafarers and fungible identities across European empires in the early twentieth century

Abstract

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.

In 1911, Ali Mohsin left British-controlled Aden for the Côte Française des Somalis. ¹ He worked on German merchant ships out of Djibouti until the outbreak of the First World War, when the British Consul in French Somaliland sent him to Bayonne, France. From Bayonne, Mohsin went to Cardiff, where he served continuously on British vessels for the next 10 years. In 1933, he tried to renew his British passport, but his application was flagged. The British authorities were concerned that Mohsin was not who he claimed to be. During his years at sea, Mohsin had used a different name, working under the alias Messen. ² According to the South Shields police, Mohsin, alias Messen, ‘together with a number of other coloured seamen, [were] the subject of enquiry as to [their] right of possession to a British Passport’. ³ Across the Channel, French officials were similarly worried about the identities of African sailors whom they called marins indigènes. They were concerned that a significant number of mariners from French West and East Africa were sailing under borrowed or assumed names, and that ‘foreign native’ sailors were ‘passing themselves off as natives of [French] colonies’ by using fraudulent identity papers. ⁴ A central concern for the French and British authorities was that they could not figure out precisely who these men were – a fact that caused considerable consternation among the officials charged with policing the identities and mobilities of the people they claimed as colonial subjects. Yet, during the first decades of the twentieth century, France and Great Britain implemented policies that limited black sailors’ ability to prove their status as imperial subjects. These restrictions helped make the adoption of aliases an increasingly viable, if extralegal, option for sailors from French and British colonies in Africa.

For many seafarers, there was value in an alias. Mariners created new names, borrowed the identity of a friend or family member, or bought stolen or forged papers. These monikers carried with them the expectation of work, as sailors used their assumed names to get hired as crew members on ships flying diverse flags. Indeed, the historical practice of signing on to ships’ articles, by giving a name and making one's mark, created the conditions for a maritime economy where names embodied the promise of both labour given and wages received. ⁵ While government authorities saw names as a legal category used to ascertain specific identities, sailors understood that names had economic power. A name could be bought and sold and traded. It could be appropriated and then discarded. Working under a borrowed or assumed name also made it easier for seafarers to dodge the imperial surveillance state. In addition to aliases, sailors valued colonial subjecthood as a fungible asset. A sailor's status as a subject of imperial France or Britain was a commodity that could be monetized and used to move within and between empires.

Seafarers’ use of aliases remains understudied within maritime history. Some scholars mention sailors’ ‘fondnest for aliases’, and many have recognized mariners by their multiple names. ⁶ But few works engage with name-changing as a specific maritime strategy. ⁷ Limited archival evidence perhaps explains this gap in the research. As V. C. Burton explains: ‘the adoption of aliases is a documented but unquantifiable practice’. ⁸ Yet, in French and British colonial and police archives, accounts of black seafarers and their aliases abound. ⁹ For many state officials, whose correspondence from the 1920s and 1930s makes up the bulk of these records, their central purpose was to uncover the ‘authentic’ identities of sailors. By contrast, this article recognizes the ethical implications of uncovering ‘lost’ voices, particularly when those voices do not wish to be found. Rather than revealing the ‘true identities’ of those sailors who sought to remain hidden, this article focuses on the aliases themselves and seafarers’ strategies for securing work and eluding colonial authorities.

The practice of name-changing also illuminates tensions between maritime capitalism and European imperialism. During the first half of the twentieth century, the labour of sailors from colonial Africa was essential to the European shipping industry. ¹⁰ These seamen 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. ¹¹ In order to secure this work, African sailors sometimes commodified their names and identities as part of an alternative extralegal economy that also benefitted the broader ‘legitimate’ shipping industry. However, their identities and their mobilities 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.

***

The adoption of aliases was not a practice that was exclusive to African mariners from French and British colonies in the twentieth century. Seafarers had been changing their names since at least the Age of Sail. ¹² In the seventeenth century, for example, impressed sailors deserting British ships routinely adopted aliases. ¹³ Seafarers escaping debt or a criminal past also found anonymity in a nom de guerre. ¹⁴ As Charles R. Tucker, a New Bedford whaling merchant, remarked in 1837: ‘It has of late become very fashionable for sailors to assume some fictitious name by which they ship and are known by before they sail – and thus may deprive their friends from tracing them’. ¹⁵

But adopting a new name was not only done for illicit purposes. ¹⁶ Scholars working on the early modern Black Atlantic describe the confluence of African American and maritime naming practices. ¹⁷ William Jeffrey Bolster and others have shown how African Americans serving in the merchant navy brought with them various traditions, including the custom of nicknaming. ¹⁸ Many who successfully escaped enslavement in the United States went to sea, and choosing a new name was an act of liberation and self-empowerment. As Bolster explains, renaming oneself was ‘an overt act to be somebody – to be anybody one wanted’. ¹⁹ Name-changing was also a frequent practice among mariners from the west coast of Africa and the Sahel. Gregory Mann explains how family names, known as jamw in Mande cultures, were ‘an all-important identity marker and an instrument of “mobility”’. ²⁰ He describes how names ‘were adopted, rejected, and imposed with great ease and by a variety of actors’ in order to evade the imperial state or escape slave status. ²¹

Aliases allowed for a degree of anonymity among sailors. As members of a crew, seafarers were ‘“hands” not faces’. ²² Sailors understood the importance of names not just in terms of their self-empowerment, but also in terms of the promise of work. They recognized that the names they chose or assumed were worth something. French archival sources reveal how African sailors often assumed the names of older family members who were retiring from the Marine Marchande by taking possession of their discharge or seaman's books, known as livrets. ²³ British and French sources describe how African sailors sometimes took ownership of a friend's duplicate papers or temporarily borrowed an associate's identity in order to show a more favourable record of employment. ²⁴ Archival records also suggest that acquiring an alias was not always voluntary. Names were often misspelled or other identifying information was misrecorded due to bureaucratic oversight. This is what likely happened to Ali Mohsin, who was snagged by the British authorities in 1933. It is unclear whether his ‘real’ name was Mohsin or Messen, but he had nonetheless built a reputation working under the latter. Although Mohsin, alias Messen, may not have chosen to adopt a new name, he came to understand that the name most associated with his labour had special value.

The use of aliases was so commonplace that both shipping companies and select government authorities often recognized sailors by their multiple names. For example, a 1933 report issued by the British Colonial Office about Somali sailors living in Liverpool, Cardiff and South Shields revealed that out of the 109 seafarers documented, 79 – or an overwhelming 72 per cent – freely admitted to using an alias at some point during their maritime career. ²⁵ According to a Cardiff police report, five Somali sailors questioned by the Aliens Section of the Detective Department detailed the various names they gave when signing on ships’ articles. The report concluded that although the identities of these men were in question, all five were ‘bona-fide seamen’ and therefore legitimate mariners. ²⁶ In fact, one key way to root out archival evidence about maritime name-changing is to look for records about sailors who chose to reveal their aliases. For example, when Elmi Ghalib applied for a British-issued Certificate of Nationality in 1933, he produced ‘Seaman's Discharge Book no. 562674’, which had been issued under the alias ‘Hassan Ahmed’. ²⁷ Ghalib, alias Ahmed, had worked consistently as a fireman on British ships out of Liverpool. In another instance, Jama Issa reported to British authorities that he went by not just one but two aliases: Ali Goth and Ali Idowa. ²⁸ In 1926, a sailor registered with the Dakar Inscription Maritime (registration office) under the name Gaye Amady. But throughout his many years in the Marine Marchande, he was also known by the name Samba Amady. ²⁹ Finally, in the 1934 novel The Death Trap, B. Traven (the author's name itself is an alias) wrote: ‘Rarely if ever did anybody … reveal his real name. No one, not even the skipper himself, knew for sure if the name and the nationality given by a man when signing on were correct’. ³⁰ The use of aliases was therefore a historic practice, recognized by shipping companies and government authorities alike. ³¹ Yet, during the interwar period, French and British officials were particularly concerned when black sailors adopted aliases, especially when these identities were procured through alternative economies that transgressed imperial boundaries.

***

In 1936, Sekou Keita and Bilaly Demba were hired to work aboard the steamship Le Leconte de Lisle, which was based out of Marseille and owned by the Messageries Maritimes. The papers they carried stated that they had registered in Dakar and had been assigned livrets numbered 4186 and 3528, respectively. ³² Since 1933, Le Leconte de Lisle had often worked the Indian Ocean route, which meant that, from Marseille, Keita and Demba sailed through the Suez Canal and then stopped in Djibouti for coal. They next docked in Aden and Mombasa before calling at numerous ports along the east coast of Africa before reaching Réunion and beginning the return journey. The ship was due back in Marseille on 20 June 1936, and its arrival was widely anticipated by the local port authorities, as well as by officials in Paris, Dakar and Conakry. Two months earlier, a representative from a government organization in charge of surveilling colonial subjects, known as the Service de Contrôle et d’Assistance en France des Indigènes (Service for the Control and Assistance of Natives in France), had written a letter to the Marseille Inscription Maritime calling into ‘doubt the authenticity of two livrets indigènes with the names Sekou Keita and Bilaly Demba’. ³³ More troubling to these authorities, the livrets of the two men were linked to over a dozen others that had been confiscated the year before and determined to be forgeries. In short, the authorities believed that the names Keita and Demba were aliases and that the livrets associated with these names were ‘absolutely false’ and part of a significant batch of forged seaman's books in circulation among colonial sailors in the Marine Marchande. ³⁴

During the interwar period, rumours about the existence of a robust black market in forged work and identity papers circulated widely. In networks that extended from Dakar to Marseille, Bordeaux and Le Havre, and from Aden to Djibouti, Marseille and Liverpool, sailors were supposedly trading freely in forged documents and seeking the aid of career criminals who specialized in the traffic of people and papers. ³⁵ As the economic crisis deepened in the 1930s, government reports and media coverage described clandestine economies connecting multiple colonial ports. ³⁶ According to a 1932 article in a French newspaper, Le Journal, a Dakar officine (meaning a dark den or an illicit backroom) was ‘furnishing false papers to indigènes coming to France’. ³⁷ British officials at the Home and Colonial Offices similarly discussed the worrisome ‘traffic’ in ‘irregular papers’ from sailors from West and East Africa, as well as from the Red Sea region. ³⁸

These concerns reflected a broader conversation about the policing of citizens and subjects. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, nations and empires began to develop new modes of surveillance and systems of identification. The creation of the modern passport in the early twentieth century exemplified some of these efforts. In the 1920s, the League of Nations convened three conferences aimed at regularizing visa procedures and standardizing the passport as a globally recognized form of identification. Spearheaded by European empires and the United States, an international consensus formed around the importance of managing people's identities. Merchant mariners, however, remained a special case, and their mobilities highlighted the vulnerabilities within the developing system. Sailors did not typically carry passports. Historically, their discharge (or sailor's) books, which were their records of labour, also served as their main form of identification. Even today, most merchant navies around the world issue mariner's books, which are recognized internationally in lieu of or along with a passport. ³⁹ In the interwar period, the development of these paper regimes attempted to establish new barriers to human mobility. ⁴⁰ They also created new possibilities. In these emergent institutions, sailors found opportunities to create alternative systems. Significantly, African sailors’ unofficial maritime economies threatened to undermine the developing hegemony around international modes of identification.

Reports of one such clandestine economy surfaced in Saint-Nazaire, France in 1932 when a man calling himself Mamadou Dialou was arrested on suspicion of possessing a fake birth certificate. On 11 February 1932, Dialou was found guilty of ‘fabricating false identity papers with the aim of using them for embarkation’. ⁴¹ Indeed, Dialou's so-called ‘deception’ was discovered while he was working aboard the steamship Flandre. According to Le Journal, which reported on the trial, Dialou was part of an officine operating out of several colonial ports. Dialou's conviction was ‘proof’, the newspaper wrote, ‘that this clandestine organization fabricates false papers on a grand scale’. ⁴²

Beginning in 1935, functionaries at maritime registration offices in Marseille, Le Havre and Bordeaux seized dozens of livrets that they suspected were fake. A letter from the Marseille-based Service de Contrôle et d’Assistance en France des Indigènes to the Minister of the Colonies identified ‘thirteen livrets found in the hands of native sailors who do not appear to be their rightful owners’. ⁴³ Another memo sent to the Dakar Inscription Maritime listed another set of livrets that had been confiscated in Marseille. This memo listed the names on all the seized documents, as well as the registration numbers associated with each name, and concluded that ‘the authenticity of the names of the men in possession of them’ was in serious ‘doubt’. ⁴⁴ In both instances, the forgeries were easily detectable. All the documents claimed to have been issued in Dakar, but they all looked markedly different from the types of seaman's books issued there by the Inscription Maritime. ⁴⁵ To begin with, the stamped seal was an obvious fabrication. In some cases, the registration numbers and names were real and corresponded with state records of sailors who had registered in Dakar, but the photographs of the seized documents did not match. ⁴⁶ In other instances, the names and registration numbers were both false. To imperial officials, these papers were fake and therefore lacked value. But for African seafarers and the shipping companies that hired them, these papers were worth something as exchangeable commodities.

The colonial and maritime authorities in Senegal, Guinée and France attempted to identify and prosecute sailors accused of using fake identity papers. This proved difficult to do. For one thing, sailors could fairly easily evade the colonial authorities. In the case of the 13 livrets seized in 1936, none of the men who possessed the forgeries and who worked under aliases were ever located. Marseille officials determined that these men had left France to look for work in other European ports. ⁴⁷ In other cases, the authorities did make arrests, as was the case for the men who claimed Sekou Keita and Bilaly Demba as their names. They were charged with identity fraud. But, in July 1936, they were acquitted. The archival documents do not specify why they were released, but we can surmise that it was because the authorities could not precisely confirm who these men really were. ⁴⁸

The authorities also tried to determine how sailors’ identities ended up circulating so widely in the first place. Many mariners, recognizing the value of their seaman's books, procured duplicate papers, which they then gifted to a colleague or sold to a trafficker. According to French authorities writing in the 1930s, a significant number of sailors had recently applied for duplicate papers, suggesting that this was one significant way in which the clandestine economy functioned. ⁴⁹ In the case of the 13 livrets, five of the sailors who seemed to be the original owners of their seaman's books had applied for and received duplicate papers from maritime offices in Marseille or Dakar. It is unclear if these sailors actually lost their papers or if they had been paid to apply for the duplicates. But those duplicates, and the many forgeries based on them, had become articles of trade, sought by sailors who adopted these identities as their own.

In addition to attempting to confirm the ‘true’ identities of these sailors, the authorities also tried to track down and root out the many officines they suspected were operating clandestinely in colonial ports. They were only able to locate a few. In 1937, officials in Marseille and Dakar identified a certain Monsieur Autie, who operated an underground printing shop in Marseille at 32 rue Nationale. Officials determined that Autie had produced at least 53 forged livrets that claimed Dakar as their point of origin. In a letter from the Governor General of Afrique-Occidentale Française (French West Africa) to the Ministry of Colonies, ‘these forgeries exhibit[ed] certain particularities, notably all shared a paper cover’. ⁵⁰ In another case, the authorities could not locate the actual printer of the forgeries but instead relied on informants to track down and follow suspected traffickers. Several bars in Marseille served as marketplaces where sailors from around Africa could purchase papers. According to two informants, one such bar was located at 26 rue de Puvis de Chavannes. It was owned by Toumani Sangaré, a former sailor from French Sudan. ‘On the afternoon of Sunday, March 1, 1936’, read one report, ‘three or four indigènes entered the establishment of Sangaré’. ⁵¹ At this bar, which was a popular meeting place for Soninké sailors, they met with Abdoulaye N’Diaye, known as ‘Le Boiteux’, who, according to the Marseille branch of the Service de Contrôle et d’Assistance en France des Indigènes, was well known to local police. ⁵² The sailors who had met with N’Diaye were later found to be in ‘possession of forged livrets’. ⁵³ Officials believed that Sangaré and N’Diaye were in cahoots with a local left-wing philanthropist, a man named Alexandre Casanova. An informant reported that Casanova was seen with ‘two or three noirs, including a man fitting the description of Toumani Sangaré’. This same informant got hold of one of Casanova's business cards. Hand-written on the back of the card was the price sailors purportedly paid for their new identities: ‘300 francs each’. ⁵⁴ Despite the volumes of correspondence between officials at the highest levels, no arrests were ever made. ⁵⁵

***

Names were not the only goods for sale. Seafarers also traded in imperial identities. They assumed and discarded French and British subjecthood in order to sign on as crew members on merchant vessels and to move clandestinely across imperial boundaries. In short, colonial subjecthood was also a fungible commodity valued by sailors. Together, names and subjecthood were part of a maritime economy that functioned in two distinct ways, through the widespread circulation of borrowed and gifted papers among colleagues and kin and, in a more concrete sense, through a market where identities were bought and sold for a price.

Many French and British officials were convinced that African sailors’ use of aliases was proof of a thriving, illegal trans-imperial market in fraudulent papers. The British authorities believed, for example, that Arab boarding-house keepers in British and French ports played a significant role as traffickers in this underground economy. ⁵⁶ French officials, by comparison, suspected that African and north African proprietors of café-bars were dealing in false papers. ⁵⁷

But not all colonial authorities believed that the widespread use of aliases was evidence of a vast criminal conspiracy. As a French official from the Marseille branch of the Service de Contrôle et d’Assistance en France des Indigènes wrote to the head of the Marseille Inscription Maritime: not all ‘identity fraud … involve[s] career traffickers’. ⁵⁸ This official described the case of Ahmed Coulibaly, who registered with the Dakar Inscription Maritime in 1932 but died in hospital in 1934. ⁵⁹ After his death, his papers ‘passed from hand to hand’, and countless sailors had assumed his identity over the years, taking his name as their own. ⁶⁰ There was no indication that Coulibaly's papers were bought or sold; they simply circulated. This and other examples call into question the authorities’ preoccupation with officines, and instead paint a much more banal, but also more interesting, picture. They underscore how acquiring a new name or claiming to belong to a certain empire in order to secure work was a rather commonplace strategy among sailors. Such examples illuminate how sailors produced networks of knowledge about work and labour.

These networks also call into question the assumption that clandestine or informal economies operated without any connection to supposedly legitimate ones. ⁶¹ In fact, shipping companies helped sustain these alternative economies and profited from them. In some instances, shipping executives maintained relationships with suspected traffickers. In 1936, for example, the head of personnel at the Cyprien Fabre shipping company held a closed-door meeting with Abdoulaye N’Diaye, who French authorities believed was selling aliases and work permits to sailors on the Marseille docks. ⁶² In other instances, shipping companies actively cultivated informal sailor networks, such as the one linking Marseille, Djibouti and Aden. Following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1857, the Messageries Maritimes often engaged Yemeni sailors out of British Aden to work as chauffeurs and soutiers on its Indian Ocean and Red Sea routes. ⁶³ In the 1920s and 1930s, the company began to routinely discharge and hire Yemeni sailors out of Djibouti instead of Aden. This resulted in a growing community of mariners who lived in Djibouti and Marseille but were originally from Yemen, who could make some claim to residency within both the French and British empires. These examples illustrate how African and Yemeni sailors were part of a global maritime economy that relied on both legal and extralegal practices to function.

During the interwar period, these alternative marketplaces gained in importance as metropolitan governments passed new measures to police the identities and mobilities of sailors from the colonies. In the United Kingdom, the 1925 Coloured Alien Seamen Order (Special Restriction) required undocumented black seamen – the majority of whom were British subjects or protected persons – to register as aliens in the mainland. In France, a series of laws required sailors from the French colonies to carry special identification papers, while other decrees limited their ability to work on French vessels.

Scholars, notably Laura Tabili, have done the important work of showing how the 1925 Special Restriction helped to define British citizenship in starkly racial terms. ⁶⁴ The Coloured Alien Seamen Order required mariners from British colonies to provide documentary evidence that they were British subjects. This proved difficult to do because merchant seafarers’ discharge books had historically been accepted as proof of nationality. While these documents remained acceptable forms of identification for white British sailors, after 1925, sailors from British colonies had to meet more rigorous standards in order to be recognized as British. If they could not provide the required additional documents, they were either denied leave to land or had to register as aliens on disembarking ship in the metropole. ⁶⁵

The 1925 Order was part of a series of policies aimed at limiting the ability of black seafarers to live and work in mainland Britain. Significantly, these measures used laws initially designed for foreign non-nationals and applied them to black British sailors. The 1925 Special Restriction was an amendment, for example, to the 1920 Alien Order, which required all non-British foreign nationals to register with the police on arriving in the United Kingdom. ⁶⁶ The 1925 Special Restriction also paved the way for future legislation that continued to target black British sailors. In 1931, British officials began to confiscate colonial sailors’ passports and alien registration certificates and replace them with a new form of identification called a Special Certificate of Nationality. At best, these certificates marked Afro-Caribbean, African and South East Asian sailors as second-class, nominal members of the British Empire. At worst, because these papers automatically expired after five years and had to be renewed, they effectively rendered these mariners stateless.

In the French case, scant attention has been paid to government restrictions targeting sailors from the French colonies. In 1913, a Marine Marchande missive required all ‘native’ sailors to produce their identity or work papers on demand. ⁶⁷ This policy was amended in 1914 when another ministerial circular required ‘natives’ to prove their identity when registering as seamen or embarking as crew members. ⁶⁸ In tandem with the Marine Marchande, the Ministry of Colonies and colonial governors also instituted new registration requirements for African sailors. In 1914, mariners from Afrique-Occidentale Française were required to obtain an additional form of identification, which classified them as ‘native sailors’ who were ‘French colonial subjects or protected persons’. ⁶⁹ A 1920 decree applied this special registration to all ‘native sailors’, including those in Afrique-Équatoriale Française (French Equatorial Africa). In sum, French policies required sailors from the colonies to meet a more rigorous requirement than white sailors in order to prove their legitimacy as both mariners and members of the Empire.

If one goal of the French authorities was to monitor the identities of colonial subjects, another was to police the definition of Frenchness. A 1925 letter from the head of the Marine Marchande to the Minister of the Colonies proposed new legislation that would address ‘the question of the employment of indigènes’, and specifically consider whether French colonial subjects should count as French members of the crew. The French Undersecretary of the Marine Marchande went on to detail his ‘reservations about hiring indigènes as part of the crew that is required to be French’, and argued that new legislation must include ‘a formal disposition that consecrates this doctrine’. ⁷⁰ Specifically, any new law ‘for employing foreign labour in the Marine Marchande’ must specifically state ‘that indigènes of our colonies are not considered French in the composition of crews’. ⁷¹ In other words, one set of policies affirmed the second-class status of sailors from French colonies by marking them as subjects and therefore not fully French. And another set of policies precluded them from being called French altogether by banning them from being included in the quota of crew members reserved for French nationals. In sum, ‘their personal identities and qualities as French subjects’ had to first ‘be established’ so they could be treated as aliens. ⁷²

In both the British and French examples, government officials repurposed legislation meant for so-called ‘aliens’ and applied it to colonial subjects. These measures helped make sailors’ identities dubious by making it more difficult for them to prove who they really were. As a result, aliases and other name-changing strategies became an increasingly viable recourse for sailors, who found ways to circumvent and appropriate these laws to their own ends.

Although scholars have largely overlooked alias adoption at sea, this historical practice is essential for understanding how names – whether real or assumed – have been valued as important assets within maritime economies. For sailors from the French and British colonies in Africa, names could be commodified in order to secure work and circumvent imperial boundaries. Sailors borrowed a friend's discharge book, purchased duplicate or fabricated papers, or signed on with a nickname. These were working aliases – names utilized strategically by African mariners and recognized by shipping companies, which relied on black labour to power their fleets.

Thinking critically about aliases also illuminates tensions between maritime capitalism and European imperialism. To date, many scholars have argued that European merchant navies were the ‘flagships’ of empire – that shipping companies functioned as key conduits of colonial culture, goods and policy. Detangling shipping from empire shows how these two systems overlapped but were also distinct. Although imperial governments and shipping companies were both concerned with African sailors, their interests did not neatly align. Companies such as the Messageries Maritimes, for example, were less worried about ascertaining the ‘true’ identities of their crews than ensuring that a steady supply of cheap labour was available in ports of call around the world. By contrast, France and Great Britain, in an effort to police the identities of colonial subjects, repurposed legislation meant for so-called ‘aliens’ and applied it to sailors from the colonies. As a result, these policies made name-changing a lucrative, if extralegal, alternative for African seafarers.

More broadly, examining the place of alias adoption within alternative economies underscores the contribution that maritime history can make to other fields, including to labour and migration studies. It can provide an important historical perspective on contemporary debates about the role played by big business in cultivating pools of undocumented and poorly documented workers.