Oceanic and Maritime History Workshop

Labour, Identity and Transoceanic Exchange in the History of Sea Shanties

This paper investigates shanties as globally constituted forms of maritime knowledge-making, arguing that sailors’ work songs offer a vital lens through which to examine the cultural, environmental and social dynamics of oceanic labour across the nineteenth century. Although often described in purely functional terms as rhythmic aids to collective work, shanties are better understood as expressive artefacts shaped by the movement of peoples, musical idioms, and labour practices across multiple oceanic basins. Drawing on sailors’ journals, logbooks, vernacular song manuscripts, nineteenth-century printed collections and audio recordings, the paper reconstructs the transnational trajectories of shanty repertoires as they travelled through major port cities spanning the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific worlds. The analysis emphasises the heterogeneous origins of shanty performance, tracing its entanglements with West African call-and-response structures, Anglo-Irish and Scots balladic traditions, South Asian rowing and hauling chants, Pacific Islander…