During the early 20th century, Dutch passenger liners carried thousands of travelers between Europe, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia. The peaceful images presented to European tourists in colorful brochures, however, overlooked the ways passenger ships embodied imperial instabilities and reflected the varied and confusing relationships between metropole and colony during the late-colonial period. The ship, therefore, became a colonial classroom where Europeans were taught to interact with non-Europeans in ways that exported terrestrial structures of empire across global maritime networks. Aboard Dutch passenger liners, segregation was essential in establishing and maintaining imperial norms around race, class, and gender and shipping companies tightly regulated maritime spaces in the hopes that European passengers would transition from the disparate identities of the metropole into a consenting and unified group while at sea. Colonial ideology asserted that if tourists learned how to maintain order through hierarchy, segregation, routine, and etiquette on board, they would reinforce colonial norms after arriving in the colony or returning to the metropole. Using Dutch shipping company archives housed in the Netherlands, this paper shows how Europeans were encouraged to practice their impending terrestrial roles through interactions with the ship’s Indonesian staff of stewards and nannies and how Dutch officers facilitated the “viewing” of non-European travelers in the third and fourth classes. Despite this, the liminality of the maritime world during the late-colonial period also tested the limits of these colonial boundaries; both passengers and crew members helped subvert the colonial classroom through various transgressions enacted throughout the journey.

What kinds of things did early modern seafarers accumulate during a voyage? What kinds of relationship did mariners have to material objects whilst at sea in this mobile space? This paper draws on sources found amongst records of the Prize Papers collection (High Court of Admiralty, The National Archive London), housing papers seized from enemy ships immediately after capture by English/British Royal Navy, customs vessels or privateers: detailed inventories that were drawn up as official documents by the ship’s master or second-in-command when members of crew died or deserted ship. They are often accompanied by details of how these belongings were distributed amongst other members of the crew. This paper will examine, in particular, sailors’ personal possessions in these inventories as a means of grasping their roles in the intercultural transfer of material culture and knowledge in the early modern world. It will explore strategies and systems of object circulation and use language analytical methods to elicit the valuation logics underlying the accumulation of personal items in the mobile space. What kinds of things did sailors acquire? What role did cultural or geographical markers play in the labelling of such possessions? Unlike the many consumers of exotic coffee, sugar and calicos back in Europe, sailors often had first-hand experience of the cultures in which they acquired goods: how did this impact on their relationship to exotic things? This microhistorical perspective on consumption ‘from below’ offers a parallel narrative to that of the ship as a mere conduit for bulk cargo.

The suggested communication takes an anthropological look at the deck of the great sailing boats often visiting Brittany harbours at the beginning of the 18th century. Seafarers, forming its crews, carry out various missions: fishing campaigns in Newfoundland, private operations at the English Channel or in the Gulf of Guinea, traffics in the Caribbeans or the South Seas. Their eating habits and more generally the material environment in which they operate should enlighten us about the functioning of modern societies. The written sources are mainly built up of admiralty funds from the main Brittany harbours. Judicial investigations themselves are particularly interesting because they sometimes show, almost accidentally, the social implications that centre around this strong moment of sociability that mealtime represents: an altercation occurs during that time, witnesses describe then what they eat, when the conflict does not lie in the organization of the meal itself. Underwater archaeology resonates with these fragments of life, echoed in the archives. On wrecks, cooking utensils and leftovers give us a better understanding of the interactions on board.Does meeting between judicial archives and underwater archaeology allow us to consider the ship as a microcosm of the 18th century society? Is the ship also a laboratory of new habits at a time when Europe's interactions with the rest of the world are profoundly upsetting modern societies?

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, commercial ocean liners provided new opportunities for Europeans to travel across the oceans. During this period, more than a million Swedes migrated to the United States. While they constituted the majority of ocean liner passengers, many Swedes also traveled by ship from Europe or the United States to Asia for various purposes, such as working as sailors, Christian missionaries, scientists, or colonial servants, as well as for leisure. Life on board these ships offered opportunities to adapt to shipboard life and prepare for the journey ahead. Through interactions with passengers and crew, they received and shared advice, learned new practices, and adjusted their ways to the new circumstances. This paper focuses on one core practice that received significant attention in narratives from shipboard life: clothing. It explores the different roles and uses of dress in ocean liner passenger narratives of Swedish Lutheran missionaries in the early 20th century. The paper examines how dress was used to express social interaction and seclusion, adapt to the climate, meet social expectations, and conform to cultural practices on board the ship, as well as for lives and experiences in ports and countries beyond. Examples are drawn from passengers traveling to Colombo and Yokohama, as well as the return journeys to Sweden via ports in the Mediterranean.