Sea Control - Sea Control 483 - The Transformation of Maritime Professions with Dr. Karel Davids

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Links1. The Transformation of Maritime Professions: Old and New Jobs in European Shipping Industries, 1850-2000, edited by Karel Davids and Joost Schokkenbroek, Palgrave MacMillan, 2023.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Nate Miller is back as host, editor, and producer today, and he has Dr. Carl Davids on to discuss his work on the transformation of maritime professions. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime peace and security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Hello and welcome aboard the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. My guest today is Dr. Carl Davids, and we are discussing his edited volume, The Transformation of Maritime Professions, Old and New Jobs in European Shipping Industry, 1850 to 2000. Carl, welcome aboard. Would you like to start by telling the listeners a little bit about your background, please? Well, I'm at the moment a retired professor of economic and social history at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. and I studied history at Leiden in Leiden

at Leiden University and I took my PhD on a study on science and development of navigation technology in the Netherlands from the late 16th until the early 19th century at my job

in my job at Vrije Universiteit I taught and published for many years on Dutch and global economic and social history, on the history of early modern technology and maritime history and I also publish both in Dutch and English and other languages. And my most recent

book before this edited volume was a book called Global Ocean of Knowledge, which is on the relationship between globalization and marital knowledge in the Atlantic world between 1660 and 1860. So by way of introduction. Wonderful. And as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions expressed here are strictly our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might be otherwise associated.

I was kind of curious, how did you settle on 1850 to 2000? That is a broad range. What makes that slice of time something that you really wanted to investigate? Well, that period is a period of big changes in the shipping industry, bigger than many centuries before. Well, in fact, the book started as a course in maritime history, which was taught by Joost Schokkebroek, who is the co-editor of this volume, and me at the Vrije Universiteit. And what Joost and I both are interested in is especially the social aspect of maritime history, especially the 19th and 20th century. So we organized a course looking especially at the question, which is one of the basic questions of social history, how big changes impact the lives of ordinary people, how ordinary people experience big changes in their daily life or working life. And so we focused on the impact of big changes in the shipping industry on the lives of different groups of sailors.

And the students studied various groups of seamen, especially in the Netherlands. And then, well, the results were so promising that we decided, well, let's organize panels at international maritime history conferences around this topic and try to make it more competitive. to try to draw in specialists from other countries and more kinds of new and old jobs in the shipping industry. And what we found so interesting about this long period of time is that there were big changes, but not just, well, perhaps the best known of them all, the shifts from sail to steam or from wooden ships to iron or steel ships,

but also the rise of passenger shipping and the rise or the increase of government regulation. And also, and that's why it was so interesting to continue longer to the 20th century, the changes in communication technology has also huge impact on the lives of ordinary seamen in the shipping industry. So by taking this long period, we could study and compare the impact of all these changes on the lives of different categories of theme in different countries of Europe. One thing that I enjoyed about the book was that it explored just a really wide variety of folks that are involved in the maritime industry. and one one of the topics that uh you covered was the hierarchy changes and how they played into one another especially like you were saying that the communications folks like with radio operators and and how they fit into that hierarchy can you speak to those changes a little

bit well one of the new phenomenon new phenomenon arising in this period was precisely um the fact that more hierarchies emerged aboard ship so not just um the hierarchy among deck officers but also a new hierarchy of people in the engine room and also a new hierarchy of people in the catering department and in the course of time all kinds of frictions arose between those different hierarchies. Originally especially between the hierarchies

of the deck personnel and the navigating officers on the one hand, the traditional hierarchy of seamen and the new hierarchy of engineers. Some contributions to the volume show people

in that new hierarchy had to a certain extent struggle to get their job or profession recognized. In some countries, engineers had to do a lot of

infighting to get their jobs acknowledged. And on the one hand, and that's of course understandable, people in the old hierarchy, for example, the captain or mates, saw the traditional position

challenged and especially the traditional authority of the captain was to some extent undermined or at least changed by the rise of this new hierarchy of engineers and as some of the

contributions show it could even happen that for example engineers on the steamships were in the course of time earning more than captains on traditional sailing vessels and one of the groups which in fact

hardly fitted in in this complex of hierarchies was precisely the group of the radio operators, so they were a kind of old group, often not employed

by a shipping company but by a separate organization altogether, like the Makoni company or Radio Holland in the Netherlands and often there were not many radio operators on board, sometimes just one or two or three. So that was a kind of outsider group

which had a lot of difficulty to get their position recognized on board. And you can notice that the tension between the new arrivals and the old established groups in ways people were talking about each other. And also, for example, this is also shown in a contribution on the spatial arrangements on board that people in those new groups, especially the radio operators, didn't for a long time have a kind of fixed

place on board. So they could be accommodated in all kinds of different places, some attractive places, some not very attractive places, just behind the funnel, for example. So it took a long time before they more or less gained a recognized place on board. And by looking at those aspects, for example, spatial arrangements for professional organizations, you can reconstruct those frictions and tension between those different hierarchies, which became typical for ships, many ships in the 20th century. i'm curious did you see any i guess in your words tension between captains and engineers

because the captains wouldn't necessarily know what's going on in the engine department originally well let's say for a long time in the 19th century captains did not know much about what what was happening in the engine room. But later on, it became part of the training of captains to know a bit about engines as well. But still, of course, they were not as knowledgeable about engines as the people in the engineering department. But later in the 20th century, nowadays, of course,

there's a lot of talk about multi-skilling. So navigating officers have to know a lot about how all the machines on board operate as well. So in that sense, there is more fusion going on between the old-fashioned engineers and the captains. So in that sense, too, the tensions, which were a feature of much of 19th and 20th century history, are less clear today.

Also during this period, one thing that struck me in your book, and you spoke to directly here, was that the amount of change and in particular the industrial revolution as it was sweeping through Europe and just kind of how that played into people's perspective of skilled trades you know sailmakers and skilled seamen how did that play a role in the dynamics on board let me put it this way when we talk about industrial revolution it suggests that the change was going very fast and was in fact of course many of those developments took a very long time to be completed for example the transition from sail to steam was a very long drawn out

process and some of the contributions in the volume for example on greece or scandinavia you notice that for a long time in the 20th century there were still a lot of sailing ships So, in that sense, the impact was, for many people, only gradually felt. On the other hand, of course, semen, a large group of semen, could notice that changes were happening and that, in the course of time, there were less employment opportunities. And one of the contributions, several of the contributions also deal with the topic of de-skilling, that all established skills were becoming redundant or less valuable. And that was especially true for one of the authors called the group of medium skills. So people with some degree of skill, also much experience, especially seamen in those categories became less and less needed. So the employment opportunities disappeared.

for them it would be much more difficult to find new employment opportunities on land or perhaps they could move to other shipping industries whether they're still sailing ships or tramping ships and so on

so in that way the impact was felt but perhaps we could return to this topic later because in recent decades other things are happening and one of the differences, I think, between what is happening now

and what was happening for much of the time in the late 19th century and much of the 20th century, that changes are going much faster now than in the past. So the impact can be felt often much more quickly than it used to be the case for a long time in the 19th and 20th century. given that there's a difference in the pace and and how it can be felt and maybe even in one lifetime there's a pretty dramatic change nowadays in the maritime industry where there

wasn't before do you see anything in in your work here that could inform folks in the maritime I'm in the street now. Can I just tell a brief personal story? Absolutely. Yes, please. One of the reasons why I was interested in this group of radio operators was that my grandfather has been a radio operator. And he decided to choose that career under the impact of the Titanic disaster.

So shortly before the First World War. So then he was trained as a radio operator, and he sailed in that role during the First World War. And after that, he got a job in Atlanta. And at that time, it was, of course, one of the most skilled and newest jobs in the shipping industry. So it opened a lot of new opportunities and prospects.

So everybody thought, well, we should go into this new profession. But when he died in 1985, the job had almost disappeared. So, indeed, in his case, within the space of a lifetime, his job appeared and disappeared. And, in fact, on his tombstone, there's still a quote from the last tune played on the Titanic. So, nearer to thee, my God. And still on his tombstone to remind people, well, that was the reason why I chose this job in the first place.

But this case of the radio operator is also interesting and illuminating because it teaches, indeed, that the pace of change is sometimes, perhaps today, more difficult to predict than it used to be in the past. So in the early 50s, not many people could predict at that time that a job like radio operator would just become redundant by the end of the century. And that may apply to jobs today as well. But one of the lessons, well, there's a good lesson and a bad lesson, is that the disappearance of jobs and the pace of change is not always a disaster for individuals. So, for example, in the case of radio operators, many of them could also use their skills on land, like engineers could as well, and many other people could work both afloat and ashore. And in fact, the same applies, I think, to sailmakers as well, because, of course, still many sailing boats around which need sail. So plenty of employment opportunities for sailmakers, like there are for ship carpenters. But for other jobs, for example, many able seamen, those employment opportunities are far fewer.

And of course, for them, the impact of changes can have a huge impact on them individually, but also for maritime communities. But what many of these contributions in our volume show is that there is the importance of organization. So you can cope with many of these changes. First of all, it's easier to cope with those changes when you are in more skilled jobs because those skills can be used in different places. For the lesser skills, it's a bigger problem. But still, for all groups, it's important to be organized. And in many of those professions and jobs we studied, you notice, and that's also different with earlier centuries of maritime history, that seamen get more and more organized in professional organizations and trade unions. And those were and still are, I think, a means of prime importance to achieve improvements in your position and to cope with all those big changes in the chipping industry.

another thing that i was really curious about was the pace of regulation and uh the change in technology and how those two didn't necessarily match up but could you speak a little bit to that and and maybe even the how formalized training was also in some ways lagging behind the application of technology one of the challenges in the shipping industry is of course that it has always

been becoming more and more a very international industry and especially so in the recent decades with the emergence of flags of convenience and so on so

if you put it in terms like a capital of labor capital is operating internationally and labor is often operating nationally or even locally and in some

parts of the shipping industry or some aspect of the shipping industry regulation emerged earlier than in others and also at the international level for example in communication technology, there was not such a big

lag between the emergence of new technologies and the beginning of the population. Also under the impact of the Titanic disaster, of course. So all kinds of arrangements were made which were internationally valid for all kinds of industries, although there were still, of course, differences by language and so on. whereas for large groups of sailors

especially those in the semi-skilled or the unskilled regulation took a long time to emerge but the good news is that even in those parts of the shipping industry regulation eventually

emerged and organization between seamen from all kinds parts of the world became stronger. So, but I agree with you that the time lag has been much longer than

all the parts of the chicken industry. Well, last question for you then. Is there anything that you feel like I've missed or anything that you want to add in for the listeners? Well, one of the things we are still interested in and we couldn't

incorporate in the volume is more global comparison. So as you noticed when you read the title of our book it's focused on European shipping industries. Still in Europe we have contributors specialised in

different countries and different professions but we would be very much interested in seeing this kind of comparative research continued for other parts of the globe. For example comparisons with shipping industries in Asia or in the Indian Ocean

so I would invite your listeners to start research and make comparative studies on those topics as well Wonderful Well I'm sorry if that is all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest

Carl Davids. Carl what are you working on next and can we find you online? You can find you can find me via my LinkedIn connection so if you just type in Carol Davids

you can find my name and further information on my LinkedIn page and a new project which I started not so long ago but which I'm very much interested in is a topic briefly called Losing Knowledge

and it is in a way related to the topic of this book because I'm very much interested in finding out whether knowledge which seemed to disappear when big changes are occurring, for example, not just in the shipping industry, is really disappearing or just moving to other places

or in some ways still be preserved. And I intend to make comparisons between maritime industries and other industries in the 19th and 20th century. So that's my big project for my hopefully many years of retirement. Well, that is a really interesting question. I'm going to keep an eye out for that work.

Well, thank you again for joining us. And to the listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © transcript Emily Beynon I don't know.