ABSTRACT
The contribution of West Africans to British maritime interests and their experience of this work has largely gone ignored in accounts of British trade with West Africa. This chapter focuses on the experience of one particular West African ethnic group called the Kru, who travelled between Freetown and Liverpool on board Elder vessels in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The growth of ‘legitimate trade’ in the nineteenth century saw the recruitment of West Africans to fulfil the specific labour needs of British colonialism. West African Kru seamen were engaged for up to two years at any one time with no obligation in the pre-Second World War period to pay them unemployment benefit, or provide them with further work. West African Kru seamen constituted a form of ‘reserve army labour’ that could be wheeled in and out of the British economy as conditions dictated.
