began commercial operations in Aden, that a British trader was finally established at the port.7
British mail ships, largely P&O vessels after the termination of the government mail service, were given priority at the harbour and were provided with buoy berths. Until 1857, all other vessels were required to lie at anchor in the inner harbour and, where British mail ships had port company pilots, other merchants had to employ the services of Red Sea pilots until the establishment of the Aden Pilot Service in 1848. Steamships required an incredible amount of coal, all of which was shipped to the port by a fleet of colliers from the British ports of Cardiff, Newcastle, Liverpool and Hull – ports that were soon to see the settlement of Yemeni merchant seamen in the dockland areas. The draft limitations in Aden’s Western Bay meant that the colliers were required to discharge their loads in the outer harbour to draft 17 feet before unloading the remaining coal in the inner harbour.
At the dockside, the labour required to handle all cargoes was mobilized and organized through the system of a muqaddam. The muqaddam acted as a ‘foreman’ or, ‘leader’ of small, freelance labour gangs for anyone wishing to employ them. The chief duties of the muqaddam was to recruit and employ local men individually, keep the labour gang together, fill the places of those who fell sick and provide sufficient men to meet the needs of the port employers. Serangs (Bosons) and tindals (Boson’s mates)8 supervised the actual work, with the serang accepting or refusing the services of the muqaddam as they saw fit. This degree of partiality was open to a system of small bribery, known locally as ‘al-ḥaqq al-qahwah’ (literally, ‘the right of coffee’), which meant that for a small ‘service charge’, usually set at a nominal fee – the price of a cup of coffee – an individual could buy his place on to a muqaddam’s gang, or a muqaddam could ensure work for his gang by greasing the palm of a serang or tindal. Ansari refers to the role of the muwassiṭ or muqaddam as:
Serangs and ghat serangs – labour agents, moneylenders and lodging house-keepers rolled into one (and therefore very powerful men) – were already established in Calcutta and Bombay … Yemeni and Somali maritime employment was organised and controlled in a similar way: muqadams (similar to serangs) were charged with supplying labour from their own tribes and negotiating contracts to the best advantage of the shipping companies and themselves. 9
The muqaddam system was used by Haines from the earliest days of the British presence in Aden, specifically in the construction of the fortifications and the garrison erected around the port. Labourers not only found their way to Aden from the tribal highlands of Yemen, but they came from as far as Egypt and Iran. The overwhelming majority of labourers, however, were from Mocha or the hill-farming communities of northern Yemen. As a result of labour migration, Aden soon became a cosmopolitan community comprising of Arab, Indian, Somali and Persian workers and traders. It was through this very particular and effective employment process that Aden quickly developed a competitive edge over all the other coal bunkering stations and colonial ports. During the 1840s and 1850s, it was estimated that a third of Aden’s population were hill farmers from the northern hinterlands, who would return to their mountain villages to sow their crops and then harvest them from June to October every year. This annual migration left the port with a serious shortage of labourers. Another third came from Mocha as the changing fortunes of the once-famous coffee port was slowly reduced to little more than a fishing village when the coffee merchants and traders relocated to Aden.
2.1 – A picture postcard view of British Colonial Aden, circa 1960.
In the early years of British control of Aden, migrant labourers usually settled in poor makeshift wooden huts along the dockside. However, by 1856, the EIC’s Assistant Resident at Aden introduced a policy of tearing down the temporary huts at the same time that he was clearing the water tanks at al-Tawāhī. Hut occupiers were offered plots on which to build stone houses which meant that by 1867 there were 1840 permanent houses for a population of 17,564.10 A survey conducted at Ma˓allā in 1881 revealed that 15% of Aden’s population was homeless, 60% were semi-settled in ‘kutcha’ houses, which suggests these were homes of Indian settlers, and the rest occupied stone houses. By 1870, the population of around 22,000 was dominated by migrant port workers who frequented the coffee houses in search of work, to take their recreation, eat food and, in many cases, collect their wages from the muqaddam, who was also often the coffee house owner. The size of Aden’s population remained fairly constant until after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Thereafter, steamers gradually began to replace the square-rigger ships, which made longer voyages around the Cape to China and India. More steamers inevitably meant more coal at Aden whose status was further boosted as an important refuelling and trading port when the triple-expansion engines for steamers were introduced in the 1880s accelerating the numbers of vessels passing through the port. Yet, as the port became increasingly busy, the facilities and harbour conditions at the docks had hardly improved. It was only after a parliamentary debate in 1885 and the subsequent formation of the Aden Port Trust in 1889 that the British government and the mercantile community at Aden arranged for a major dredging and reconstruction of the docklands, which enabled the mooring of the biggest ships of the day to berth at the port. The end result of the muqaddam system of employment and migration flow meant that many Yemeni lascar crews were discharged in Europe, and did not return to Aden; instead, a number of pioneer Muslim settlements around the ports of Marseilles, Amsterdam, Cardiff, South Shields, Liverpool and London emerged by the late nineteenth century.
As a country at the heart of the industrial revolution and the subsequent manufacturing boom, Britain became a place of migration for many foreign emigrants and settlers. In the beginning, the Muslim presence was transient and temporary, largely facilitated by British imperial expansionism and commercial enterprise. But the empire slowly drew Muslims to its industrial centres by a number of means: firstly as oriental sailors, or lascars, and wealthy Arab merchants, then later as a large post-colonial labour force. The establishment of the Yemeni Muslim community in Britain is intrinsically linked to the historical legacy of British colonialism and imperialism, because Aden was ruled through imperial India until it was granted colony status in 1937. When Aden originally became a British Protectorate in 1839, the empire secured a vital strategic fuelling station for its merchant steam vessels sailing to and from British India and the Far East. Yemeni migration to Britain began with the formation of early nineteenth-century lascar settlements in Cardiff, Liverpool, London and South Shields. Humayun Ansari has asserted that ‘the vital link in Yemeni emigration to Britain was the port of Aden.’11 However, the burgeoning industrial docklands of imperial Britain were far removed from the remote highland village settlements from where most of the Yemeni lascars originated. The British colony at Aden was included in the Bombay presidency until 1932 when its control was then transferred to the central Indian colonial Government at Delhi, and the Resident at Aden subsequently became a Chief Commissioner. By 1937, Aden was finally separated administratively from India and it became a Crown colony.12 This relatively late shift in the colonial politics of recognizing and ruling the Aden Protectorate as a separate entity from colonial India is perhaps largely responsible for the perceived ‘invisibility’ or, lack of any distinct recognition of an early to mid-nineteenth century Yemeni presence in Britain.
As colonized subjects associated administratively with British imperial India, the cultural and ethnic distinctiveness of Yemeni lascars was probably viewed as an insignificant detail in the larger scheme of colonial lascar employment within the booming maritime industry of imperial Britain. Hence, most of the contemporaneous accounts of lascar presence in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain are largely absent of any specific cultural and ethnic details regarding the particular racial origins of Oriental lascars. Instead, general depictions and monolithic representations, as ‘Indians’, ‘Arabs’, ‘Africans’
