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Merchant shipping offers an ideal setting for examining the changing regulatory regimes applied to workers across the 19th and 20th centuries. Given powerful nation-states and a global marketplace in the 19th century, recruitment and regulation of merchant seamen became a high priority and a vexing problem for western powers like the United States and Great Britain. After World War I, the deskilling impact of steam and diesel power, hypercompetition among shipping powers, and a worldwide reach for cheap labor threatened wage and living standards established by previous collective bargaining and political accommodation. No occupational sector looked with greater hope to the International Labor Organization in 1919 for restoring a semblance of order and humane treatment. Given the diversity of the international seafaring workforce, however, regulation—whether global or national in inspiration—inevitably reflected regulators' racial, ethnic, and imperial designs. When ethnic, political, and economic differences prevented global regulations from taking hold, national actors, by the mid-1930s, took charge. Despite its failures, the International Labor Organization and especially its maritime division were among the few broadly international bodies to survive the wreckage of economic depression, another world war, and the large-scale collapse of democracy with both machinery and aspirations intact.

This chapter begins by exporing the European orientation of the Royal Navy and a great deal of British and Irish merchant shipping. The focus then turns to maritime towns and cities, where seafarers from many nations interacted. The next section looks at the mobility of the maritime labour force: the tendency for sailors to work on ships (naval vessels and merchantmen) of different nations is particularly striking. The world of cross‐Channel smugglers is then examined. Once the network of connections has been sketched, consideration is given to the more tricky issue of attitudes. The evidence is patchy, especially at the level of the common seaman, but there are some insights if we look carefully enough. Patriotic utterances can readily be found, but so too can indications of other forms of belonging, including a sense of occupational solidarity, uniting sailors of different nations.

This chapter describes Sir Edwin Lutyens's memorial to 35,000 fishermen and merchant seamen killed in the Great War, which have no grave but the sea. It recounts the crucial role the fishermen played that was often acknowledged by key figures in the country's political and military establishment immediately after the war and in the first years which followed. It also discusses the publication of a small number of books that highlighted the fishermen's activities in the Great War that told much of the scale and scope of their contribution. The chapter refers to the new navy known as the Auxiliary Patrol that had been dispersed and disbanded very rapidly after the return of peace. It summarizes the scale and scope of the engagement of fishermen and coastal communities from around the British Isles on the maritime front line during the Great War.