The Sailors’ Home and moral regulation of white European seamen in nineteenth-century India

This article examines the efforts of British Christian missionaries in regulating the daily lives of European seamen in colonial Indian port cities. Missionaries aimed to reform seamen, who typically lived a life a debauchery and degeneration, by moral regulation and promotion of healthy living and hygienic practices in their everyday lives. Through a study of the Sailors’ Home run by Baptist missionaries and several other charitable institutions in Calcutta, this article provides new insights into maritime history, missionary history and colonial politics. Missionaries conceived seamen as not only the victims of government apathy and a malevolent labour market, but also tropical climate and an unforgiving urban space. This perception, rooted in the Victorian notions of purity and the link between a sanitary body and a moral mind, helped them justify regulating seamen’s bodies across the colonial world and beyond. The article shows how their actions produced white imperial bodies in a colonial context.