Racialization and exclusion: the accounting role in the Indian Maritime labourers market in Britain over in nineteenth century

This paper analyses the accounting role in applying logics of racialization and regulation as part of mass management techniques Foucault described as bio-politics. In particular, the paper focuses on the Indian seamen called “Lascars” as a reserve labour forces in the Maritime labour market in Britain in nineteenth century. Labour recruitment practices, skills evaluations and wages and provisions are analysed through accounting records and disclosures. Weargue that Foucault’s genealogy of racism deserves appreciation due to the highly original suggestion that modern racism is a form of biopolitical government that impacts on individuals in their most basic relationship to themselves and others. Using an inductive research approach, we checked the archives of the Card Library inside the National maritime Museum in London, where there are the main logbooks and other resources containing accounting records and disclosure on the Lascars. Our findings show how the accounting has played a role in discriminating and exploiting the Lascars during the period under investigation. According to Foucault theorization of racism, the analysis of the resources collected during our research have revealed how the accounting records and disclosure has been used as operative practices in intensified trends of racialization action, used for controlling the lives, and bodies of the Lascars. The research contributes to the critical studies on the proactive role of accounting as a set of valuation and measurement techniques that reproduce dominant and oppressive social orders through states and capital markets. Additionally, our discussion opens future research on the use of the accounting in perpetuating existing institutionalised inequalities in a society practising forceful racist exclusions.