The work is a study of the world of maritime workers and shipping during 1870-1945, a formative period for the world economy and a crucial period for the Brutish empire. It considers recruitment and control of shipping crews, their social and regional composition, wages, itineraries, voyages of the Indian seafarers and reveals the importance of Indian labour in particular in world trade and shipping. It explores the way South Asian seafarers led lives at foreign ports and in cities in war and peace, especially the encounters between seafarers and shore communities and their constituting ‘flexible labour’, the imperial efforts to regulate their employment, employers’ off-shoring strategies, and their resistance.