History in the Making – Childhood Journeys Across the Seas: Locating Children in Shipboard Spaces

By the early twentieth century, young passengers were travelling in increasing numbers on steamships sailing to, from, and within Asia, yet the historical record of children’s experiences of sea travel is usually filtered through the representations of adults. This talk considers the challenges and possibilities of writing a history of childhood steamship mobilities when children’s voices are, on the surface, largely absent from maritime archives. Imaginative readings of adult-authored sources provide insight into the distinctive emotional, intellectual, and physiological effects of long-distance journeys for child passengers. Over the course of a voyage, children’s perceptions of global space were expanded, their understandings of class and racial distinctions were sometimes elided and sometimes reconfirmed in the compressed and segregated on-board space, and they encountered unfamiliar peoples and cultures at ports of call. Applying age as a category of analysis can lead to a more textured understanding of shipboard socialities and of the state and institutional management of maritime mobility.