The Transports of Lascar Specters: Dispossessed Indian Sailors in Women’s Romantic Poetry

This article historicizes Mary Robinson’s “The Lascar, in Two Parts,” published in her Lyrical Tales (1800), and Jane Taylor’s “The Shipwrecked Lascar” (1817), Romantic poems that deploy the affective epistemology of sympathy to describe the plight of Lascars or East Indian sailors while neutralizing their presence in the name of female-oriented philanthropy. It traces two phases in the expansion and contraction of the Lascar surplus labor population in England, from 1800 to 1814 and from 1815 to 1823 respectively. Robinson’s poem records the first phase: the pauperization of migrant Indian workers abandoned in British seaports by callous captains who stole their wages. Taylor’s poem records the second phase: the expulsion of Lascars from the nation to accommodate disbanded British seamen returning from the Napoleonic Wars. While previous scholars have shown how abolitionist Englishwomen co-opted the trope of black slavery to reposition themselves in the public sphere, this article extends their analysis to show how the metropolitan witnessing of black Asian sailors required a different moral-sentimental economy than that of black Africans, one committed to a strict policy of enclosure and repatriation rather than abolition.