How does racialisation shape the labour process? How is race formed in the transition from slavery to wage labour? What is the role of racecraft in wage labour exploitation? Looking at the history of the Siddis, ‘liberated’ East African slaves settled in the Indian subcontinent, helps answer these questions. In this episode, Lukas Slothuus and Ashok Kumar interview Tania Bhattacharyya from the University of Cambridge about Tania’s article Steam and Stokehold: Steamship Labour, Colonial Racecraft and Bombay’s Sidi jamāt from the Race and Capital special issue of the HM journal.