Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Frontispiece
- Preface
- Introduction
- Working Across the Seas: Indian Maritime Labourers in India, Britain, and in Between, 1600–1857
- The Brickmakers' Strikes on the Ganges Canal in 1848–1849
- On the Move: Circulating Labour in Pre-Colonial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial India
- Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, c. 1900–1960
- Power Structure, Discipline and Labour in Assam Tea Plantations during Colonial Rule
- “Following Custom”? Representations of Community among Indian Immigrant Labour in the West Indies, 1880–1920
- Masculinity, Respect, and the Tragic: Themes of Proletarian Humor in Contemporary Industrial Delhi
- Stretching Labour Historiography: Pointers from South Asia
- DOCUMENT
- Select Bibliography
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Frontispiece
- Preface
- Introduction
- Working Across the Seas: Indian Maritime Labourers in India, Britain, and in Between, 1600–1857
- The Brickmakers' Strikes on the Ganges Canal in 1848–1849
- On the Move: Circulating Labour in Pre-Colonial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial India
- Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, c. 1900–1960
- Power Structure, Discipline and Labour in Assam Tea Plantations during Colonial Rule
- “Following Custom”? Representations of Community among Indian Immigrant Labour in the West Indies, 1880–1920
- Masculinity, Respect, and the Tragic: Themes of Proletarian Humor in Contemporary Industrial Delhi
- Stretching Labour Historiography: Pointers from South Asia
- DOCUMENT
- Select Bibliography
Summary
At the beginning of the 1990s the discipline of labour history seemed to be in serious crisis. The editorial in Supplement 1 to the International Review of Social History in 1993 was seriously concerned that, having peaked during the 1960s and 1970s, interest in labour history had declined very rapidly by the 1990s. The decline of “old labour history” prompted the question whether this was the end of labour history itself. The current phase of globalization, coinciding with the rapid decline of the industrial working class in advanced capitalist countries, the retreat of the state, the emergence of subcontracting, and the demise of the Soviet Union, was the context for nascent doubts about the foundational basis of labour history.
However, recent years have witnessed a growing scholarly interest in historical labour studies, especially in Latin America and South Asia. This revival is different both in its location and in its central concerns. Earlier, the major emphasis of labour history research was on the core countries such as North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan. Now, research on the labour history of the capitalist peripheries is increasingly attracting international scholarship. The concerns of this new labour history are not confined to the traditional working class alone; much attention is also paid to migrants, the self-employed, and indentured labourers.
This new labour history also feels an urgent need to reconstitute the older frameworks, which had revolved around fixed binaries of space, time, and social relations. Increasingly, labour historians have to contend with the existing notions of pre-modern and modern, free and unfree, formal and informal labour relations, and with traditional spatial divisions such as factory and field, urban and rural.
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- Information
- India's Labouring PoorHistorical Studies, 1600-2000, pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Foundation BooksPrint publication year: 2007