The proletarians have lost their innocence. A conservative sociologist once described wage labourers as follows:

The worker is personally free, i.e. his physical and spiritual-moral powers are completely at his own disposal. […] He has no property, i.e. he has no exclusive material power over capital as a secure basis with relative permanency. […] He has neither a stock of consumer goods that enable him to live, nor permanent interests of capital. […] He lives in economic circumstances in which means of subsistence can be obtained only through economic returns. […] He is forced to offer personal capacities with an economic exchange value in return for means of subsistence.

In the history and historiography of labour servitude, the ideology of modernity and progress looms large. Thus it was with bitter irony that a British officer described the miserable condition of a labourer in late nineteenth-century colonial India: “Steam, the great civilizer, has not done much for this man, although the railroad runs within a few hundred yards of his door.” The persistence of the miserably poor existence was bad enough, but truly appalling was the fact that the introduction of modern industry had not set the labourer free. The poor labourers, or kamias as they were called locally, had seen modernity whizz past them without carrying them along in its journey to progress and freedom.

Labour history in Latin America has, to a great degree, followed the models set by the rich historiography in Europe and North America. Other than a justifiable concern with the peculiarities in production for export of primary goods, much of the Latin American historiography suggests that the process of labour formation was rather similar to that of the North Atlantic economies, only lagging behind, as did industrialization in this region of the world. However, this was not the case. The export orientation of the mining industry and its peripheral location in the world economy introduced certain modifications not found in the North Atlantic economies. The vagaries of the mining industry, exacerbated by the severe swings in raw material prices, created conditions which hindered proletarianization and modified the consciousness of the mine workers.

The sugar workers of large-scale capitalist plantations in the Caribbean are familiar figures in social history. As portrayed in Sidney Mintz's landmark research in southern Puerto Rico, sugar workers are manifest rural proletarians: landless wage labourers exploited by “land-and-factory combines”. In Mintz's studies, Puerto Rican sugar workers became the classic case of modern rural proletarians. Such rural proletarians are the dichotomous opposite of peasants: hence given rural populations are either peasants or rural proletarians.

The year 1995 marked the centenary of the exploitation of a 400 squarekilometre tract in the Indian province of Bihar known as the Jharia coalfield. From 1895, when rail lines entered the region, until the end of the World War I, coal output in India increased tenfold and the size of the mines' workforce fivefold. By 1907 Jharia was yielding half of India's output. One of its oldest mines was Khas Jharia, which worked a 260-feet deep source. Thirty-four years after it opened, its surface had merged with the outskirts of Jharia township and restrictions were imposed on the dimensions of its galleries. Despite these, Khas Jharia's pillars collapsed on 8 November 1930 causing an 18-feet deep subsidence and widespread destruction. This incident was the proximate cause of an underground fire which rages to this day.

As “They Came in Ships” by the Guyanese poet Mahadai Das suggests, scholarship on indentured immigration is not an exclusively academic concern in Caribbean countries with sizeable Indian populations. An international conference on Indian diaspora held recently at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago, was not only covered by national news media, but also attended by Trinidadians (almost exclusively of Indian descent) unattached to the university, some of whom also contributed papers, helped to organize and run it. In Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, contestations over national identities are grounded in and self-consciously refer to a shared historical archive. This includes conventional, written material such as colonial administration records, newspapers, travelogues, and memoirs that reflect the concerns of privileged observers: government officials, reporters and editors, missionaries, labour activists, historians, anthropologists. It also includes memories and accounts of personal and group experiences by others in these societies, transmitted orally or through other popular media, and they all simultaneously and unevenly undermine as well as authorize each other.

The advent of capitalism has traditionally been associated with a transformation of the economic and political functioning of the family. Capital is presumed to weaken, certainly to modify, gender and age hierarchies by undermining the productive role of the household. The labour market takes over the organization of work and age of consent legislations undermine parental authority in order to create the new legal subject capable of entering “free” labour contracts. The family, though it remains outside the norms of capitalism, primarily undertakes the physical and social reproduction of labour within the capitalist sphere. Such a transformation of the “family” is, however, not inevitable. In nine-teenth-century India the colonial state, though avowedly committed to a free market in labour, in practice often upheld familial claims on women's labour and sexuality. As a result, gender and generational controls within the family were enhanced rather than weakened.

Everybody knows that refuse is a ragpicker's raison d'être. Continuous collection of the waste from big city consumption, along with the rubbish and the refuse, led to collection efforts that gradually brought about a wholesale trade and an industry for recycling these wastes back into production. Until the famous prefectorial decree of 24 November 1883, garbage was left on the public thoroughfares and collected by the dust carts of the licensed garbage collectors at daybreak. During the night, the bins were searched by the ragpickers, who constituted a unique category of workers known as ramasseurs (gatherers). They seemed to work with standard equipment from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. Each carried a hook, a basket suspended from the back (a “dummy”), and a lantern. They sought and garnered a wide variety of products, from fabric to cork, ranging through metals, bones and skins, each item serving a specific purpose, from the most common-place (old papers and rags for paper production) to the most extraordinary (crusts of bread for the crumbs used by butchers for frying). Around 1900, the ragpicker's take consisted of all kinds of old papers, twine, rags for manufacturing paper (50 to 60 per cent), all types of bones (20 to 25 per cent), and an infinite variety of objects (15 to 30 per cent). At this time, however, the rag industry changed dramatically as a result of technological advances (especially the new manufacture of paper from wood pulp). The subsequent collapse of most of the markets exacerbated the recent differentiation between ragpickers. Nevertheless, ragmen still siphoned off 13 per cent of the tonnage of garbage in Paris. Annual exports of this capital resource by the rag trade totalled 27 million francs.