I. Introduction

Since the 1990s, academic fashion has rediscovered and revamped theories of the ‘clash of civilizations’ (or rather, of the solipsism of cultures) that had already been popularized successfully in the early years of our ‘age of extremes’ by conservative ideologues like the German Oswald Spengler. Indian ‘indigenism’ appears to be another subsidiary branch of that ideological current. Recent writings on India's colonial period thus often tend to disconnect its precolonial from its colonial past, in order to construct incompatible exogenous and indigenous ‘principles’ of social organization. The imposition of ‘alien’ discourses on the Indian context is presented as the disruption of a communitarian social system that has been painted sometimes in pastel colours. ‘Indigenism’, as has been rightly remarked, tends to harmonize the precolonial past. The obsession with abstract cultural ‘principles’ (or, to use Spengler's term, ‘Urphänomene’, i.e. ‘primordial phenomena’) is often accompanied by a lack of interest in empirical research that is concerned with the material conditions of human existence and with the relations between human beings emerging from these concrete historical conditions. These trends notwithstanding, this paper is concerned with elementary aspects of social praxis, which rendered, for all their apparent ‘triviality’, members of South India's society, to use an expression of Marx, ‘actors and authors of their own history’. Hence, an analysis is attempted of labour relations in Madras City and its hinterland in the late eighteenth century, in the transitional period between the precolonial and colonial regimes. The discussion of the source material will highlight the problem of continuity and change—it is intended to identify ancien régime forms of subordinating labour that proved to be compatible with colonial conditions and to distinguish them from forms that did not survive or were newly created.