Labour Matters Towards Global Histories : Studies in Honour of Sabyasachi Bhattacharya
Contents: Acknowledgements. Introduction. I. Regimes and resistance: 1. Fettered bodies: labouring on public works in nineteenth-century India/Chitra Joshi. 2. Transformed over seas: \'medical comforts\' aboard nineteenth-century emigrant ships/Anil Persaud. 3. Working an island colony: convict labour regime in the Colonial Andamans, 1858-1921/Aparna Vaidik. 4. Work, family and the reproduction of life: the phase of early industrialization in the Jharia coalfields, 1890s-1940s/Dhiraj Kumar Nite. 5. Contestation and conflict: workers\' resistance and the \'labour problem\' in the Bombay Cotton Mills, c.1898-1919/Prashant Kidambi. II. Languages and lexicon: 1. The \'special classes\' of labour: women and children doubly marginalized/Emma Alexander-Mudaliar. 2. Dalits and the ideology of work in India/Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay. 3. Blurred boundaries: slavery, unfree labour and the subsumption of multiple social and labour identities in India/Claudio Costa Pinheiro. III. Mobility and migrations: 1. Mobility, resistance and identity: the Musahars of the middle Gangetic plains/Rafiul Ahmed. 2. The rural-urban nexus in Russian labour history, 1860s-1930s: suggestions for a global, comparative perspective/Gijs Kessler. 3. Making a living at the interface of legality and illegality: Chinese migrant workers in Israel/Li Minghuan. IV. Regulation and rebellion: 1. The work of law: three factory narratives from Bombay Presidency, 1881-1884/Aditya Sarkar. 2. Forms of workers\' protest amidst dilemmas of contesting mobilizations: the Jamalpur strikes of 1919 and 1928/Nitin Sinha. 3. For the drink of the nation: drink, labour and plantation capitalism in the colonial tea gardens of Assam in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century/Nitin Varma. 4. Labour, popular sociability and social representation: immoderate drinking among the working class as a historical problem in Chile, 1870-1930/Marcos Fernandez Labbe. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya: select writings.
"This volume, in honour of Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, brings together a set of essays that highlight some of the major transformations in the field of labour history today.
The present juncture is one in which the geographical boundaries of the discipline, which were narrowly configured around the nation-state, are being challenged; and the analytical category of labour, for long identified with the industrial, unionized and male worker, has been stretched to include hitherto marginalized, informal workers. The shift away from Eurocentric comparisons in recent years has meant a questioning of the spatial, temporal and relational binaries that were dominant in the writing of labour history earlier. By focusing on sites, forms and relations of labour that habitually cut across the classical divides of labour history, the essays explore connections between events and processes across time and space. They demonstrate that global history is not just history at a global scale, but a macro-view of historical processes of importance to human societies and their systematic analyses at all scales. Global history, the contributions in this volume show, can be solidly based on micro-historical studies, if these studies connect with the larger areas of inquiry." (jacket)
