Empire of Labor tells the story of how hired workers experienced and responded to the rise to power over the long eighteenth century of the English East India Company (EIC), which perennially hired thousands of people in and around its settlements in Bengal. Focusing on boatmen and silk reelers as well as sailors and soldiers—a remarkable look at both indigenous and European workers—the story begins with the earliest accounts of the EIC's dealings with hired labor in the region, from 1651. Prior to EIC dominance, hired workers drove hard bargains with their employers, making demands that drew upon their own notions of wages, work rhythms, and time. When their demands were not met, they ran away, often to rival indigenous or European employers. Empire of Labor explores these demands and how they conflicted with the EIC's notions of discipline. Analyzing Bengali literary sources and Dutch and English archival materials, the book rethinks the ascendancy of the company state as a violent process involving removing competing employers, imposing army and police power, introducing new production technologies, and instituting draconian regulations which eliminated indigenous cultures of work. Most importantly, it depicts the lifeworlds of these recalcitrant workers, showing how they lived and resisted. A major intervention in histories of colonialism, labor, migration, and law, Empire of Labor ultimately recasts colonial rule as a novel form of state-labor relationship.
Titas Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of History at Duke Kunshan University.
"Empire of Labor integrates histories of indigenous and European hired labor in East India Company Bengal to completely alter our understanding of the character of work and flight. Refocusing our attention on law, policing, and violence, it shows how the EIC created new hierarchies of discipline to control the mobility of men, women, and children, override their customary practices, and standardize wages and contracts. In this way, waged work forged new social relations and created new forms of servility that crushed precolonial freedoms and destroyed lifeworlds."—Clare Anderson, author of Convicts: A Global History
"This book combines methodological boldness with archival riches to make a compelling case about waged work in the early modern peninsula. In the process, it reenergizes labor history for all readers and gives them both novel and exciting directions in which to pursue its leads."—Indrani Chatterjee, John L. Nau III Distinguished Professor in the History and Principles of Democracy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville
"A completely novel and original contribution to the history of work in Bengal and India in the period of 1670–1820. Titas Chakraborty demonstrates convincingly how, especially in the decades around 1800, the rules of the game were changed by the British, putting heavy constraints on the freedom of wage workers—constraints with long-lasting impacts on the development of India to this very day."—Jan Lucassen, author of The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind
338 pp.6 x 9Illus: 21 b/w images
9780520399648$29.95|£25.00Paper
Mar 2025