Respectability on the Line offers a social and cultural history of railway labor in Britain and colonial India from the 1840s through World War I. The book treats the railway industry as a microcosm through which to study the history of capitalism in the liberal imperial era. Using company records, Mattie Armstrong-Price shows how executives shaped the domestic and working lives of higher-grade employees with an eye to cultivating their respectability. Meanwhile workers' writings reveal how railway towns provided opportunities for some employees to maintain non-heteronormative living arrangements. The book tracks these histories of everyday life while also outlining stories of early trade unionism. In Britain, railway unionists established benefit funds that mimicked company-sponsored provident funds, while in colonial India workers fought to gain access to company benefits on equal terms. This comparative study shows how industrial labor was made through conflict, subversion, and accommodation across an uneven imperial field.
Mattie Armstrong-Price is Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University.
"This remarkable study of nineteenth-century capitalist and colonial workplace paternalism combines diverse historiographies with a dizzying range of cross-disciplinary knowledges and approaches, including literary theory, studies of affect and emotions, science and technology studies, feminist theory, and Marxism (classical and contemporary). The result is a brilliantly executed analysis of the consequences of capitalist industrialization for particular gender regimes, patterns of social authority, modes of racialist understanding, and the rise of a liberal-imperial governing order. Mattie Armstrong-Price is that rarest of intellectuals: the historian's historian who is simultaneously a theory head. This book is compelling confirmation that the largest-scale problems can be meticulously brought down to imaginatively conceived, empirically focused, and concretely illuminated microhistorical ground."—Geoff Eley, author of History Made Conscious: Politics of Knowledge, Politics of the Past
"A rich, comparative history of how ideologies of labor and management shaped histories of gender and social reproduction across political and racial hierarchies. Respectability on the Line tells a compelling story about how paternalism, colonialism, and capitalism materialized in the intimate and domestic lives of railway workers to shape collective action and class formation in India and Britain."—Ritika Prasad, author of Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India
"This is a timely and welcome addition to the history of railway labor and capitalism. Intertwining histories of metropolitan Britain and colonial India, this empirically rich narrative uses respectability as a conceptual category to understand how labor relations were shaped across railway sites. Respectability on the Line uniquely converges otherwise analytically disparate terrains of colonial/imperial and British history as a 'unified, if uneven field of historical activity.' The focus on gender, race, and labor underlines the fault lines through which railway capitalism and labor relations were shaped at 'home' and in a colonial milieu. Rigorously researched, this book provides a unique lens for understanding complex and intertwined accounts of labor and capitalism."—Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, author of Imperial Technology and "Native" Agency: A Social History of Railways in Colonial India, 1850–1920
"Armstrong-Price brilliantly reshapes labor history to show a gendered and racialized tradition of paternalism operating in imperial and metropolitan spaces of the Victorian state, where managers cultivated respectability, workers stretched the parameters of respectability in non-heteronormative ways, and local workers turned to Indian nationalist leaders to denounce the fictions of this respectable paternalism and expose discrimination."—Judith R. Walkowitz, author of Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London
234 pp.6 x 9Illus: 8 b/w images and 1 table
9780520421554$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Feb 2026