South Asian Colonized Hired Work
by Titas Chakraborty, author of Empire of Labor: How the East India Company Colonized Hired Work
In the summer of 2012, as I was researching Empire of Labor, the largest labor unrest in India’s recent history shook the Manesar plant of Maruti Suzuki, the biggest transnational automobile corporation in India. The violent altercation between worker-activists of a fledgling labor union and factory management culminated in a stunning spectacle of state repression of workers which included life imprisonment of thirty-one worker activists and the reopening of the Maruti Suzuki factory under the protection of a police-force of 1500 men. The Maruti Suzuki incident was emblematic of many traits of labor relations and the larger culture of work in our world of late globalization or what we call “neo-liberalism”: use of state terror and draconian labor codes to discipline workers, making workers flexible to the demands of capital, and diminishing distinctions between “skilled” and “unskilled” work. While we readily associate these traits temporally with the post-Fordist, late twentieth century moment of corporate innovation, Empire of Labor reveals that the long eighteenth century had already witnessed much of this culture of work taking root during the English East India Company’s commercial and territorial conquest of Bengal.
Since the seventeenth century the English East India company governed a large number of hired workers hailing from both Europe and Bengal as part of its interlinked state building and commercial activities. Company work brought together indigenous boatmen and silk reelers, and European sailors and soldiers – an extremely heterogenous workforce not only owing to their places of origin, but also the forms of work. Transformations in ways in which the Company governed this workforce also articulated the evolving nature of the English East India Company’s statehood as a zamindar and a chartered English corporation into a full fledged colonial state entity. All facets of colonial conquest – organization of military force, violent overthrow of competitors, introduction of new technology and implementation of a new law and order system – entailed control over this workforce.
Workers experienced these transformations in governance as an incremental and precipitous decline in their ability to negotiate terms of employment. Throughout the early eighteenth century they drove hard bargains regarding tenure of work, working hours, skills, modes of payment, and even composition of wages. Whenever their demands were not met they resorted to flight. Through fight, workers articulated their sense of the “just” and the “right”—the “just” wage, the “right” technique, the “just” demeanor, and the “right” time. The East India company’s state making process harnessed the efficacy of this practice. It ushered in a form of waged work wherein workers lost their leverage in deciding the conditions of work. This novel form of waged work— colonial capitalist waged work – affected the lives of not only workers of the Indian subcontinent but also European workers.
Using extensive research in English and Dutch East India company archives and middle Bengali literature in English, Dutch and Bengali, Empire of Labor is a major intervention in global labor history, early modern history, and histories of colonialism in South Asia and the world.