This book presents a historical account of plantations in India in the context of the modern world economy. It brings history up to the present, thereby showing how history can assist in explaining contemporary conditions and trends. The author focuses on labour and economic development problems and uses the World Systems theory so as to demonstrate the practical utility of the theory and its limitations as a guide to historical research. Based on extensive archival research, the book interprets the dynamics of plantation capitalism by focusing on the work, life and struggle of the dalits on plantations in colonial and post-colonial South India as they evolved from the mid-19th century. It argues that these elements of the plantation life-world were fashioned by the specific characteristics of the workers' location within the capitalist world-economy, the then prevailing local social structure and the scheme of disciplining to which the workers were subjected to. Treating the relations among various social forces – the planting communities, the oppressed communities (dalits in India), the regional and national state, and the Imperial regime, this book fills a gap in academic literature on capitalism, economic development, and globalization.

Presents a historical account of plantations in India in the context of the modern world economy. This book shows how history can assist in explaining contemporary conditions and trends. It focuses on labour and economic development problems and interprets the dynamics of plantation capitalism.

This volume offers insights into ongoing global socioeconomic transformations by directing attention to the significance of labour, work, craft, community, social institutions, social movements and emergent subjectivities in different parts of the world. This is in contrast to theories that project globalisation as a process driven exclusively by global capital and technology, a scheme in which some parts of the world forever will be ‘peripheries’ supplying labour and natural resources, the lives and work of those people purged of originality, meaning and value by the very construct that describes them. Together the chapters in the book present a nonessentialist and non-linear reading of global transformations by examining the relations and adaptations between economy, polity and society, which remains a fundamentally unresolved question in the social sciences. Combining a wealth of conceptual and empirical investigations, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, globalisation studies, anthropology, economics, development studies and area studies.

This work concerns transformation processes in labour relations and in production systems in the 1980s. It describes new industrial and occupational patterns, as well as technological progress and the implications of the end of the Welfare State. Old practices are assessed.

Based on extensive original research, this book examines the challenges confronting trade unions in the global South, by focusing on trade union struggles in Sri Lanka under neo-liberal globalisation. It centres on movement politics of unions; explains union capacities to mobilise workers as a part of broad counter movement; and specifies worker struggles in Sri Lanka. The author identifies key dimensions of variation in the approaches taken by oppositional groupings, in particular unions, other labour organisations and the labour movement, and locates those variations in a larger theoretical context. Three case studies on trade unions in tea plantations, garment factories and among the nurses show how these theoretical dimensions operate in practice, and the consequences for the sort of opposition that is (and is not) created. The book contributes to the on-going debate on social movement unionism, and it also reveals their gaps in terms of addressing how class injustices are mediated through ethno-nationalist projects reproducing ethnic and gender hierarchies. It acknowledges the diversity of experiences and forms of resistance in the global South and critically engages with issues of gender, ethnicity and labour internationalism, providing a useful contribution to studies on South Asian Politics as well as Labour and Development Studies.

This book explores the effects of product market and labour market reforms on firms, labour institutions and labour rights in the economic and industrial relations system in India. India has over the years liberalized its economy through a broad range of reforms concerning the product market and complementing these it has also sought to reform the labour market and the industrial relations system. The book assesses the impact of these reforms on both the formal and informal labour markets in India, critically examines the labour processes and uncovers/describes precarious conditions of labour in various industries and occupations, and analyzes the dynamics involved in the making of industrial, employment and labour policies in contemporary India.