By investigating the hitherto unstudied trans-colonial migration between Mauritius and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century, this article complicates liberal Eurocentric perceptions of global labor force formation under the auspices of colonial capital. Indeed, coercion, as depicted in liberal historiography, was a crucial component of indentured migration but indentured workers themselves sometimes availed of the opportunity of the global demand for their labor by engaging in trans-colonial migration. The dialectic of the formation of globalized indentured labor regime was such that while capital sought to confine workers to specific plantations, the very nature of the demand for labor enabled workers to defy the dictates of capital and further enabled them to move from one colony to another in search of better livelihoods and thus made them globally mobile. These migrations did not follow the so-called boundaries between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. Rather such migrations reflected workers’ search for jobs through trans-colonial networks within the framework of imperial domination.

This essay adds the story of the Indian Labour Corps (ILC) to the narratives of the various “coloured” units brought in to France to deal with the manpower crisis that had overtaken that theater of the First World War in 1916. The label “coloured” or “native labour” justified inferior care and a harsher work and disciplinary regime than that experienced by white labor. However, official reports and newspaper coverage also expose a dense play of ethnographic comparison between the different colored corps. The notion was that to “work” natives properly, the managerial regimes peculiar to them also had to be imported into the metropolis. The register of comparison was also shaped by specific political and social agendas which gave some colored units more room than others to negotiate acknowledgement of their services. One dimension of the war experience for Indian laborers was their engagement with institutional and ethnic categorizations. The other dimension was the process of being made over into military property and the workers own efforts to reframe the environments, object worlds, and orders of time within which they were positioned. By creating suggestive equivalences between themselves and other military personnel, they sought to lift themselves from the status of coolies to that of participants in a common project of war service. At the same time, they indicated that they had not put their persons at the disposal of the state in exactly the same way as the sepoy.

This article explores the changing modes of political practices in the mill neighborhoods of Ahmedabad, through an investigation of the figure of the political intermediary. By focusing primarily on local municipal politics in the mill areas it charts the electoral fortunes of the main union, the Textile Labour Association, and the techniques of political control it exercised. Through an examination of the circulation of local power, I seek to understand the ambiguous but critical position occupied by the intermediary. I use both archival material and oral narratives to investigate the intersections and overlaps between two figures of local importance—the union representative and the neighborhood tough.

The upper plateau of the Nilgiris, South India, was a grazed, grassy, and open landscape until the mid-nineteenth century when it was subject to colonial rule and commerce. However, even as it initiated and institutionalized capitalism, colonial rule also sought to selectively and legally safeguard from the material consequences of modernity and capitalism the pastoral lifestyles of the Toda graziers and the open and grassy biophysicality of their principal grazing landscape. Anointed the “Wenlock Downs” and reserved as forest in 1900, conservation policies to preserve this landscape for the amenities it afforded the English gentry significantly influenced policies to ameliorate backwardness associated with the pastoral lifestyles of the Toda. As official policy prior to the Second World War the Toda were encouraged to farm the grasslands to which they were given property rights. After the war, pastoralism gained official preference despite ostensible Toda interest in cultivation. English interests in protecting amenities trumped ameliorative interests. An historical racial standpoint, the pejorative labeling of Toda as indolent, also served strategically during the war as a rhetorical device to make a convincing case for pastoralism as an ameliorative panacea. This article is an historical sociology of bureaucratic discourse on Toda labor and landscape during and immediately preceding the Second World War.

Studies of globalization in India have focused on high-tech industries, such as call centers in urban areas. But a widespread effect of the globalization of India's economy is the growth of “rural outsourcing”—the expansion of urban-based industries into the countryside. Rural outsourcing links to longer histories of decentralized manufacturing in India. This ethnography of the decentralized industry of sari embroidery in Southern Bengal shows that workers are ambivalent toward it. Among villagers who participate in the embroidery industry, I found three scales of ambivalence: ambivalence toward the product; toward the production process; and finally, toward the politics of this form of decentralized production. Ambivalence is not a transient or uncertain position of confusion or ambiguity. Rather, it is a widely-held expression of the dual and contradictory positions that workers and contractors hold in relation to the industry. I argue that the “frictions” of globalization find expression not just in resistance or contestation, but also in articulated positions of ambivalence toward globalization processes.

This article engages the question of what happens to labor as Indian cities become transformed into “global cities.” It does so by focusing on the convergence of three interrelated trends over the past few decades: the informalization of labor, the making of global cities, and the financialization of the economy. The article explains the effect on labor, capital, and urban space of this concatenation of trends. It challenges the conclusion of urbanization scholars who emphasize how labor has been largely excluded and bypassed by the growing urban economy. Instead, the article demonstrates, by using nationwide data as well as examples from Bangalore, that as labor is being displaced from formal employment and as wages become compressed, the urban commons is becoming a more valued terrain. On the one hand, displaced urban and rural workers must increasingly rely on subsistence practices and depend more upon the city's public spaces and goods to survive. On the other hand, these spaces, vital to city life, are becoming attractive to indebted municipal governments and aggressive financial investors for their speculative land values, and hence have led to greater insecurity and dispossession. The global city, therefore, is being built in large part with workers' wageless labor. Consequently, the struggle between capital and labor has reached far “beyond the factory” and farm, to the urban commons, sites simultaneously key to the majority's survival and integral to the urban speculative project of financialization.

On the afternoon of August 2, 2014, I walked into Hossain Market, one of the many nondescript multistoried buildings lining the commercial thoroughfare in Uttor Badda, Dhaka. I had gone to show solidarity with hunger-striking garment workers of the Toba Group, three of whose units were housed in the building. Since July 28, several hundred workers had occupied the upper floors, demanding payment of three months back wages, overtime, and a festival bonus. The market entrance looked deserted, not exactly the hotbed of industrial action I'd expected. “Is this where the strike is?” I asked no one in particular. A couple of young women immediately escorted me up several flights of stairs – past the inevitable collapsible gates and oversized padlocks adorning each floor. On the seventh floor landing, young student volunteers were buzzing around a media and communications desk they had set up. Inside, I found half a dozen workers sprawled across cutting tables and makeshift beds, being administered saline by a medical team provided by a well-known health rights NGO. Hundreds of others, mostly women but also some men, milled across the room. Before I could speak to the workers, Shahidul Islam Shabuj, a labor organizer and sometime acquaintance, spied me from a distance and whisked me away to the top floor for an audience with Moshrefa Mishu, president of the Garment Workers Unity Forum and the prime mover behind the “fast unto death.” For Shabuj, my presence was fortuitous—an opportunity to get the workers’ formal message out.

The strength of the trade union movement in Pakistan has ebbed and flowed over the course of the country's history, but today, after roughly twenty-five years of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization, the movement is arguably at its weakest point in recent memory.

Lacking the power to improve the terms and conditions of school teaching at home, more than seventy US women migrated to work for the Argentine government in the last third of the nineteenth century. Only a few studies have researched this episode in the history of teachers, interpreting it as an uplifting, civilizing mission and characterizing the teachers as valiant, benevolent, and occasionally misguided reformers. Yet these migrant teachers' own words suggest that the desire to uplift played little part in their migration decisions, whereas low pay and limited employment opportunities for women figured prominently. Drawing on diaries, correspondence, newspapers, and census records, this study explores how these migrant teachers understood themselves, their work, and their social location. The analysis offers new insight into these teachers' identities as workers both at home and abroad. While acknowledging how teachers' labor served reform objectives, the essay argues that the long history of teaching in the United States needs to be reconsidered as a labor history.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, some of the most contentious disputes over international labor standards and worker rights occurred not between Western nations and the “rest” but within single nations. To explore the deep fissures in Japanese society over the rights of women and workers, I offer the first scholarly account of Japan's only woman representative to the ILO's inaugural 1919 Washington conference, elite social feminist Tanaka Taka, grandniece of renowned Japanese capitalist Shibusawa Eiichi. I recount her efforts in Japan and in Washington to secure free speech and economic rights for Japan's workers, men and women, and detail the hostilities she encountered from employers and organized labor. In addition, I reconstruct the parallel tale of factory supervisor Masumoto Uhei whose appointment as Japan's labor delegate led to widespread labor protests and a power struggle between trade unions and the state in Japan. The debate over who would speak for Japan's workers at the ILO and whether Japan would accept the labor standards being proposed by Western nations captured worldwide attention. It changed ideas in the East and the West about what Japan's workers deserved and desired and had lasting consequences for global politics and social policy.

During their famous Kitchen Debate at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, US Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev argued over the relative merits of capitalism and communism, but they agreed on what success meant: nice furniture, big houses, and cool appliances. Both believed in the necessity of consumer citizenship in part because the mass production economies behind mass-produced domesticity meant lucrative contracts for both private corporations and state-owned enterprises. Like the defense corporations transforming Cold War fears into lucrative contracts, well-positioned individuals and firms in both countries understood that billions were at stake in the economy of domesticity. Much like the urbanization model that's driven the Chinese economy of the past twenty years, the mass housing projects of the United States and Soviet Union were vital to economic and political stability during the second half of the twentieth century. Both Nixon and Khrushchev understood that the success of their governments depended upon contented middle classes. Economic growth strongly influenced public opinion about political leadership and, by extension, government legitimacy. Nothing was more important to economic growth than housing. Each man fantasized about a future of beautiful mothers working effortlessly with electric mixers to feed their Cold War kids.