Tracking rural South Asians from their lives as peasant farmers to their roles as lascar seamen, waged labourers and petty traders, Chapter 3 examines their remarkable working lives. It situates their experience of waged labour within that of other non-white immigrants, as well as that of the (mostly white) native working class. It proposes that current understanding incorrectly concludes that the fluidity of South Asian men’s working lives was a response to structural discrimination in the British labour market. In contrast, it asserts that many maintained their own agenda for economic independence. The chapter contends that South Asians often self-financed their migration to take up self-employment as pedlars in Britain, rather than simply being lascar seafarers jumping ship. This undermines claims that peddling was an imposed form of precarity. As fare-paying passengers, the growing number of pedlars during the 1930s resembles the economic migration of the post-Partition era. Thus the forms and networks of immigration were created prior to, and were bolstered by, the Second World War, rather than being solely a product of the post-war era.

Chapter 2 focuses on the social networks of South Asian immigrants to the Sheffield area. It begins with an exploration of the origins and reasons for the migration of Pashtuns, mostly from Chhachh in northern Punjab. This ethnic group was the first and most numerically dominant South Asian migration to the area during the period. The chapter also examines the crucial primary role of the biradari (clan) in facilitating and sponsoring this pioneering migration from the villages of Punjab, North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Kashmir. Through the more cosmopolitan environment of employment aboard British merchant ships as lascar seamen, the kinship-based networks supporting migration were bolstered by contact with those outside the biradari. Pioneering immigrants were thus able to establish contacts ashore in Britain. The chapter argues that these early links, which included white natives within a working-class milieu, were crucial in the establishment of successful early South Asian immigration and settlement, not only in the Sheffield area, but in towns and cities across Britain.

If Indians and Asians had been the leading producers and traders in the first global economy, as chapters 2 through 5 argue, then chapter 6 considers who they were as well as where and how they operated so effectively. It uses the Multānīs as a key example of Indian trading firms that plied the overland caravan routes. This gains added significance because Eurocentrism presumes that the so-called European-dominated High Seas displaced the trade on the overland routes. The chapter places special emphasis on critiquing the Eurocentric model of the Asian pedlar by revealing the rational methods and activities of the large-scale Multānī firms. Indeed, these matched the scale of leading European firms and bankers such as the Rothschilds and Warburgs. And it also problematises the Eurocentric Oriental despotism thesis by revealing the many ways in which the major Asian states—Mughal, Ottoman, Safavid and the Central Asian Uzbek Khanates—provided a highly conducive environment for the Multānī firmsto flourish.