The Well-Being of the Labor Force in Colonial Bombay: Discourses and Practices [Hardcover]

This study draws on extensive archival research to explore the social history of industrial labor in colonial India through the lens of well-being. Focusing on the cotton millworkers in Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the book moves beyond trade union politics and examines the complex ways in which the broader colonial society considered the subject of worker well-being. As the author shows, worker well-being projects unfolded in the contexts of British Empire, Indian nationalism, extraordinary infant mortality, epidemic diseases, and uneven urban development. Srivastava emphasizes that worker well-being discourses and practices strove to reallocate resources and enhance the productive and reproductive capacities of the nations labor power. She demonstrates how the built urban environment, colonial local governance, public health policies, and deeply gendered local and transnational voluntary reform programs affected worker wellbeing practices and shaped working class lives.

1. Introduction.- 2. The Political Economy of the Textile Industry and Its Labor.- 3. Industrial Housing and Sanitation Policies.- 4. Social Service, The Civic Ethic, and Labor Welfare.- 5. Welfare Rhetoric and Maternal Bodies: Protective Legislation Debates in Colonial Bombay.- 6. Childbirth, Childcare, and Women Millworkers.- 7. Epilogue?

Priyanka Srivastava is Assistant Professor of History and Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA.

This study draws on extensive archival research to explore the social history of industrial labor in colonial India through the lens of well-being. Focusing on the cotton millworkers in Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the book moves beyond trade union politics and examines the complex ways in which the broader colonial society considered the subject of worker well-being. As the author shows, worker well-being projects unfolded in theló¾