Description

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Labour bondage is a major feature of the peasant economies that have dominated the subcontinent of South Asia from an unrecorded pre-colonial past until the post-colonial present. Discussing when, why and how servitude originated on the tribal-peasant frontier in West India and was instituted in the rural landscape, this book draws on engagement in anthropological fieldwork from the 1960s onwards to offer a historical perspective on the collapse of bondage. The author argues that the globalized frame of capitalism does not allow for a transition to free labour in the world at large. Subjected to dispossession and to a lack of employment and income, a sizeable workforce at the bottom of the pile remains stuck in neo-bondage. A prologue to the book points out the different pathways imposed on labour by capital in the global North and South in the age of imperialism and neo-imperialism.

About the Author

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Jan Breman is Professor Emeritus at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam and Honorary Fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.