Capitalism, Inequality and Labour in India

Breman takes dispossession as his central theme in this ambitious analysis of labour bondage in India's changing political economy.

Jan Breman (Author)

9781108482417, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 August 2019

298 pages, 12 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.6 x 2.1 cm, 0.54 kg

'… Jan Breman's work will certainly stand the test of time not only as evidence to the sufferings and fights of the dispossessed laboring, but also as an exercise in academic excellence, fueled by empathy that ultimately generated profound and intricate scholarly insights.' Nikolay Kamenov, H-Soz-Kult

Jan Breman takes dispossession as his central theme in this ambitious analysis of labour bondage in India's changing political economy from 1962 to 2017. When, in a remote past, tribal and low-caste communities were attached to landowning households, their lack of freedom was framed as subsistence-oriented dependency. Breman argues that with colonial rule came the intrusion of capitalism into India's agrarian economy, leading to a decline in the idea of patronage in the relationship between bonded labour and landowner. Instead, servitude was reshaped as indebtedness. As labour became transformed into a commodity, peasant workers were increasingly pushed out of agriculture and the village but remained adrift in the wider economy. This footloose workforce is subjected to exploitation when their labour power is required and is left in a state of exclusion when it is surplus to demand. The outcome is progressive inequality that is thoroughly capitalist in nature.

Part I. Labour as Codified in Annals of the State: 1. The country liberated
2. An end to servitude?
Part II. Constrained in Decrepitude: 3. The commodification of agricultural labour
4. The class struggle launched and suppressed
5. The Gandhian road to inclusion
Part III. The Political Economy of Boundless Dispossession: 6. The Agrarian Question posed as the social question
7. Labour migration: going off and coming back
8. Indebtedness as labour attachment
Part IV. Conclusion: 9. Capitalism, labour bondage and the social question.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Development economics & emerging economies [KCM], Labour economics [KCF], Sociology: work & labour [JHBL], Sociology [JHB], Industrialisation & industrial history [HBTK], Asian history [HBJF]