Volume 44 part 2 (August 1999)

Summaries

Ravi Ahuja, The Origins of Colonial Labour Policy in Late Eighteenth-Century Madras
This article challenges the view that the English East India Company was unable to dominate society in the colonial metropolis of Madras effectively before the end of the eighteenth century. Instead it is argued that colonial interventions even into the social organization of labour were persistent in goals and methods and acquired institutional forms in the latter half of the century. Hence an early colonial labour policy is clearly discernible. The ruling block's strategies concerning the regulation of labour were not based on laissez faire ideas but rather on a paternalistic brand of contemporary English social theory. This ideological disposition found practical expression in interventions into the city's labour relations by means of various "Police Committees". Moreover, British legal techniques were used to regulate labour relations in Madras. On the whole, early colonial labour policy was distinguished from contemporary practices in Britain by a far higher level of coercion.

Chris Evans, Work and Workloads During Industrialization: The Experience of Forgemen in the British Iron Industry 1750-1850
This article examines the ways in which working practices and workloads changed in the course of British industrialization by tracing the experience of one group of skilled workers: iron forgemen. A well-established historiographical tradition assumes that workers were subjected to a more burdensome discipline during the Industrial Revolution. However, empirical studies of workplace practice in early industrial Britain are scarce, and those few studies that have been attempted stress the continuity of workers' experience. But this study argues for discontinuity, exploiting a range of data on the output levels achieved by individual forge crews c.1750 - c.1850 to identify substantial increases in the burdens imposed upon forgemen.