“Human Beings Are Too Cheap in India”: Wages and Work Organization as Business Strategies in Bombay's Late Colonial Textile Industry

IF 0.8 2区 历史学 Q1 HISTORY International Review of Social History Pub Date : 2024-11-11 DOI:10.1017/s0020859024000579
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Aditi Dixit
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Abstract

This article examines the business strategies employed by early twentieth-century Bombay mill owners in work organization and wage differentiation. The traditionally highly segmented and fluctuating domestic textile markets in India were further complicated by colonial free trade policies, making them highly competitive. This prompted Bombay mills to adopt various strategies, including maintaining a flexible workforce, product diversification, tailoring sales strategies to the Indian market, and increasing labour inputs, related to their heavy reliance on short-stapled Indian raw cotton. Using detailed and disaggregated data reported by textile mills in Bombay during the 1920s and 1930s, this article investigates how employers adopted these strategies in tandem with distinct wage-setting systems as management tools to depress the wage bill. By analysing the motivations behind the adoption of or resistance to these tools across different operations within the production process – such as weaving, spinning, reeling, and winding – the article reveals how gendered and social-class stratifications shaped these strategies and led to wage disparities across the industry. Ultimately, these labour-intensive strategies, conditioned by the broader colonial context in which India's textile industry developed, were at the root of the lower productivity of Indian workers, with long-run adverse consequences for India's general industrial development.
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"印度的劳动力太廉价":孟买殖民后期纺织业作为商业策略的工资和工作组织
本文探讨了二十世纪初孟买纺织厂业主在工作组织和工资差异方面采用的商业策略。印度国内纺织品市场历来高度细分且起伏不定,殖民时期的自由贸易政策使其变得更加复杂,竞争激烈。这促使孟买纺织厂采取各种策略,包括保持灵活的劳动力、产品多样化、针对印度市场制定销售策略,以及增加劳动力投入,因为他们严重依赖短绒印度原棉。本文利用孟买纺织厂在 20 世纪 20 年代和 30 年代报告的详细分类数据,研究了雇主如何将这些策略与独特的工资设定制度相结合,作为压低工资总额的管理工具。通过分析纺织、纺纱、缫丝和络纱等生产流程中不同工序采用或抵制这些工具背后的动机,文章揭示了性别和社会阶层的分化如何塑造了这些策略,并导致整个行业的工资差异。归根结底,这些劳动密集型战略受制于印度纺织业发展的广泛殖民背景,是印度工人生产率低下的根源,对印度的总体工业发展造成了长期不利影响。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
1.10
自引率
0.00%
发文量
68
期刊介绍: International Review of Social History, is one of the leading journals in its field. Truly global in its scope, it focuses on research in social and labour history from a comparative and transnational perspective, both in the modern and in the early modern period, and across periods. The journal combines quality, depth and originality of its articles with an open eye for theoretical innovation and new insights and methods from within its field and from contiguous disciplines. Besides research articles, it features surveys of new themes and subject fields, a suggestions and debates section, review essays and book reviews. It is esteemed for its annotated bibliography of social history titles, and also publishes an annual supplement of specially commissioned essays on a current theme.
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