Set against today's context of globalization and the decline of large-scale industry, Lost Worlds is a detailed exploration of the world of labour in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Asia. Using a wide range of oral and archival sources as well as popular literature, Chitra Joshi reconstructs working class lives, exploring their everyday worlds at the workplace and within community life, as well as their moments of conflict and struggle. In its analysis of the complex relationship between past and present, memory and history, culture and practice, community and nation, everyday life and moments of upheaval, this book represents a very significant academic contribution to labour history in South Asia.

Set against today s context of globalization and the decline of large-scale industry, Lost Worlds is a detailed exploration of the world of labour in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Asia.Using a wide range of oral and archival sources as well as popular literature, Chitra Joshi reconstructs working class lives, exploring their everyday worlds at the workplace and within community life, as well as their moments of conflict and struggle.Revising perceptions of workers culture as primitive, and of workers as passive objects of managerial strategy, Joshi examines how workers actively reinterpreted their cultural past, and actively negotiated the ways in which they worked. The book considers the ways in which migrant workers moved between urban and rural environments, struggled to retain their pasts, adapted to new life in the industrial city, and developed alternative methods of family and household existence. In demonstrating the ways in which community and religious ties were redefined within the context of neighbourhoods and workplaces and exploring workers worlds beyond the community, Joshi also considers workers perceptions of nationhood and how nationalist politics impacted on their precarious existences. Returning to the present, she reflects in her concluding pages on the meanings and experiences of contemporary worklessness.In its analysis of the complex relationship between past and present, memory and history, culture and practice, community and nation, everyday life and moments of upheaval, this book represents a very significant academic contribution to labour history in South Asia.

Transport labour has been a fundamental feature in every economic system and in every epoch of humanity worldwide. This volume considers the history of labour in transport from 1750 to 1950, in the context of globalisation and the evolution of capitalism. The nine articles presented in this collective work span these two centuries and address a largely neglected aspect of labour history in transport: the stories from the Global South (Africa, Asia and Latin America). The transport sectors touched upon in these studies are wide-ranging, encompassing a variety of workers, from porters to boatmen in India, from Mongolian caravanners to Filipino rickshaw drivers, from truck drivers to postal runners in west Africa, from wage-earning slave porters to immigrant railway workers in the cities of Brazil. These histories from the South are a constitutive part of the global history of labour.