ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the emergence of an urban-industrial workforce in India in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. It examines the colonial structures and constraints that operated upon Indian industrial manufacturing before the First World War; the perennially crucial role of migration within working-class formation; the interlinked structures of the industrial workplace and the working-class neighbourhood; and the development of factory legislation in the period leading up to the war. It concludes with an account of the major forms of working-class mobilisation and examines the role of various forces – nationalist campaigns, wage relations, epidemic disease, and communal division – in stimulating diverse forms of self-assertion.
