ABSTRACT
New forms of wage employment appearing in the mills, plantations, and indentured labour markets in this chapter made workers victims of exploitation because the colonial rulers perfected modern techniques of controlling the subjects. The Marxist pauperization thesis attributes the rise of wage employment to adverse forces pushing people to leave traditional livelihoods in the nineteenth century. This chapter tried to offer a more differentiated, and therefore more realistic, picture of the rise of wage employment than available from the received account. The present account does not dispute distress, but adds to it another dynamic: the prospect that rural surplus labour could more easily seek alternative and supplementary earning opportunities. Combining the distress-led and volitional processes, people can see that different groups participated in wage work differently. Three patterns are identified: decline in self-employment, which mainly characterized the artisans; shifts between forms of labour, which characterized the rural labourers; and combining self-employment with wage employment, which characterized many peasant groups.
