ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the interaction between the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the discourse of labour welfare and labour control in colonial India. It focuses on the period between the foundation of the ILO in 1919 and the commencement of the global depression in 1929. The ILO was also a consensus-making body serving a global agenda of economically advanced countries and was anxious to remove impediments to the development of an economic system transcending national boundaries; therefore, it demanded member states' legislation in accordance with global norms. The general trend of the post-world war scene was that the global links of the Indian labour movement moved to the centre stage. The very notion of an International Labour Organisation seems to have originated in the appreciation by the developed countries of the need to set up international standards in the labour market.
