ABSTRACT
Capitalism thrives on contracts. From recruiting workers and employees to transacting everyday business and selling commodities, the contract ideology is the absolute necessity for capitalism to function. Contracts are to ensure a regime of secure, legitimate, and trustworthy business, and ultimately the ‘free market’. Scholars have rejected such classical liberal reading of nineteenth-century contracts as agreements between free individuals, generating free wage labour. Instead, they are seen as sustaining a regime of unfree contract labour that criminalize the wilful exit of workers. Joseph Stephens Archive holds original contracts, executed between workers and a railway contractor in 1860s India when several laws were passed to criminalize the free exit of workers. Historians studying the implications of these laws for labour relationships have not analysed actual contracts. This chapter uses workmen and employer contracts as a method to reconstruct the socio-legal aspects of labour history in modern India and shifts the focus of existing historiography from contract laws to analysing the language of contract documents. The chapter suggests that contracts, as powerful written documents, were an answer to employers’ concerns about workers’ assumed dishonesty and carelessness, their fears about lazy workers not completing work on time, and workers absconding with advance payments.
