Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the transformation of industrial relations in the cotton textile industry of late nineteenth-century Bombay, between the Factory Act of 1881 and the global plague pandemic of the late 1890s.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the transformation of industrial relations in the cotton textile industry of colonial Bombay in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Its purpose is to trace the movement from a structure of labour regulation encased within the administration of factory law (initiated with India's first Factory Act, in 1881) to a more combative style of industrial relations in the 1890s, characterized by a greater frequency of strikes, and more open confrontations between employers and workers. To this end, the paper surveys three sites of transformation and plots their relations with one another:

- The spatial transformation of Bombay in the 1880s, as the city's cotton mill industry and workforce virtually colonized the northern part of the island and came, very rapidly, to dominate its urban configuration, both physically and politically.

- The logics of factory law, in terms of both legal enactment (the Factory Acts of 1881 and 1891) and its 'realization' in day-to-day administration.

- The emergence of a more militant terrain of industrial relations, characterized by a crisis of demand and recurring patterns of rapidly expanding strike action, in the 1890s.

Through these interlinked investigations, the paper tries to elucidate the shifting relations between the uncertainly defined domains of law and industrial politics, to identify the points at which a separation between these domains was effected as well as the points at which they irrevocably 'contaminated' each other, and to comprehend the structure and shape of industrial relations that emerged from these processes.