The Imperial Underbelly: Workers, Contractors, and Entrepreneurs in Colonial India and Scandinavia

The volume introduces a new analysis of interconnected labour and economic history of colonial India and Scandinavia. From a recently found archive of a railway contractor’s private and business papers, the studies revise both Indian labour history and Scandinavian modern history, and ties south Sweden into the British Empire. With deep insights into everyday work practices of Indian and European contractors and manual labourers, the book establishes a bridge across the globe, between two poor regions as sites of extraction and industrial transformation, resulting from global migration and capital flows. Drawing on rich archival sources such as the Joseph Stephens Archive, Maharashtra State Archives, the National Archives of India, and the British Library, the book offers deep insights into everyday business practices of European contractors in India, which were rarely documented and have remained largely inaccessible so far.

A unique look into the labour and entrepreneurship practices under British colonial rule in India, as well as its impact on the most transformative years of modern southern Scandinavia, the book will be of great interest to students, academics, and teachers of history, labour studies, subaltern studies, colonialism, imperialism, economic history, railways, economics, and Scandinavian and South Asian studies.

Gunnel Cederlöf, Professor of History, Linnaeus University, Sweden, and member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. She specialises in the environmental, legal, and colonial history of India and South Asia. She has taught at Uppsala University and KTH Royal Institute of Technology. She is the author of Founding an Empire on India’s North-Eastern Frontiers, 1790-1840: Climate, Commerce, Polity (2014), Landscapes and the Law: Environmental Politics, Regional Histories, and Contests over Nature (2008, 2019), Bonds Lost: Subordination, Conflict and Mobilisation in Rural South India c. 1900-1970 (1997, 2020), At Nature’s Edge: The Global Present and Long-Term History (2018 with M. Rangarajan), Subjects, Citizens and Law: Colonial and independent India (2017 with S. Das Gupta), and Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods, and Identities in South Asia (2006, 2014 with K. Sivaramakrishnan).