Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in the historical studies of labour in India and other parts of the world. Apart from the study of the industrial workforce labour history has been enriched by the scholarly attention to migratory mobile labour lives of artisans women and peasant immigrants to plantations within India and overseas. Earlier the major emphasis of labour history research was on the core countries such as US Canada Europe and Japan. Now research on the labour history of the capitalist peripheries is growing and is increasingly attracting international scholarship. An urgent need is felt for reconstituting the older frameworks which had revolved around fixed binaries of space time and social relations. Labour historians have to increasingly contend with the existing notions of “premodern” and modern free/unfree formal/ informal forms of labour relations and traditional spatial divisions such as the factory and the field urban and rural etc.

Introduction
1. Working Across the Seas: Indian Maritime Laboureres in India Britain and in Between 1600-1857
2. The Brickmakers' Strikes on the Ganges Canal in 1848-1849
3. On the Move: Circulating Labour in Pre-Colonial Colonial and Post-Colonial India
4. Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South Asian Seamen c.1900-1960
5. Power Structure Discipline and Labour in Assam Tea Plantations during Colonial Rule
6. "Following Custom"? Representations of Community among Indian Immigrant Labour in the West Indies 1880-1920
7. Masculinity Respect and the Tragic: Themes of Proletarian Humor in Contemporary Industrial Delhi
8. Stretching Labour Historiography: Pointers from South Asia
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