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

Cederlöf, Gunnel (Ed.) Book The Imperial Underbelly: Workers, Contractors, and Entrepreneurs in Colonial India and Scandinavia Provided in Cooperation with: Taylor & Francis Group Suggested Citation: Cederlöf, Gunnel (Ed.) (2023) : The Imperial Underbelly: Workers, Contractors, and Entrepreneurs in Colonial India and Scandinavia, ISBN 9781000804966, Routledge, London, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003317227 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/281314 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The Imperial Underbelly 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 fows. 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 ofers 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 is Professor of History, Linnaeus University, Sweden, and member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. She specializes 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, Confict 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). The Imperial Underbelly Workers, Contractors, and Entrepreneurs in Colonial India and Scandinavia Edited by Gunnel Cederlöf First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor& Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Gunnel Cederlöf; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Gunnel Cederlöf to be identifed as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www. taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cederlöf, Gunnel, editor. Title: The imperial underbelly : workers, contractors, and entrepreneurs in colonial India and Scandinavia / edited by Gunnel Cederlöf. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifers: LCCN 2022033742 (print) | LCCN 2022033743 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032320922 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032328928 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003317227 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Labor—India. | Labor—Scandinavia. | Contractors— India. | Contractors—Scandinavia. | Economic history. Classifcation: LCC HD8686.5 .I43 2023 (print) | LCC HD8686.5 (ebook) | DDC 331.0948—dc23/eng/20220916 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033742 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033743 ISBN: 978-1-032-32092-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-32892-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-31722-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003317227 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors vii ix 1 Circular Migrations, Capital, and Opportunity: A Global History of Scandinavia and India at the Industrial Turn, an Introduction GUNNEL CEDERLÖF 1 2 The Life of Contract Capitalism and the Building of the Colonial Railway ARUN KUMAR 26 3 Bureaucracy and Ideologies of Control in British India: Social and Professional Networks and the ‘Contract System’ in Railway Building RADHIKA KRISHNAN 56 4 Social Capital and Its Limits in Fortune Making: Joseph Stephens’ Enterprises in India and Scandinavia, 1859–69 DHIRAJ KUMAR NITE 72 5 Labour Practices and Well-Being: Construction Workers in 1860s Western India DHIRAJ KUMAR NITE 101 6 Circulation of Knowledge, Capital, and Goods: Scandinavia and the British Empire ELEONOR MARCUSSEN 135 vi Contents 7 Colonial Entrepreneurial Capital in the Industrialization of Southern Sweden: The Huseby Estate under Joseph Stephens ERIK WÅNGMAR 161 8 Doing One’s Duty, Making a Future: The Ironmaster’s Daughters and the Unceasing Project of Rearing a Family MALIN LENNARTSSON 181 Bibliography Publications From Research Related to the Huseby Estate and Joseph Stephens Archives Index 204 219 222 Illustrations Figures 1.1 Joseph Stephens 4 1.2 Weighing cotton on the Colaba Island, Bombay 10 1.3 The manor house at the Huseby Estate, 1870 14 2.1 Mhow-ke-Mullee Viaduct, 3,000 men employed, Khumnee Hill, 1856 33 2.2 Part I, Acopy of Stephens’ contract in Modi script dating from 1865 35 2.3 Original copy of the contract between Stephens and Reembhy Casseembhy 36 2.4 Contract with lime supplier, with a third-party guarantor contract 42 2.5 List of tools and tent and with Yemma Muccadam, January1865 45 3.1 Engineers, contractors and other visitors to the Bhor Ghat works on the Great Indian Peninsular Railways, 1856 62 4.1 The contractor Mr. Clowser at his workshop at Oonee village. Constructions at Bhor Ghat 86 5.1 Railway workmen’s quarters at the Great Ravine near Rajmachi Fort, 1856 117 6.1 Joseph Stephens (left) in a meeting at Huseby together with regional timber merchants, most prominently M. M. Warburg (next to Stephens) of Bark& Warburg, Gothenburg, and Robert Ternström (sitting with arms crossed) of Schmidt& Co, Karlshamn, 1870 148 7.1 At the entrance of the Huseby manor house, from left, Joseph Stephens, his daughter Florence, two unknown men, daughter Maggie, Elisabeth Stephens, daughter Mary, unknown woman, circa 1900 167 8.1 Florence, Mary, and Maggie Stephens, mid-1890s 182 xiv Contributors Map 0.3 Southern Scandinavia, Railway lines of interest, circa 1874 Source: Map drawn by Laurie Whiddon, Map Illustrations. DOI: 10.4324/9781003317227-1 1 Circular Migrations, Capital, and Opportunity A Global History of Scandinavia and India at the Industrial Turn, an Introduction Gunnel Cederlöf Most of the research published in this volume would not have been carried out if a box of documents from the 1860s from western India had not surfaced in the attic of a manor house in Sweden in 2008. Careful study of the contents of this box has given us access to the lives of the lowest levels of contractors and workers involved in the extension of a large and complex infrastructure of railway, roads, and administration into Berar in the northern Deccan Plateau of central India. Historians working in other parts of the world discuss such projects in terms of a technical or socio-technical mega-system constructed to efciently extract the natural resources required in industrial production. In Berar, the Nagpur Extension was the spine of a huge technical and societal change. The documents in the box reveal the activities undertaken and the consequences for people on the ground as the British imperial government made plans to draw cotton from the felds to the Bombay ports and on to England as rapidly and efciently as possible. The project or the system, if we prefer to see it as such, depended on a weak underbelly. With the evidence of people’s experiences of breaking stones and carrying rails, we can see the harsh realities of those who rarely benefted from the ‘system’ put in place. At the same time, the documents also show us life in the bottom layers of the infrastructure project, the low-level contractors, a few of whom were successful. Joseph Stephens was one of them, and his documents are now kept as the Joseph Stephens Archive (JSA) at Linnaeus University in Sweden.1 The story of how the private and business documents of one of the lowerlevel contractors ended up on an ironmaking estate in the southern Swedish uplands reveals linkages and mobility in Europe, outside the British imperial realms. It not only reveals non-English and non-British involvement in the construction of large imperial grids across the Indian subcontinent in the years following the Great Uprising (1857–8). It also traces the midnineteenth-century reconstruction of regional economies in Scandinavia and the role of global capital and skills. On the one hand, the chapters in this volume allow us to follow a young man from Copenhagen who travelled to Bombay to seek professional training and proft. On the other hand, they 2 Gunnel Cederlöf enable us to trace the rapid social and economic transformations in which he played a small part. To fnd his point of entry, we frst need to see the larger framework. As has often been acknowledged, the American Civil War (1861–5) both caused a crisis for English textile producers and became a window of opportunity for cotton merchants operating in Egypt and India. When the North American ports of export blocked cotton from the southern states, Britain turned to long-established Asian and African places of production, where growers massively expanded their output. British eyes had been on Berar cotton even before the war; now both demand and production were scaled up. Within just a few years, Indian short-staple cotton, less valuable than the Egyptian long-staple variety, was growing in more felds in west and south India. In the Berar district on the Deccan Plateau, north-east of Bombay, the acreage under cotton doubled in the war years. Getting cotton from the felds to the Bombay ports on such an industrial scale completely transformed both social and natural landscapes. Laxman D. Satya characterizes these changes as a deskilling of labour, a deindustrialization of the economy, and a complete destruction of domestic textile production. While the small Berar district alone produced as much cotton as Egypt, ‘half the population went naked’ when all the cotton cultivated was exported to England and textiles imported from Britain were far too expensive for the growers and labourers in Berar.2 Such an enterprise could only be achieved using the most advanced technology. At a frenetic pace, within one decade, an imperial grid was laid across Berar’s savannah landscape for the purpose of efciently transporting the cotton to the coast. Arailway from Bombay to Nagpur, with a new line connecting Nagpur to the main Bombay—Allahabad line, was rapidly put in place. New metalled roads connected cotton-producing villages with the railway, and a telegraph line was put up along the embankment, linking all the stations with Bombay and the merchants in England. Their correspondence was handled at the many new post ofces along the 165-mile-long Nagpur Dak Line. As a result, new cotton market towns emerged along the railway line, serving to draw economic activities away from old market centres in the north and south of the district. Such an enormous infrastructure operation required a massive workforce. Contractors recruited skilled and unskilled labourers, both of which were drawn from the villages during agricultural low seasons and arrived in Berar as migrant workers. The contractors operated by bidding for specifc contracts in the hands of private companies and their engineers and the Government of India’s Public Works Department. The largest actor was the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR), a private company put in charge of the entire operation by the government. Like railway companies in other parts of the world, the GIPR was guaranteed a 5 per cent return on its capital by the government, whether it made a proft or not.3 Circular Migrations, Capital, and Opportunity 3 The contractors were mostly young men, many of whom had come from Europe in search of an income and, hopefully, a fortune. One of them was Joseph Stephens. Joseph’s family had made a long journey across two generations before Joseph left for India. From the mines of Cornwall and from Liverpool, they moved via Stockholm to Copenhagen in geographical and socio-economic leaps. We could say that this was a typical imperial family that made a better future for itself by migrating within Europe or moving to North America or Australia. Joseph’s uncles settled as missionaries and businessmen in the United States and Australia, while his father, George, moved with his wife and their three children to the Scandinavian hub of colonial commerce, Copenhagen. This town was open to the world, a characteristic that came to mark Joseph’s journey to adulthood.4 When the Stephens family arrived in Copenhagen in 1851, the town had experienced a troubled and transformative half-century.5 In the mid-1790s, frst the royal palace of Christiansborg and thereafter one-third of the town itself went up in fames in devastating fres. Adecade later, during the Napoleonic Wars, Britain sought control of the Danish feet. After three days’ bombardment of Copenhagen, leaving about a thousand buildings in ruins, Denmark yielded. The kingdom was a small player in the European wars, but it controlled the bottleneck passage between the North and the Baltic Sea—to which the British now gained access. They also eliminated a hostile alliance. In the wake of this trauma for Denmark, economic recession followed. The fact that the town was fairly soon rebuilt refected the colonial wealth that supported its merchant aristocracy. The dual monarchy uniting Denmark and Norway that dated back to the sixteenth century had opened up to Denmark the old Norwegian possessions in Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroes. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Denmark secured shares in the West Indies, the Gold Coast, Tranquebar and Serampore in India, and the Nicobar Islands, wealth from these colonies enriched the country’s merchants. In spite of the disastrous start to the 1800s, therefore, colonial capital supported the restoration of Copenhagen, promoting modern urban development and city planning. Displayed in prominent ways in the architecture of the new and monumental buildings was an abundance of oriental ornamentation. The royal capital held a great attraction for people across the country, giving rise to continuous immigration, since all the state, commercial, and religious institutions of importance were here. When the Stephens family arrived in the city, Copenhagen had 150,000 inhabitants, more than one-tenth of Denmark’s population. Signifcantly, the frst half of the nineteenth century is known as the Danish Golden Age. It was a time when Romanticism blossomed and the expanding bourgeoisie enjoyed culture and the arts. The close of this period is associated with the end of absolutist monarchy and with territorial wars.6 Joseph’s father George was a philologist. He studied Scandinavian runic inscriptions, folk songs, and tales, and the linguistic and historical 4 Gunnel Cederlöf Figure 1.1 Joseph Stephens. Source: Courtesy Huseby Bruk AB. Circular Migrations, Capital, and Opportunity 5 relationship between Old Norse and Old and Middle English. In Copenhagen, he was employed as a lecturer and, before long, a professor of English language. His move to Copenhagen put him right at the centre of trade in old Nordic artefacts, and he added many items from Greenland, Iceland, and the Sami regions of northern Scandinavia to his collection. Over the years, he built his own cabinet of curiosities with objects from all over the world.7 His thinking about a common Scandinavian cultural past had a close afnity to the political ideas of Scandinavianism that thrived in Denmark, and his work helped to strengthen that movement. There were calls for a union of the Scandinavian countries, which were particularly strong in Denmark in response to eforts to unify the many German states. Nationalist movements grew on both sides of the border, in support of a Danish nation and a united Scandinavia, on the one hand, and unifcation of the German states, on the other. George arrived in Copenhagen immediately after the frst of two wars with Prussia and her allies over the southernmost duchies under Danish control: Schleswig, Saxe-Lauenburg, and Holstein. The majority population of Schleswig was Danish, whereas in the other two duchies people were ethnically German. Winning the war in 1851 further strengthened Danish nationalism. More importantly, it played a part in ending absolutism and ushering in a new constitution. The Stephens family arrived in an atmosphere of promising opportunities.8 Joseph’s sister, Ingeborg, married a railway engineer by the name of John Hallen Abbott. He had trained in Birmingham as an apprentice to Sir Charles Fox, a civil engineer. In 1852, Fox sent him to Denmark to work for the Zealand Railway Company, which was when he met Ingeborg. The Zealand Company constructed the frst railway line in Denmark between Roskilde and Copenhagen, with the aim of connecting Kiel in the southern duchies with the Baltic Sea. Engineering skills and technology came from England, a frontrunner in engineering in Europe. Britain’s engineers were proud not to have trained at educational institutions, but in apprenticeships to senior civil engineers and under the auspices of the Institution of Civil Engineers. This was not an educational establishment: its members were senior engineers, and new ones were elected by those already belonging to the institution. At this time, most countries in Europe were setting up institutions of higher education. In Denmark, the Polytechnic Institute emphasized theoretical training from the outset. Since there was little industrial need for professionals highly trained in engineering, the early cohorts who passed through the institute were employed in government or the military establishment. However, they were few and the institute got of to a slow start. John worked on the connection between Roskilde and Korsør. When an opportunity arose for employment on the largest infrastructure project in the world—the construction of the main lines in British India—John joined the operation and he and his wife travelled to Bombay in 1857, the year of the large uprising in north India. He started out as a third-class assistant engineer for the GIPR in Nashik, before going on to make quite a rapid 6 Gunnel Cederlöf career. After his third promotion, when he was made District Engineer, he was elected a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in England, and in 1870 he became Chief Engineer, twice ofciating as Chief Resident Engineer, in charge of the entire railway. He did not leave India for England until 1884, dying there soon after his arrival.9 Ingeborg, by contrast, could not stand living in India and did not spend more than four years there across a period of 11. She returned to Denmark for good in 1868, long before her husband left India. The letters between the family members provide somewhat meagre accounts of the couple’s everyday life in Bombay and on the construction sites—John from the engineer’s perspective and Ingeborg in an increasingly miserable tone from her isolated life as a European, non-British woman. Margareta Petersson describes how, after starting out in a tent, they moved to a house in Nashik, and how Ingeborg occasionally fed boredom for the still restricted social life of Bombay. George planned for Joseph to join his brother-in-law and, in the English engineering tradition, train under him. John in turn tempted him with the rich bird life of India. The reason for going was of course not the birds, but the prospect of being trained on site to become an engineer and earn more money than Joseph would ever do in Denmark. He landed in Bombay in 1860, 19years old, and came to spend 10years in western India, mainly in the Berar district. During that time, he made only one trip to Scandinavia, to inspect the ironmaking estate of Huseby in southern Sweden which his father and godfather had suggested that he purchase. Joseph was one of the few in the lower ranks of railway construction who actually earned a fortune from working as a contractor. In 1867, he put all this money into the estate.10 We know very little about life on the lowest echelons of infrastructure construction in mid-nineteenth-century India. Contractors like Joseph did not keep the documents after work on a contract had been completed. This group of fairly untrained young men in their twenties, from a mix of lower social backgrounds, had no reason to keep their administrative paperwork once they had done their job. If they earned a proft, they would take the money and destroy the documents. Not so Joseph. Carefully mentored by his father, who was a collector of sorts, when he left India in 1869 Joseph packed his business papers and correspondence into a wooden box and shipped them to Scandinavia. The still unopened box with the documents inside was found in the attic of the manor house at Huseby in 2008. They have opened a window onto life and work along the railway line in 1860s Berar. In a unique way, these documents give detailed evidence of the many specialized trades of manual labourers—in the wage accounts, even down to the individual labourer, whose name, gender, occupation, pay, and signature are all recorded. Joseph’s contracts with labourers, his own descriptions of labour conficts, notes on ‘cherimerry’ given to workers, and on negotiations with them after accidents occurred, bring fesh and personality to our knowledge of a group of people otherwise referred to collectively Circular Migrations, Capital, and Opportunity 7 and facelessly as ‘labourers’. They also give voice to the mostly hidden and disliked class of small contractors and subcontractors, via Joseph’s diaries, correspondence, notes, accounts, drawings, sketches, and maps. Joseph’s relationship to the GIPR and its engineers, when tendering for and securing contracts, or fending of complaints about construction failures, allows us an insight into the contractors’ lives. His correspondence with his brother-in-law, in particular, illustrates the advantage to a contractor like Joseph of having such intimate connections with the GIPR engineers. The contractors’ work was part of a social economy. Six of the eight chapters in this volume investigate diferent aspects of the contractors’, subcontractors’, and workers’ realities based on this collection of papers, read in relation to documents in the Maharashtra State Archives, the National Archives of India, and the British Library. Arun Kumar explores the central place of contract laws in regulating the labour-capital relationship at infrastructural sites in the colonial capitalist economy. He shows how the penal and economic punishment clauses of the contracts added an extra layer of exploitation and inequality in contract laws that subordinated and disciplined labour. Radhika Krishnan investigates the very same contracts but from the perspective of social and professional networks which, she argues, retained the system long after the economic advantages had begun to fade away. Dhiraj Kumar Nite contributes two studies, one of which investigates the business network shared by the contractors as ‘merchant intermediaries’. They shared business attitudes and aspirations that worked through partnerships. He emphasizes Stephens’ capacity to generate his own social and cultural resources, which made social mobility possible. In his second study, Nite makes a detailed analysis of the information gained from the pay sheets that Stephens kept. He shows the intricate working of the contractual employment and commercialized economy, which controlled the workforce. His study also provides an insight into the diversifed welfare return for diferent groups of workers, based on task, gender, and age. These four chapters make important contributions in the felds of labour and economic history. Eleonor Marcussen’s work establishes a bridge between western India and southern Sweden that gives an insight into how Joseph made use of the experiences and skills gained from the most formative years of his life when he became the owner of the largest estate in the southern Sweden province of Småland. In this way, she is able to show that regions beyond the colonizers and the colonized, such as Sweden and Denmark, had a key role in realizing the ambitions of imperial expansion. The last two chapters discuss life on the Huseby Estate from the perspective of Joseph’s work to revive the estate’s economy from the 1870s onwards and of Joseph’s three daughters when he was an old man. Erik Wångmar discusses the ways in which Stephens rebuilt and invested in the estate and places its progression in view of the long-term development of the economy of Sweden. Malin Lennartsson penetrates deeply into the relationships within the Stephens 8 Gunnel Cederlöf family and, especially, the troubled road to adulthood for the daughters. In Lennartsson’s study, Joseph is a widower and an old man, and memories of his years as a young man in India has turned into family anecdotes. Yet his social climb into the Swedish economic higher echelons, without gaining the social acceptance of the aristocracy for his daughters, refects a socially transformative society with wealth and status out of joint. Family history is here made to show how the global transformations and Joseph’s own social and economic upward mobility materialized in his responsibilities as the patriarch of both an estate and a family with three daughters. Lennartsson investigates in particular how his ambitions for Huseby and for his daughters infuenced their individual circumstances and lives. The journeys of Joseph and his family across the globe at a time of largescale mobility and change were both uniquely personal and representative of myriads of similar initiatives to beneft from the openings which the British Empire provided for an upcoming social class in Europe. The following gives a brief introduction to society and environmental and socio-economic change in western India and the Berar district, where Joseph was working at the time the infrastructural grid was constructed. It also shows how capital and skills gained in British India made their way into an impoverished part of southern Sweden. This, too, was simultaneously unique to Joseph’s life and part of a major transformation of a Scandinavian regional economy. Extractive Processes Eroding a Regional Economy Berar was a small region in the northern part of the large Deccan Plateau. These parts of the Deccan geology formed at the end of the Cretaceous Period, around 66.25million years ago, and are today one of the earth’s largest formations of volcanic basalt. This has resulted in the mineral-rich black soil that holds water in spite of dry conditions and was a precondition for successful cotton cultivation in Berar. Rainfall is plentiful along the coast and in the western parts of the steep, rocky, and jagged hills entering the plateau. These hills are part of the long Western Ghats range that runs along the western side of the Indian subcontinent. Further inland, in Berar, the country is in a rain shadow, with the plains receiving on average only 660mm of annual rainfall. Further east, at slightly higher locations, the Nagpur district received on average 1,170mm of rain, compared with 1,900mm at Bombay on the coast. Natural conditions here permitted a cover of moist or dry tropical deciduous or tropical thorn forest. However, as Sumit Guha observes, long-term human intervention in the form of lopping, shifting cultivation, grazing, and burning of forests and grass had turned this part of the plateau into open savannah grassland and thorny shrub. Guha concludes that the process was far advanced by the time the region was surveyed by the British in the 1820s.11 The ecology and landscape varied from the place where the Nagpur extension line branched of the main line at Bhusawal, immediately east of Circular Migrations, Capital, and Opportunity 9 the Western Ghats, across the open dry grasslands to Nagpur, the subcontinent’s geographical centre. Bhusawal was located at the eastern extreme of the otherwise hilly Khandesh district. Because of its location immediately east of the Western Ghats, Bhusawal was a dry area, with rainfall as low as in Berar. In spite of the dry conditions, in years with a normal monsoon the quality of the soil still made for good harvests. Cotton has a long history in Berar. The unsafe years following the British victory in the last of the three Maratha Wars (1817–18) opened up the region to speculation in cotton cultivation and exporting. Berar was within the Hyderabad state territories, and its government utilized the potential for cotton and farmed out land to Bombay- and Hyderabad-based private companies and moneylenders. By making large loans to growers and levying charges on the various transport routes, the private actors profted, while corruption was rampant, producers benefted little, and quite a lot of cotton remained in Berar for the local manufacture of cloth owing to poorly functioning transport. In the early 1850s, the British were in search of cotton supplies for the textile factories in England, which was one of the reasons they entered into a treaty with Hyderabad in 1853 that gave them de facto control of Berar. The district, acquired by Hyderabad on the fall of the Maratha states, was now ‘assigned’ to the British, who thereby gained control of the revenues from the higher yielding districts. From 1861, the year when the American Civil War began, the British resident in Hyderabad was put in charge of all of Berar’s administration. By that time, a railway line had begun to be built. The operation included far more than the tracks and the station buildings. Thousands of workers, recruited by a large number of contractors and subcontractors, worked to secure the entire infrastructure required for the railway to function as an artery for the fow of cotton from the growers to the Bombay ports.12 When John Hallen Abbott arrived in Nashik to start work on the GIPR, the technically advanced construction of lines, bridges, and reversing stations to bring the trains up and down the steep hillsides and across the chasms and gorges at Bhor Ghat had been completed. Construction work on the undulating plains, where Joseph would soon also work, was technically much less challenging. However, in the territories where the rails were laid, they encroached signifcantly on society and people’s livelihoods. They not only changed life along the new tracks but also had an impact on old established markets and nodal points of communication routes away from the railway line. According to Satya, the cotton economy and the system of rail transport in combination ‘wiped out the fne urban—rural balance of pre-colonial Berar’. Like Berar, Guha shows, Khandesh also experienced a gravitation of economic centres away from once important market towns to those where the new railway stations were constructed.13 Satya’s seminal work on cotton and famine in Berar provides a good deal of knowledge about the imperial cotton economy and its efects on the agricultural economy and society of the district. He shows that when 16 Gunnel Cederlöf hit by natural disaster and whose economy was under strain. They brought with them work practices and social and business networks, the efects of which have still to be investigated. Joseph invested capital in the Huseby Estate that he had accumulated from profts gained from British imperial infrastructure operations in India. The historian Lars-Olof Larsson has calculated the number of farms in Kronoberg county sold to foreign citizens, arriving at a fgure of 250 between 1867 and 1882. To this day, however, that knowledge has not spread beyond the confnes of academic study, and it has left only a small imprint even in scholarly works. In his chapter in this volume, Erik Wångmar qualifes this representation of immigration when he notes that most of the properties in question were small, whereas Joseph’s was one of the largest that ended up in the hands of foreign owners. The combination of a slump in prices and the construction of the railways, which enabled forest products to be exported on a large scale, played a part in making these holdings attractive. Some of the new owners, like Stephens, considered clear-cutting their forests for the export market. Towards the turn of the century, large-scale felling causing signifcant landscape changes and the Swedish government was taking legal measures for securing regrowth and for draining wetlands by ditches to delay the efect of frost on the young saplings. Two decades into the twentieth century, spruce monoculture covered larger acreages of land, resulting in ecological change and an increasingly industrial forest production.27 Eleonor Marcussen traces the process of immigration in more detail by studying Joseph’s investment in the Huseby Estate and his intentions in making the purchase. She turns the searchlight on southern Sweden to ask why and how economic and social conditions created a lucrative market for private interests and business investments deriving from wealth generated in British India. Again, social and family networks played an important part in securing private property far beyond Joseph’s expectations. By analysing circumstances, intentions, and acts, Marcussen provides a better understanding of how colonialism and private entrepreneurs contributed to socio-economic change in Småland province. Future research in this feld promises to reveal the broader networks within the south of Scandinavia, in particular those that linked economically disadvantaged regions to each other as a result of the immigration of people who brought with them global capital, skills, and networks.28 The Huseby ironworks had its heyday in the seventeenth century, during the Thirty Years War (1618–48), when cannon and cannonballs were sold to the navy and shipped to the Baltic Sea. More than two centuries later, Joseph bought a run-down estate and put all his energy into putting it back on its feet. Ironworks in Småland used lake ore, derived from iron-rich sediment at the bottom of shallow, nutrient-poor lakes. The iron formed into small fat plates and was collected through the winter ice. Since this was a more fragile material than the iron ore produced from mines in central and northern Sweden, from the mid- to the late-nineteenth-century either Circular Migrations, Capital, and Opportunity 17 Småland’s ironworks closed down or the estates switched to producing glassware.29 From 1850 to 1899, 45 glass factories began production in Småland, 12 of which were built in 1850–75. With the competence in place of handling the melting of material at high temperatures, this made good use of workers’ skills where there had been an old workshop, and skilled artisans arrived in Småland from Denmark and England. The fnal decades of the iron mills in Kronoberg were dramatic. Production peaked in 1860, when the eight mills in use produced more than they had ever done in their 230years of existence. They were subsequently closed between 1877 and 1886. Only the Huseby Estate remained, with Joseph persisting in using iron from the lakes on his estate and developing Huseby into a workshop for iron stoves and agricultural and household tools.30 An upward social leap did not automatically follow from an economic leap. Joseph spent a decade hectically building up the Huseby Estate and placing its products frmly on the market. With a growing workforce, he extended the estate, drained the wetlands for more agricultural land, renovated the workshop, and was a leading fgure in an initiative to build a small railway line connecting Huseby with the southern coastal port town of Karlshamn, to make for easy access to the Baltic. It is clear from the way Joseph established his enterprise at Huseby that his connections towards the south were stronger than those to the north. From the viewpoint of this and similar estates, it makes more sense to study the turnaround of southern Sweden in the perspective of a southern Scandinavian region rather than one primarily or solely oriented towards the north and defned by the political centre of the Swedish nation state. Outside the immediate realms of Kronoberg county, Joseph cultivated his economic ties within the networks connecting him to Copenhagen, England, and the British Empire, whereas later in life he became a conservative member of the Swedish parliament, arguing in favour of protectionist policies. After 13years at Huseby, Joseph married Elisabeth Kreüger, the daughter of a high-ranking naval ofcer, and they soon had three daughters. From his training, Elisabeth’s father knew the king of Sweden well, and Elisabeth had been a lady-in-waiting to the queen. This connection with high society opened doors for Joseph; however, membership of that social class did not automatically follow. Furthermore, neither Joseph nor his wife seems to have had the tools to bring up and educate their daughters for a society where middle-class women could do better if they knew how to handle fnances and run a business.31 When Elisabeth died far too early, the oldest of the daughters, Florence, began to assist her father on the estate. Wångmar observes how Joseph allowed her into the running of the business. As he himself had once done, now Florence learnt from watching her father closely and training at his side. During her father’s lifetime, she became increasingly involved in practical and legal matters. However, Malin Lennartsson fnds that the three sisters seem to have entered adulthood poorly equipped to fend for themselves. Schooling under governesses seems to have been a waste, and the 18 Gunnel Cederlöf ambition for the daughters appears to have been to marry them of to wellsituated men. This would confrm the family’s social advancement from the dusty Berar plains to high society in the kingdom of Sweden in only two generations. Only one of them married, however. Lennartsson traces the life of the youngest of the three, Maggie, describing a very unstable and insecure path. Paradoxically, only after her father’s death, when she inherited a small estate, did she succeed in setting up a business of her own, remaining unmarried and legally independent. She came also to be supported in the running of her business by a manager who left Huseby and joined Maggie’s estate Ålshult.32 Work on the Joseph Stephens Archive has changed historical perspectives. The best thing that can happen to a newly discovered collection of historical documents is for research to open up knowledge about the life hidden within them. Agrowing body of research is now developing, based on Stephens’ documents from his time in India. The studies published up to now are listed at the back of this volume, and more are yet to come. Margareta Petersson’s work on the family history of the Stephenses, and especially on Joseph’s sister Ingeborg, lends a dense texture to the social family connections, aspirations, and experiences in which Joseph grew up. Five postdoctoral researchers have each dedicated a year to the work. Alexander Bubb, now a scholar of literature at the University of Roehampton, the United Kingdom, spent 2013–14 at Linnaeus University. Four of the authors in this volume—Radhika Krishnan, Dhiraj Kumar Nite, Arun Kumar, and Eleonor Marcussen—worked in the archives from 2015 to 2019. Ingemar Gunnarsson has written a licentiate thesis33 and he and Per Johansson at the Linnaeus University Library have spent a good deal of time taking care of the documents, which are now preserved in the university’s central archives, located within the large Huseby Archives. All of this research has been made possible by generous funding from Linnaeus University and its centre of excellence, the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, and from the Crafoord Foundation. The project Huseby in the World, funded by the Kamprad Family Foundation, has made both scholarly and cultural work possible in a unique collaboration with the Huseby Estate, which is today open to the public. We are grateful both to the funder and to the estate’s director, Sofe Magnusson, and her colleagues for the creative environment that grew out of this collaboration. The photographs from the 1860s India, published in this volume are all brought from India by Joseph Stephens and John Hallen Abbott and held in trust by the Huseby Estate, Huseby Bruk AB. Aspecial thank you to Henrik Chetan Aspengren, historian and member of the Huseby in the World project, for coming up with the ideas behind the title of this volume. He is now a research fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Afairs in charge of its South Asia Initiative. Janaki Nair, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in India, and Ravi Ahuja, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Centre for Modern Indian Studies in Germany, have given important Circular Migrations, Capital, and Opportunity 19 support and feedback throughout the work. Over the years, research related to this work has benefted from discussions and collaboration at conferences and workshops. Iwould especially like to acknowledge the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, and the Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Notes 1 I am grateful for assistance and comments on this chapter from Maria Ågren, Peter B. Andersen, Björn Hakon Lingner, K. Sivaramakrishnan, and Rolf Torstendahl. See Stafan Hansson, ‘Tekniken som samhällsomdanare: Exemplet Norrbottens teknologiska megasystem’, in Eva Landberg, Karin Rönnbäck, and Per Moritz (eds), Norrbotten: Årsbok 2007 (Luleå: Norrbottens hembygdsförbund, 2007), pp.26–41. 2 From 1860/1 to 1865/6, cotton cultivation in Berar expanded from 629,000 to 1,238,966 acres. Laxman D. Satya, Cotton and Famine in Berar, 1850– 1900 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997), pp.143, 180, 183–5, 192; Henrik Chetan Aspengren, ‘Bombay—möjligheternas stad’, in Margareta Petersson (ed.), Från Brittiska Indien till Huseby bruk: Järnvägen som arena för modernitet och kolonialism under lycksökaren och järnvägsentreprenören Joseph Stephens tid i Indien 1860–69 (Lund: Arkiv förlag, 2018), pp.57–60. 3 Satya, Cotton and Famine, pp.58, 179; Ian J. Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj, 1850–1900 (New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.25. 4 Margareta Petersson, ‘Joseph Stephens—Familjen och arkivet’, in Petersson (ed.), Från Brittiska Indien, pp.15–20; Margareta Petersson, ‘A Danish Family in India: Gendered Colonial Upbringing, Everyday Life, and Cultural Encounters’, in Kristina Myrvold (ed.), India: Research on Cultural Encounters and Representations at Linnaeus University (Gothenburg; Stockholm: Makadam, 2017), p.74. 5 I am grateful to Dr. Peter B. Andersen and Dr. Björn Hakon Lingner for their generous assistance and conversations with me on the situation in Denmark and Copenhagen in the mid nineteenth century. 6 Henriette Steiner, The Emergence of a Modern City: Golden Age Copenhagen 1800–1850 (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014), pp.19, 39, 43–7; Aksel Lassen, ‘The Population of Denmark, 1660–1960’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 14/2 (1966), pp.134, 143, table2. Steiner bases her information about the population of Copenhagen on C. Bjørn, ‘Fra reaktion til grundlov’, in Olaf Olsen (ed.), Gyldendal og Politikens Danmarkshistorie (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske boghandel Politikens forlag, 1988), p.84; and Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen, Det danske imperium: Storhed og fald (Viborg: Aschehoug Banks Forlag, 2005), pp.162–3, 168–70. 7 Petersson, ‘Joseph Stephens—Familjen och arkivet’, p.16; Svend Cedergreen Bech, Dansk biografsk leksikon, 3rd ed., 16 vols (København: Gyldendal, 1983), pp.99–100. 8 In the Second Schleswig War of 1864, Denmark lost the duchies to Prussia, a loss confrmed at the Peace of Prague in 1866. William Carr and Harry Hearder, The Wars of German Unifcation 1864–1871 (Boca Raton, FL: Taylor& Francis Group, 1991), pp.34–40; Benedikte Brincker, ‘A “Small Great National State”: An Analysis of the Cultural and Political Factors that Shaped Danish Nationalism 1760–1870’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 16/4, December (2003), pp.417–18; Alexander Bubb, ‘Class, Cotton, and “Woddaries”: AScandinavian Railway Contractor in Western India, 1860–69’, Modern Asian Studies, 20 Gunnel Cederlöf 51/5 (2017), pp.1377–8; Bregnsbo and Villads Jensen, Det danske imperium, pp.184–5. 9 The Institution of Civil Engineers in England was founded in 1818, and new members were elected by the existing ones. The Polyteknisk Læreanstalt was established in 1829. The Roskilde—Copenhagen line was opened in 1847. Kulturministeriet, Slots- og kulturstyrelsen, Fredede og bevaringsværdige bygninger, www.kulturarv.dk/fbb/sagvis.pub?sag=7396535, 23 April 2020. ‘Obituary Notice’, Institution of Civil Engineers, Minutes of Proceedings, London, Institution of Civil Engineers, 1885, Vol. 79, pp.360–1. Henrik Harnow, Den danske ingeniørs historie 1850–1920: Danske ingenrørers uddannelse, professionalisering og betydning for den danske moderniseringsproces (Århus: Systime, 1998), pp.44–7; Rolf Torstendahl, Engineers in Western Europe: Ascent—and Decline? AProfession Torn Between Technology and Economy, 1850–1990, with Outlooks to the Present (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, forthcoming), pp.68, 80–1. 10 Bubb, ‘Class, Cotton, and “Woddaries”’, pp. 1377–8; Petersson, ‘A Danish Family’, pp.80, 84–5; Ingemar Gunnarsson, ‘Från lärling till “ingenjör”’, in Petersson (ed.), Från Brittiska Indien, p.68. 11 Deccan, or Dakhan in more recent transcription. 660.18mm of annual rainfall was measured for Akola as an average for the years 1869–1906. Sumit Guha, Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–1991, Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society, 4 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp.33–5; A. E. Nelson, Central Provinces District Gazetteers, Akola District, Volume B, Statistical Tables (1891–1907) (Nagpur: Government Press, 1909), pp.4–5, table1; William Stevenson Meyer, Richard Burn, James Sutherland Cotton, and Herbert Hope Risley, The Imperial Gazetteer of India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), Vol. 7, p.365, Vol. 8, p.277, and Vol. 18, p.306. 12 Satya, Cotton and Famine, pp.137–40; Eric Lewis Beverley, Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp.66–7. 13 Meyer etal., Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. 8, p.153; Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, p.148; Kerr, Building the Railways, pp.55–6; Satya, Cotton and Famine, p.179. 14 Satya, Cotton and Famine, pp.25, 48, 60–1, 87, ch. 4. 15 Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, pp.1, 135. 16 Ibid., pp.65, 71–2, 136, 168–9, 172; Bubb, ‘Class, Cotton, and “Woddaries”’, p.1388. 17 Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces, 1860–1914, Studies in Social Ecology and Environmental History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), p.29. The calculation is from Dietrich Brandis, ‘Memorandum on the Supply of Railway Sleepers of the Himalayan Pines Impregnated in India’, Indian Forester, 4 (1879), p.366. Dietrich Brandis was Inspector General of Forests in India 1864–83. S. Ravi Rajan, Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development 1800– 1950, Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 2006), p.83. 18 Rajan, Modernizing Nature, p.71. Rajan refers to Hugh F. C. Cleghorn, The Forests and Gardens of South India (London: W. H. Allen& Co., 1861), p.32; Guha, Environment and Ethnicity, pp.165–6; Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest, p.30; Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p.120. 19 Meyer etal., Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. 7, p.362. 20 Prof. Prabhu Mohapatra, at the conference ‘The Underbelly of the Empire: Workers, Contracts, and the Social Economy of the Industrial Turn’, jointly organized Circular Migrations, Capital, and Opportunity 21 by Jawaharlal Nehru University, Centre for Historical Studies, and Linnaeus University, Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, 11–12 December2019, notes by the author. See also Arun Kumar, Chapter3, in this volume. 21 Dhiraj Kumar Nite, ‘En lycksökares liv och afärer i Indien och Skandinavien’, in Petersson (ed.), Från Brittiska Indien, pp.145–52; Alexander Bubb, ‘An Element of Risk: The Corrupt Contractor in Indian Fiction and Film, 1886–1983’, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 4/1 (2017), p.113. The frst engineering college in India was opened as early as 1847 at Roorkee, and three more soon followed. Arun Kumar, ‘Colonial Requirements and Engineering Education: The Public Works Department, 1847–1947’, in Roy M. Macleod and Deepak Kumar (eds), Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India, 1700–1947 (New Delhi; Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 1995), pp.216–18; Account of Roorkee College, Established for the Instruction of Civil Engineers, with a Scheme for Its Enlargement (Agra: Secundra Orphan Press, 1851), pp.4–5, paras 14–16; Harald Fischer-Tiné, ‘Hierarchies of Punishment in Colonial India: European Convicts and the Racial Dividend, c. 1860–1890’, in Harald Fischer-Tiné and Susanne Gehrmann (eds), Empires and Boundaries: Rethinking Race, Class, and Gender in Colonial Settings (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp.43–44. 22 Radhika Krishnan, Chapter2; Arun Kumar, Chapter3; and Dhiraj Kumar Nite, Chapters4 and 5 in this volume. 23 Nite, ‘En lycksökares liv’, pp.150, 159–61, tables2 and 3. 24 Kerstin Enefo and Joan Ramón Rosés, ‘Coping with Regional Inequality in Sweden: Structural Change, Migrations, and Policy, 1860–2000’, Economic History Review, 68/1 (2015), p.196, table1; Harald Runblom and Hans Norman, From Sweden to America: AHistory of the Migration, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia historica Upsaliensia, 74 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976); Ingvar Svanberg, ‘The Use of Wild Plants as Food in Preindustrial Sweden’, Acta Societatis Botanicorum Poloniae, 81/4 (2012), https:// doi.org/10.5586/asbp.2012.039, pp.322–3. 25 The foremost of the novels to narrate the long history of Swedish migration to the USA from the experience of a single family from Småland province was the trilogy The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg. It was published in Swedish in 1949 and in English 1951. The novel was made into the two flms ‘The Emigrants’ and ‘The Good Land’ in 1971, directed by Jan Troell, and the musical ‘Kristina from Duvemåla’ by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus in 1995. 26 Martha McLaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830: Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2001); Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006), pp. 1–31; Hyslop, Jonathan, ‘Making Scotland in South Africa: Charles Murray, the Tranvaal’s Aberdeenshire Poet’, in David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp.310–11. 27 Rune Ahlander, ‘Skogsvårdsstyrelsen i Kronoberg: Frostdikning och emigration tidigt på agendan’, in Skogshistoriska Sällskapets Årsskrift 2015 (Ödeshög: Danagård LiTHO, 2015), pp.34–43, 35–37, 40. 28 Lars-Olof Larsson, Historia kring Huseby (Grimslöv: Skatelövs Hembygdsförening, 1978), p.83; Ulf Beijbom, ‘Från utvandrartill invandrarlän’, in Lennart Johansson (ed.), Landen kring sjöarna: En historia om Kronobergs län i mångtusenårigt perspektiv; Kronobergsboken 1999–2000 (Växjö: Grafska 22 Gunnel Cederlöf Punkten, 1999), pp.375–6. Erik Wångmar, Chapter7, and Eleonor Marcussen, Chapter6, in this volume. 29 Lake ore and bog ore are forms of limonite. This source of iron has high proportions of phosphorus, making it comparatively fragile. In Lake Åsnen, part of which belonged to the Huseby Estate, the ore contained 32–36 per cent iron. Lake ore can assume diferent forms. In Lake Åsnen it formed into plates which could be harvested every 30years. If not removed, it would cover the bottom of the lake. Lars-Olof Larsson, ‘Studier kring järnhantering i södra Småland fram till det industriella genombrottet’, in Lars-Olof Larsson and Leif Rubensson (eds), Från blästbruk till bruksdöd, Jernkontorets bergshistoriska skriftserie (Jönköping: Järnkontoret, 2000), pp.130–2. 30 Olle Krantz, ‘Järnbruket som blev glasbruk: Ägarskap, tillverkning, konkurrens’, in Kerstin Wickman, Hans Cogne, Gunnel Holmér, and Denise Grünstein (eds), Orrefors: Glasbrukets historia 1898–1998 (Stockholm: Byggförlaget- Kultur, 1998), p.16; Olof Nordström, ‘Förteckning över glasbruk och hyttor i Sverige 1150–2000’, Glasteknisk tidskrift, 54/3 (1999), pp.78–80; Larsson, ‘Studier kring järnhantering, pp.213–14. 31 The railway line connected Vislanda and Karlshamn, stopping at Huseby on the way. Nite, ‘En lycksökares liv’, pp.144–5. 32 Malin Lennartsson, Chapter8, in this volume. 33 Gunnarsson, Ingemar, En skandinavisk järnvägskontraktörs karriär i Indien 1860–1867: Ackumulering av socialt och kulturellt kapital som framgångsstrategi i en kolonial kontext, Lnu Licentiate No. 31, Department of Cultural Sciences, Linnaeus University, Sweden (Växjö: Linneaus University Press, 2020). References Account of Roorkee College, Established for the Instruction of Civil Engineers, with a Scheme for Its Enlargement (Agra: Secundra Orphan Press, 1851). Aspengren, Henrik Chetan, ‘Bombay—möjligheternas stad’, in Margareta Petersson (ed.), Från Brittiska Indien till Huseby bruk: Järnvägen som arena för modernitet och kolonialism under lycksökaren och järnvägsentreprenören Joseph Stephens tid i Indien 1860–69 (Lund: Arkiv Förlag, 2018). Beijbom, Ulf, ‘Från utvandrartill invandrarlän’, in Lennart Johansson (ed.), Landen kring sjöarna: En historia om Kronobergs län i mångtusenårigt perspektiv; Kronobergsboken 1999–2000 (Växjö: Grafska Punkten, 1999), pp.365–90. Beverley, Eric Lewis, Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Bjørn, C., ‘Fra reaktion til grundlov’, in Olaf Olsen (ed.), Gyldendal og Politikens Danmarkshistorie (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel Politikens Forlag, 1988). Brandis, Dietrich, ‘Memorandum on the Supply of Railway Sleepers of the Himalayan Pines Impregnated in India’, Indian Forester, 4 (1879). Bregnsbo, Michael, and Kurt Villads Jensen, Det danske imperium: Storhed og fald (Viborg: Aschehoug Banks Forlag, 2005). Brincker, Benedikte, ‘A “Small Great National State”: An Analysis of the Cultural and Political Factors that Shaped Danish Nationalism 1760–1870’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 16/4, December (2003), pp.407–31. Bubb, Alexander, ‘An Element of Risk: The Corrupt Contractor in Indian Fiction and Film, 1886–1983’, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 4/1 (2017), pp.109–26, https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2016.33. Circular Migrations, Capital, and Opportunity 23 Bubb, Alexander, ‘Class, Cotton, and “Woddaries”: AScandinavian Railway Contractor in Western India, 1860–69’, Modern Asian Studies, 51/5 (2017), pp.1369– 93, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X16000251. Carr, William, and Harry Hearder, The Wars of German Unifcation 1864–1871 (Boca Raton, FL: Taylor& Francis Group, 1991). Cedergreen Bech, Svend, Dansk biografsk leksikon, 3rd ed., 16 vols (København: Gyldendal, 1983). Cleghorn, Hugh F. C., The Forests and Gardens of South India (London: W. H. Allen& Co., 1861). Enefo, Kerstin, and Joan Ramón Rosés, ‘Coping with Regional Inequality in Sweden: Structural Change, Migrations, and Policy, 1860–2000’, Economic History Review, 68/1 (2015), pp.191–217. Fischer-Tiné, Harald, ‘Hierarchies of Punishment in Colonial India: European Convicts and the Racial Dividend, c. 1860–1890’, in Harald Fischer-Tiné and Susanne Gehrmann (eds) Empires and Boundaries: Rethinking Race, Class, and Gender in Colonial Settings (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp.41–65. Gadgil, Madhav, and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Guha, Sumit, Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–1991, Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society, 4 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Gunnarsson, Ingemar, En skandinavisk järnvägskontraktörs karriär i Indien 1860– 1867: Ackumulering av socialt och kulturellt kapital som framgångsstrategi i en kolonial kontext, LNU Licentiate No. 31, Department of Cultural Sciences, Linnaeus University, Sweden (Växjö: Linnaeus University Press, 2020). Gunnarsson, Ingemar, ‘Från lärling till “ingenjör”’, in Margareta Petersson (ed.), Från Brittiska Indien till Huseby bruk: Järnvägen som arena för modernitet och kolonialism under lycksökaren och järnvägsentreprenören Joseph Stephens tid i Indien 1860–69 (Lund: Arkiv Förlag, 2018), pp.65–82. Hansson, Stafan, ‘Tekniken som samhällsomdanare: Exemplet Norrbottens teknologiska megasystem’, in Eva Landberg, Karin Rönnbäck, and Per Moritz (eds), Norrbotten: Årsbok 2007 (Luleå: Norrbottens hembygdsförbund, 2007), pp.26–41. Harnow, Henrik, Den danske ingeniørs historie 1850–1920: Danske ingenrørers uddannelse, professionalisering og betydning for den danske moderniseringsproces (Århus: Systime, 1998). Hyslop, Jonathan, ‘Making Scotland in South Africa: Charles Murray, the Tranvaal’s Aberdeenshire Poet’, in David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006), pp.309–34. Kerr, Ian J., Building the Railways of the Raj, 1850–1900 (New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Krantz, Olle, ‘Järnbruket som blev glasbruk: Ägarskap, tillverkning, konkurrens’, in Kerstin Wickman, Hans Cogne, Gunnel Holmér, and Denise Grünstein (eds), Orrefors: Glasbrukets historia 1898–1998 (Stockholm: Byggförlaget-Kultur, 1998). Kumar, Arun, ‘Colonial Requirements and Engineering Education: The Public Works Department, 1847–1947’, in Roy M. Macleod and Deepak Kumar (eds), Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India, 1700–1947 (New Delhi; Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 1995), pp.216–32. 24 Gunnel Cederlöf Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp.1–31. Larsson, Lars-Olof, Historia kring Huseby (Grimslöv: Skatelövs Hembygdsförening, 1978). Larsson, Lars-Olof, ‘Studier kring järnhantering i södra Småland fram till det industriella genombrottet’, in Lars-Olof Larsson and Leif Rubensson (eds), Från blästbruk till bruksdöd, Jernkontorets bergshistoriska skriftserie (Jönköping: Järnkontoret, 2000), pp.11–252. Lassen, Aksel, ‘The Population of Denmark, 1660–1960’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 14/2 (1966), pp.134–57. McLaren, Martha, British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830: Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001). Meyer, William Stevenson, Richard Burn, James Sutherland Cotton, and Herbert Hope Risley, The Imperial Gazetteer of India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908). Moberg, Vilhelm, The Emigrants: ANovel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951). Moberg, Vilhelm, Utvandrarna (Stockholm: Bonniers Förlag, 1949). Nelson, A. E., Central Provinces District Gazetteers, Akola District, Volume B, Statistical Tables (1891–1907) (Nagpur: Government Press, 1909). Nite, Dhiraj Kumar, ‘En lycksökares liv och afärer i Indien och Skandinavien’, in Margareta Petersson (ed.), Från Brittiska Indien till Huseby bruk: Järnvägen som arena för modernitet och kolonialism under lycksökaren och järnvägsentreprenören Joseph Stephens tid i Indien 1860–69 (Lund: Arkiv Förlag, 2018), pp.135–65. Nordström, Olof, ‘Förteckning över glasbruk och hyttor i Sverige 1150–2000’, Glasteknisk tidskrift, 54/3 (1999), pp.77–84. Petersson, Margareta, ‘A Danish Family in India: Gendered Colonial Upbringing, Everyday Life, and Cultural Encounters’, in Kristina Myrvold (ed.), India: Research on Cultural Encounters and Representations at Linnaeus University (Gothenburg; Stockholm: Makadam, 2017), pp.74–99. Petersson, Margareta, ‘Joseph Stephens—Familjen och arkivet’, in Margareta Petersson (ed.), Från Brittiska Indien till Huseby bruk: Järnvägen som arena för modernitet och kolonialism under lycksökaren och järnvägsentreprenören Joseph Stephens tid i Indien 1860–69 (Lund: Arkiv Förlag, 2018), pp.15–43. Rajan, S. Ravi, Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development 1800–1950, Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 2006). Rangarajan, Mahesh, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces, 1860–1914, Studies in Social Ecology and Environmental History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). Runblom, Harald, and Hans Norman, From Sweden to America: AHistory of the Migration, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Historica Upsaliensia, 74 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976). Satya, Laxman D., Cotton and Famine in Berar, 1850–1900 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997). Steiner, Henriette, The Emergence of a Modern City: Golden Age Copenhagen 1800–1850 (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014). Circular Migrations, Capital, and Opportunity 25 Svanberg, Ingvar, ‘The Use of Wild Plants as Food in Pre-industrial Sweden’, Acta Societatis Botanicorum Poloniae, 81/4 (2012), https://doi.org/10.5586/ asbp.2012.039. Torstendahl, Rolf, Engineers in Western Europe: Ascent—and Decline? AProfession Torn Between Technology and Economy, 1850–1990, with Outlooks to the Present (Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, forthcoming). 32 Arun Kumar a similar argument, adding to it their personal experience of dealing with fraudulent Indian workers. They reported that workers had taken about one lakh of rupees in advance for the work that they had not done, and there was little hope of recovering even one-twentieth of this money through the civil courts. They described the case of a Noonea worker who owed about Rs. 500 to the company, but the case had been going on for 17 months now and nothing was known about the worker’s whereabouts.39 A year after the 1859 Breach of Contract Act, whose reach at the time extended only to presidency towns, a new act, specifcally intended for railway construction and other public works, was passed. The Employers’ and Workmen’s Disputes Act IX was passed in 1860, regulating employment relationships between contractors/employers and workers and service providers at construction sites, including railway-, canal-, and bridge-building sites, throughout colonial India.40 Such industry-specifc contract laws to meet the demands and problems of particular employers remained a key feature of the colonial state, refecting its direct interest in creating and disciplining labour markets. In the case of tea plantations in Assam, the Assam Contract Act of 1865 overshadowed the general Bengal Native Labour Act III of 1863. While the latter act allowed criminal prosecution of tea workers in the case of refusal or abandonment of their contract, the 1865 Contract Act gave European plantation managers the power to arrest absconding workers. Nitin Varma argues that penal labour laws were made to ensure that workers, once contracted, had no bargaining power, accepted lower wages and poor and unhealthy working conditions, and remained settled on the plantations.41 The act afrmed what Nitin Varma articulates as the private control of labour by European plantation owners.42 Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy propose that the penal laws in tea plantations were a solution to a specifc ‘contractual’ problem, which was the practice of giving advances to workers in order to recruit them. Where costs of recruitments were signifcantly higher in terms of bringing workers from northern and central India to Assam, such as in the Brahmaputra Valley and the Surma Valley in Assam, employers used penal laws to minimize the risk of losing upfront recruitment costs. The authors assert that planters in the Dooars region of North Bengal never used penal labour-laws as their costs of recruiting workers from Chota Nagpur were signifcantly lower.43 Ian J. Kerr, who studied the making of the 1860 Act in great detail, argued that this act, like that of 1859, derived its spirit from the British Master and Servant laws, under which servants could be prosecuted for breaches of contract.44 While under the 1859 Act fraudulent behaviour after taking an advance was punished, under the 1860 Act, workers could be prosecuted even if no advance had been paid to them. It gave more powers to railway authorities, engineers, and contractors to subordinate workers. Kerr shows that the 1860 Act was a direct response to a wage dispute between workers and contractors building the GIPR railways at Bhor Ghat in 1859.45 On the one hand, it allowed the settlement of wages between workers and Life of Contract Capitalism and Building of Colonial Railway 33 contractors, and on the other, it gave contractors the power to prosecute workers who had entered into a voluntary contract to provide goods, labour, and other services, but neglected or refused to meet the specifc predetermined terms, or absconded. Amagistrate could impose a fne of Rs. 20, or in lieu of a fne compel specifc performance of the contract by the worker, and in the case of non-compliance could send the worker to prison for up to two months.46 Kerr pointed out that additional features of the 1860 Act were the use of special magistrates to settle disputes, summary administration of the law, and a clause barring any appeal against a magistrate’s decision. He suggested that while the act might have provided some relief to workers in wage disputes, its purpose was to strengthen the hold of capital over labour and criminalize defance by workers. However, he found hardly any evidence of this act being invoked at railway construction sites, other than at canal construction sites in Punjab, and even there, the 1859 Act was invoked more.47 Mohapatra argues that the efect of these laws lays not so much in their actual implementation, but in their use as a threat to coerce workers into accepting unfavourable and unfree work conditions.48 Figure 2.1 Mhow-ke-Mullee Viaduct, 3,000 men employed, Khumnee Hill, 1856. Source: Photograph by Alice Tredwell, courtesy Huseby Bruk AB. 34 Arun Kumar Joseph Stephens’ Contracts Stephens signed several contracts for services (for the supply of stones, baskets, lime, etc.) and for hire (of workmen and artisans). From the very beginning, he was aware of the implication of the laws described earlier and of the power of contracts. He himself had served under an apprenticeship contract with his brother-in-law and was under contract to various large contractors, and later directly to the GIPR. The whole railway construction operation relied on a series of hierarchical contracts—between the colonial state and the GIPR, between engineers, surveyors, inspectors, skilled railway workers, and the GIPR, between contractors, between contractors and European subcontractors and the GIPR, between European contractors and subcontractors and native worker headmen or goods suppliers.49 Contracts ensured that railways were built in a stipulated time, and the work done was accountable in the courts. We fnd several unsigned contracts and various drafts of contracts in English and the vernacular, suggesting that Stephens wrote these contracts himself and later corrected them. His contracts highlight the role of stamps, bond papers, witnesses, clear terms and obligations, signatures, and dates of contract and delivery of services in shaping the labour-capi- tal relationship at construction sites. Let us begin by analysing Stephens’ earliest contracts with stone suppliers and masons while he was constructing a bridge for the Nagpur extension line near Alasana village in Shegaon Taluka in 1862. The frst contract that we fnd was with a mason headman, Reembhy Casseembhy (dated 16 September1862).50 The contract, on a Re. 1 government-stamped paper, reads as follows (Figure2.3): I, Reembhy Casseembhy, hereby agree to complete for Messrs. J. S. Wells and J. S. F. Stephens the masonry in the 7–30 ft girder bridge at 53–23 Nagpoor Extension by the 31st January1863 at the following rates. Rubble with coursed face work Rs. 8 and 5 annas per cubic yard Blocking course Rs. 16 per cubic yard Ashlar Rs. 1 and 4 annas per cubic yard I Reembhy Casseembhy also agree to have the work taken out of my hand at any time if it should not proceed with sufcient rapidity to give satisfaction to Messrs. J. S. Wells and J. S. F. Stephens. In case the above mentioned work should not be completed by me by the 31st January1863 Iforfeit 20 Rupees per day for every day exceeding that time. Witness, L. Pereira (signed by both parties) Life of Contract Capitalism and Building of Colonial Railway 35 Figure 2.2 Part I, Acopy of Stephens’ contract in Modi script dating from 1865. Source: LNU, HA, JSA, Box F1B:1. 36 Arun Kumar Figure 2.3 Original copy of the contract between Stephens and Reembhy Casseembhy. Source: LNU, HA, JSA, F1B:1. Life of Contract Capitalism and Building of Colonial Railway 37 Although contracts on a simple sheet of paper or by word of mouth were also contracts in the eyes of the law, Stephens showed more legal awareness.51 Most of his contracts involved not only the terms and dates of contracts but also names and signatures of witnesses, body marks as marks of identifcation, signatures and names of both the parties, exact dates, and sometimes stamp paper and validation of the contract by a clerk. The earlier contract is a classic example of subcontracting at the lowest level between a European and an Indian worker. Stephens’ archive answers Kerr’s complaint about the difculty of locating archival material at the lowest level of railway construction. We should remember that these contracts were not a replacement for Indigenous forms of labour control and recruitment; rather, contractarian ideology supplemented and harnessed these power structures.52 By subcontracting portions of works to diferent native mason maistries (gang headmen), Stephens was able to relieve himself of the direct responsibility for recruiting and entering into contracts with individual workers. Rather than reducing dependence on intermediaries, contracts strengthened the position and role of intermediaries vis-à-vis workers and contractors. Subcontracting reduced Stephens’ task more to that of a supervisor, inspector, designer, and facilitator. In such a work setup, contracts assumed a signifcant role, as the actual work depended on the subcontractor’s ability to fnish the job or provide fnished material on time. The contract presented here refected Stephens’ anxiety about Casseembhy’s (in)ability to complete the expected fxed task on the bridge on time and for the pre-agreed wages. The frst term in the contract was that in the event that Stephens found the work of Casseembhy [and his workers] slow, he had the right to remove Casseembhy. In such a situation, we get no sense of what would have been the terms of his removal. The second condition was an extension of the frst concern of the employer, which was about the work being delayed. Afnancial penalty clause was added. If the work was not fnished on time, Stephens had the right to fne Casseembhy Rs. 20 per day until it was completed. This fne, interestingly, is equal to the total fne a magistrate could impose if a ‘fraudulent’ mason was punished. We see here that the contract is not just structuring the employer-employee relationship or determining the obligations of the mason, but also encapsulating the anxieties of Stephens and the everydayness of work: wages, fnes, work to be done. It is this drive to encapsulate such everyday anxieties of the work process and the uncertainty of work that would receive more attention in future contracts. We could actually read, through these contracts, the confictual history of railway construction in modern India. Although signed by the mason Casseembhy, the terms of the contract appear to be one-sided. These were Stephens’ conditions. The two ‘free’ parties were clearly not equal parties. The contract refected Stephens’ distrust of Indian workers, embodied his interests, and legitimized his power to fne the mason outside court. While the magistrate could only fne Casseembhy Rs. 20 if he refused or neglected the terms of his contract, Stephens added 38 Arun Kumar another layer of pecuniary punishment (Rs. 20 per day) as part of those terms. He combined the specifc performance theory with some form of the monetary damage theory. While the court ensured that the contract terms were met through the specifc performance theory, the contract allowed Stephens to claim monetary damages for delays, not just specifc performance with a delay. This important aspect of the contractarian ideology remains obscured if we only focus on the law of contract. This did not mean, though, that Stephens was not equally worried about the desertion of workers or satisfactory completion of the project on time at the pre-agreed cost. Satisfaction is an elusive category and was never clearly set out in contracts. It was defned on a daily basis by Stephens, who was himself under the constant supervision of GIPR inspectors to ensure that he completed his contracts as per the guidelines of the GIPR engineer. The fnancial penalties stipulated by Stephens refected the larger hierarchical contractual world of railway construction. Thus, if a contractor failed to complete his tender on time, he was liable to pay a fne of Rs. 200 per week. Stephens makes no mention of any advance being paid to Casseembhy. Although the 1860 Act did not require such a criterion to prosecute workers for breach of contract, the practice of making an advance payment was rampant. His future contracts included a mention of the exact advance paid. But why did this change occur? First, contractors ensured that the advances paid were mentioned on paper as they were the core of business practice in a competitive labour market; and second, in the case of non-compliance by workers, contractors could approach a magistrate and demand punishment of the worker or strict performance of the clauses under one of the two Acts. The freedom and concerns of workers were subordinated to the language used by the employer in the contract. The contract does not tell us the fears and anxieties of Casseembhy. Was he worried that Stephens might not pay his exact wages on time? We will see later that this obscuring of workers’ concerns in contracts entailed ambiguities in the everyday relationship between labour and capital, which at times took a confictual turn. To obtain the stones on which Casseembhy worked, Stephens entered into contracts with Vaddar stone suppliers. We fnd drafts of four contracts on behalf of his agent Wells with four diferent Vaddar suppliers. Only one of them was signed. The opening and closing language of these contracts was very similar to that of the one presented earlier. The only diference between the one signed and the three unsigned contracts was as regards the advance payment made and the conditions of employment. In the contract with Cheema Suttoo Woodari, the advance mentioned was Rs. 500; for Balla Nagappa, it was again Rs. 500; for Hanumunta Luximon, it was Rs. 250; and for Bheema Hanumanta, it was Rs. 125. Wells signed the contract with Hanumunta Luximon, although his advance was not the lowest. Perhaps Luximon was more reliable than the others and provided decent stones. However, in his contract, there was an additional clause that did not appear Life of Contract Capitalism and Building of Colonial Railway 39 in the other three. This may have been an important reason why Stephens selected Luximon. It is further agreed that the said Hanumunta Luximan must remain on the works until his services are no longer required.53 Was Stephens at liberty to add any clause he liked to the contract? It appears so, although only on the basis of negotiations with the workers. Contracts, for him, became legal documents and means by which he navigated the terrain of everyday work, not just the overall structuring of the labour-capital relationship. In his correspondence, Stephens never complained of a short supply of labour or material, but rather of late delivery of services or labour and the quality of the work. Intense competition for hardworking and reliable labourers and good materials, and uncertain working conditions (rain, disease, drought, famine, rural areas being cut of), forced contractors to draft highly unequal contract terms and to go with those suppliers who took a relatively small advance and provided unlimited supplies as per their demands. Let us look at the language of contracts from 1864 1865. Acontract with Shaik Alle Shaik Jullal regarding hedging between Nidungere (Nandgaon) and Jalgaon on the GIPR Contract No. 12 line, dating from 23 September1864, included the following terms: The above-mentioned distance to be completed in six weeks and if Ifail to complete the above works Iagree to have the work taken out of my hands and to forfeit Rupees 1 on every ninety-six lineal yards. Ihave done many or may have done, or receive for the same Rupees six. The work to be executed to the satisfaction of Stephens and the Company’s engineers and ffteen per cent of the value of the work to be retained by Mr. Stephens till the completion of the contract.54 Another contract dated 7 November1864, with Fukera Yemma and Bicka Beiro, the rubble stone suppliers, stressed that they would supply stones for buildings on the GIPR line between Chalisgaon and Mhaswad station at the rate of Rs. 6 for every hundred stones. ‘The stone had to be of a good quality and each stone not to be less than 1/3 of a cubic foot’, the contract stressed. Further, they were bound by a severe deterrent penalty of forfeiting ‘one Rupee per hundred cubic feet of all stone delivered in case they stop delivering before they have 5000 cubic feet of stone delivered should that quantity be required.’55 The contract with Shaik Alle Shaik Jullal speaks of the everyday nature of work patterns at these construction sites. First, punctual delivery of the work/services was critical. Second, easy removal of the defaulting party and monetary recovery of any losses incurred were ensured before the work commenced, Third, wages were fxed beforehand for the work to be done in 40 Arun Kumar the future. Fourth, wages/costs were only to be paid after the double-layer inspection carried out by Stephens and the GIPR’s engineer. And fnally, to ensure that all these were achieved smoothly, 15 per cent of the wages/ costs were to be withheld until the work had received fnal approval. The latter was of great signifcance because of the contractual nature of railway construction in this period. In the event that the company engineer found Stephens’ work unsatisfactory, Stephens could force the worker to redo it as per the terms of his contract at no extra cost. Withholding of wages was a popular practice adopted by European and Indian employers to bind, discipline, and coerce workers in factories, plantations, and workshops. Stephens’ growing experience of projects informed his negotiations with Indian workers and suppliers, and this, in turn, was refected in his contracts. In his contract with Fukera Yemma and Bicka Beiro, Stephens reserved the right not to pay the agreed rates to them if they failed to deliver 5,000 cubic feet of stones ‘should they be required’. Stephens wanted an unhindered, indefnite supply of stones, and the best thing for him was to make sure that the clause was there in the contract. However, apart from withholding of wages, a novel element was added in these two agreements that further subordinated workers. They could forfeit their wages, in full or in part, in the event of non-compliance with the contract. Robert Steinfeld shows that in nineteenth-century America, where laws did not allow the criminalization of breach of contract, employers relied on this popular device and other harsh pecuniary methods to coerce workers to complete their contracts.56 Harsh pecuniary measures, Steinfeld remarks, were as punitive as imprisonment and could be more dangerous for workers, as they left them two choices: to continue to provide labour or to go without wages and sufer starvation (‘a more disagreeable alternative to labour’).57 As pointed out earlier, Stephens applied a double layer of punitive measures—using both contracts and laws. But there is an excessive emphasis on pecuniary measures, and contracts worked as self-acting mechanisms. In his later contracts, we fnd additional economic means of punishing defant workers and suppliers. One contract signed in 1867 between Stephens’ agent George Peck and the stone supplier Perajee Kerappa stated that Perajee would supply no less than ‘twenty brass of good black stone’, each brass comprising 100 cubic feet of stone, at the rate of 12 rupees per brass. However, in the event of him failing to do so, the contract imposed a severe monetary penalty: Should the said Perajee Kerappa not supply the full quality of stone above specifed within one month from this date, the said Perajee Kerappa agrees to accept from the said George Peck rupees ten only per brass& this agreement will in such case be considered null& void.58 The power to end the contract lay with the employer, and with no risk of them sufering punitive measures. In another contract dated 23 October1866, Life of Contract Capitalism and Building of Colonial Railway 41 with the lime suppliers Rajaram Chintaman and Mahomedjee Hakimjee, Stephens devised yet another economic measure to secure his interests. Here, he demanded a third-party guarantor. The two were to supply best-quality lime to Stephens at Akola station at a fxed rate and had taken an advance. The contract included an agreement with the guarantor and stated: I Durjeebhoy Doorabjee hereby bind myself to become security in the sum of Rupees two hundred for the due fulflment of the above contract.59 Chintaman and Hakimjee may have been new to the profession or the region, and hence a guarantee was required. Nevertheless, we have seen how Stephens’ contracts tightened his grip over Indian workers and suppliers, ranging from imposing pecuniary fnes to securing a guarantor, and from withholding to forfeiting of wages. We need to view these measures in the light of his relationship with workers and suppliers on the ground. This may give us some clue as to why contracts were so important in building the railway and sustaining colonial capitalism. Contracts and Everyday Work Relations Stephens’ correspondence with his father, George, tells us that something went wrong with one of his contracts in early 1864. Consoling his son, his father wrote, ‘You must be careful in future contracts to have a clause binding them to provide materials in proper time, or to pay a heavy fne in damages.’60 It is interesting to see how a father based at a Danish university, who has never been to India, is counselling his son on how to administer his relationship with Indian workers. In the early years, when he was working under Lee and Watson on the bridges on the Nandura—Jalamb—Alasana—Shegaon line, Stephens seems to have employed coolies, masons, and stone dressers without a written contract. If he did enter into such contracts, these have not survived in the archive. His daily jottings in his diary give an account of the relationship he had with labour contractors in the early days. The diary records that he had employed masons of the headmen Sultanbhoy and Succarams to dress stones at Jalamb quarry and workers of the headmen Yemmas, Ebrahim, Peragees, and Sapanas at the Alasana and Moregaon bridges.61 One group produced the required stones and the other built the bridges. Uninterrupted working by the two groups was necessary for Stephens’ own contract. Stephens usually settled wages at the end of the month. He invited workers to his bungalow where he kept all his accounts. In his diary, he noted that the days wages were paid were usually full of tension and confict. On 20 April 1863, Vaddar masons of Sultanbhoy and Succarams, who worked at the Jalamb quarry extracting and dressing stone, came to his bungalow demanding their pay. It was a bit early for their monthly wages, 48 Arun Kumar of freedom’ for the beneft of their own interests.92 Bhattacharya’s critique is centred on an understanding that the subordination of the worker to capital is not a given phenomenon (the model), but is historically constituted through contestation, power struggles, cultural mediation, and reinterpretation from below (the practice). This essay’s fndings suggest that contracts derived their meanings and contents in specifc historical settings. Workers and work presented new challenges to employers, which were refected in their contracts. The fascinating work of Z. M. S. Siddiqi shows that, although Indian labour contract laws created unfree labour relations and tied workers into slavery-like work conditions, there was always scope for a liberal interpretation of the 1859 Breach of Contract Act, and judges exercised it and dismissed employers’ unjust complaints.93 Nevertheless, neither Banaji nor Bhattacharya refer to any specifc contracts, their changing language, or ways in which workers give or are disciplined to give their assent to a new work regime or question it. When we analyse the contents of contracts, we fnd that their meanings were not just limited to sustaining or producing and questioning an unfree labour regime. The role of the contract appears to be wider, more complex, and more specifc to local situations. The building of colonial railways without contracts would have been a slower process. Stephens completed most of his big contracts on time and got paid. Contracts and a favourable state and legal structure certainly contributed to his profts and the rise in his fortunes immediately after the launch of two powerful acts: the Act of 1859 and the Act of 1860, which criminalized desertion by workers and gave employers legal power to coerce them to fulfl their contracts as per the will of employers. This study has drawn attention to material that forces us to move our discussion from contract laws to the actual contracts, and from there to analyse the labour-capital relationship. Contracts and contract laws did become tools of employers and the state to tie workers into unequal work conditions, restrict their autonomy, and subordinate them to the logic of capital. But there is a need to integrate contracts, laws, customs, workers’ resistance, and everyday work relations into a seamless web which, at one and the same time, resolved and complicated this labour-capital relationship. When we dig deeper into the language of contracts, we fnd that issues such as satisfactory work, the details of wage advances, withholding of wages, security money and guarantors, employers’ anxieties and fears about Indian workers, and delivery of work of good quality and on time were critical for employers. The latter were not simply interested in criminal breaches of contract; rather, they were interested in using contracts as self-acting powerful legal documents to govern the everyday work regime. Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy’s arguments, discussed earlier, suggests that employers with higher cost for labour recruitment sought penal labour laws of varying degree to protect their ‘upfront investment’.94 Although the advance was not a criterion for criminal breach of contract in the 1860 Act relating to labour Life of Contract Capitalism and Building of Colonial Railway 49 and services at the construction sites, their reading of contractual labour laws from the perspective and needs of business/industry (tea in this case) opens up an alternative interpretation in legal-business history. Areading of Stephen’s contracts shifts our attention from laws to transaction documents, which ofer a comprehensive understanding of the emerging work regime on railway construction sites and their close relationship with the contractarian ideology. His contracts refer to employers’ varied concern and anxieties, which included labour insubordination, loss of wage advance, wage disputes, non-completion of projects on time, and irregular delivery of specifed services and products. The railway construction work regime of the 1860s was also supported by other mechanisms to discipline labour. Whereas the legitimacy of the contract’s power as a legal document was derived from the labour laws, the laws did not alone defne the scope and power of a contract. The contracts empowered employers to frame the quotidian conditions of the work, which the law was incapable of doing. As a result, employers were able to utilize both the force of the labour laws and of the contract. We see that, while Stephens and his agents relied on the ultimate threat of imprisonment and legal proceedings for completion of tasks and services, the contract itself included penalty clauses that were far harsher than the punishment laid down in the law. Such clauses, referring for example to fnes for delays, the need for a guarantor who guaranteed the advance payment and punctual and satisfactory completion of the work, and withholding of a portion of wages/costs, show contracts to have been very much part of the work process, taking away the anxieties of everyday business. Stephens’ contracts also ofer powerful evidence to weave into a larger history of capitalists’ distrust of labour. Distrust was the subterranean logic that allowed employers to empower themselves against workers through legal and extra-legal means. The fear that workers would steal, rebel, abscond, or be lazy has guided and motivated employers throughout history to invent various mechanisms to control and discipline labour. Contracts and laws are just one of those mechanisms. Others have included withholding of wages, everyday frisking, religious and non-religious moral lessons, schooling, biometrics, and camera surveillance.95 Workers are recalcitrant bodies, and labour power is not easily extractable. Once contracted, workers responded to employers’ expectations and behaviours in ways that challenged the terms of their contracts. The difering language of contracts suggests that workers had the power to challenge employers’ expectations, defy their orders by not attending work, demand wages at unusual times, refuse to accept unfair wages, and transfer their work to other contractors. If employers did not pay wages or advances on time, workers, often collectively, demanded their wages and arrears, surrounded employers, and threatened to leave work. They demanded increases in wages even after signing their contracts.96 And Stephens used contracts as a powerful antidote to tame these recalcitrant behaviours. However, he also 50 Arun Kumar used extra-legal tools such as beating, refusing to pay wages, and denying future work to insubordinate workers. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professors Prabhu Mohapatra and Gunnel Cederlöf, and other participants of the workshop ‘The Underbelly of the Empire: Workers, Contracts, and the Social Economy of the Industrial Turn’ (December2019) for giving their valuable feedback on this chapter. An extended discussion with Professor Mohapatra helped me to revise the chapter. Notes 1 Michael E. Tigar and Madeleine R. Levy, Law and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). 2 Ibid., ch. 17. 3 To understand the history of the evolution of the modern-day employer-employee contract relationship see, Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson, The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialization, Employment, and Legal Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.41–109. They alert us to the fact that the English contract laws have medieval and early modern origins. Seeing them as inventions of capitalism is ahistorical. 4 Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 5 Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (London: Murray, 1861). 6 Julian S. Webb, ‘Contract, Capitalism and the Free Market: The Changing Face of Contractual Freedom’, Law Teacher, 21/1 (1987), pp.23–31. Daniel Song, ‘From Status to Contract (and Back?): AHistoriography of Contract Law and the Transition to Capitalism’, Ex Post Facto, XXII/Spring (2013), pp.127–8. 7 M. R. Anderson, ‘Work Construed: Ideological Origins of Labour Law in British India to 1918’, in Peter Robb (ed.), Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.87–120. 8 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Vintage, 1977), pp.925–6. 9 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Vintage, 1995). 10 For an insightful analysis of these positions, see Song, ‘From Status to Contract’. 11 Song, ‘From Status to Contract’, pp.129–31. 12 Song, ‘From Status to Contract’; Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). 13 Tigar and Levy, Law and the Rise of Capitalism. 14 Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp.47–62. See also Deakin and Wilkinson, The Law of the Labour Market, pp.75–76, who argue that although the Employers and Workmen Act (1875) had removed the criminal breach of contract clause, workers could still be sent to jail for 40 days under the 1869 Debtors Act in case they failed to pay damage to employers. 15 Ibid., pp.74–84. 16 See Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Life of Contract Capitalism and Building of Colonial Railway 51 17 Linnaeus University (LNU), Huseby Archives (HA), George Stephens Archive (GSA), E1:3a, Letters from George Stephens to Joseph Stephens for the year 1860–1. 18 Abbott was appointed in 1857 along with 11 other ofcials. The list included Edward Dangerfeld (surveyor), who later supervised Joseph’s work. See The British Library, India Ofce Records (BL, IOR), List of Agreements No. 1 (ofcers), L/AG/46/12. 19 LNU, HA, Joseph Stephens Archive (JSA), F1A:1, Telegram from Abbott, 27 April1864. On the making of Joseph Stephens as a contractor, see Alexander Bubb, ‘Class, Cotton, and “Woddaries”: AScandinavian Railway Contractor in Western India, 1860–69’, Modern Asian Studies, 51/5 (2017), pp.1369–93. 20 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:1, Letter from Joseph Stephens, 15 February1865. 21 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1862, January1862 entries. 22 Bubb, ‘Class, Cotton, and “Woddaries”’, p.1385. 23 Ibid., pp.1387–8. 24 Ian J. Kerr, ‘On the Move: Circulating Labor in Pre-Colonial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial India’, International Review of Social History, 51/S14 (2006), pp. 85–109; Bubb, ‘Class, Cotton, and “Woddaries”’; Ravi Ahuja, ‘Labour Unsettled: Mobility and Protest in the Madras Region, 1750–1800’, Indian Economic& Social History Review, 35/4 (1998), 381–404; Ravi Ahuja, ‘Labour Relations in an Early Colonial Context: Madras, c. 1750–1800’, Modern Asian Studies, 36/4 (2002), pp.793–826. 25 Ian J. Kerr, ‘Working Class Protest in 19th Century India: Example of Railway Workers’, Economic and Political Weekly, 20/4 (1985), pp. PE34–40. 26 Bubb, ‘Class, Cotton, and “Woddaries”’, pp.1391–2. 27 See Ian J. Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj 1850–1900 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); Ian J. Kerr, ‘Labour Control and Labour Legislation in Colonial India: ATale of Two Mid-Nineteenth Century Acts’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 27/1 (2004), pp.7–25. 28 Kerr, ‘Labour Control’. 29 Peter Robb (ed.), Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), Introduction; M. R. Anderson, ‘Work Construed: Ideological Origins of Labour Law in British India to 1918’, in Robb (ed.), Dalit Movements, pp.87–120; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 30 Prabhu Mohapatra, ‘From Contract to Status? Or How Law Shaped Labour Relations in Colonial India 1780–1880’, in Jan Breman et al. (eds), India’s Unfree Workforce: Of Bondage Old and New (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp.96–125. 31 Ravi Ahuja, ‘The Origins of Colonial Labour Policy in Late Eighteenth-Century Madras’, International Review of Social History, 44/2 (1999), pp.159–95. 32 Ibid., pp.176–7, 185–95. 33 Prabhu Mohapatra, ‘Regulated Informality: Legal Constructions of Labour Relations in Colonial India, 1814–1926’, in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Jan Lucassen (eds), Workers in the Informal Sector: Studies in Labour History, 1800–2000 (New Delhi: Macmillan India Limited, 2005); Mohapatra, ‘From Contract to Status?’, pp.96–125. 34 Mohapatra, ‘Regulated Informality’. 35 Mohapatra, ‘From Contract to Status?’; Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Nitin Varma, Coolies of Capitalism: Assam Tea and the Making of Coolie Labour (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017); Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830–1920 (London: Hansib, 1993). 52 Arun Kumar 36 Nitin Sinha, ‘“Servant Problem” and the “Social-Subaltern” of Early Colonial Calcutta’, in Nitin Sinha, Nitin Varma, and Pankaj Jha (eds), Servants’ Pasts: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century South Asia, 1 (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2019), pp.311–44; Nitin Sinha, ‘Contract, Work, and Resistance: Boatmen in Early Colonial Eastern India, 1760s–1850s’, International Review of Social History, 59/S22 (2014), pp.11–43; Chitra Joshi, ‘Dak Roads, Dak Runners, and the Reordering of Communication Networks’, International Review of Social History, 57/2 (2012), pp.169–89. 37 Mohapatra, ‘Regulated Informality’. 38 National Archives of India, Delhi, Home Department, Judicial Branch, Proceedings 13 January1863, Prog. No. 10–12, Repeal of Sec. V Regulation 7 of 1819, Letter from Sir Wemyss, Bart, Beharampur, to R. J. Scott, dated 15 August1862, 8. Iam thankful to Nitin Varma for providing me a copy of this fle. 39 Ibid., Letter from Messrs. Burn and Co. Railway Contractors to S. C. Bayley, Collector and Magistrate of Shahabad, dated 25 August1862. 40 Maharashtra State Archives, Public Works Department, Railway, 1860, Vol. 23, No. 364, File, Act IX of 1860 Regarding the speedy settlement of disputes between workmen engaged on railways and their employers. 41 Varma, Coolies of Capitalism, ch. 2. 42 Ibid., pp.48–66. 43 Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy, Law and the Economy in Colonial India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp.105–13. 44 Kerr, ‘Labour Control’; Mohapatra, ‘From Contract to Status?’, pp.116–17. For a detailed analysis of master—servant relations in Britain and contracts in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American world, see Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor. 45 Kerr, ‘Labour Control’. 46 Ramkrishna Chatterjee, ‘Masters and Servants: Their Relations in Early Industries—A Case Study’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 41 (1980), pp.585–92. 47 Kerr, ‘Labour Control’, pp.19–21. 48 Mohapatra, ‘From Contract to Status?’, p.121. 49 Bubb, ‘Class, Cotton, and “Woddaries”’. See also the chapter by Radhika Krishnan in this volume. 50 LNU, HA, JSA, F1B:1, Contract dated 19 September1862. 51 Mohapatra, ‘From Contract to Status?’, p.119. 52 See also Ahuja, ‘Origins of Colonial Labour Policy’; Nitin Sinha, ‘Contract, Work, and Resistance: Boatmen in Early Colonial Eastern India, 1760s–1850s’, International Review of Social History, 59/S22 (2014), pp.11–43. 53 LNU, HA, JSA, F1B:1, Contract dated 29 September1862. 54 Ibid., Contract dated 23 September1864, emphasis mine. 55 Ibid. 56 Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor, p.17. 57 Ibid., pp.17–19. 58 LNU, HA, JSA, F1B:1, Contract dated 20 May1867. 59 Ibid., Contract dated 23 October1866. 60 LNU, HA, GSA, E1:3a, Letter from George Stephens to Joseph Stephens, 7 March1864. 61 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1863, 20, 22, and 23 April1863. 62 Ibid., 20 April1863. 63 Ibid., 21 April1863. 64 Ibid., 23 April1863. 65 Ibid., 25 April1863. 66 Ibid., 2 May1863. Life of Contract Capitalism and Building of Colonial Railway 53 67 Ibid., 12 May1863. 68 Ibid., 18 May1863. 69 Ibid., 19 May1863. 70 Ibid., 19 May1863. 71 Ibid., 20 May1863. 72 Ibid., 21 May1863. 73 Ibid., 1 June1863. 74 Ibid., 22 May1863. 75 Ibid., 8 June1863. 76 Ibid., 14 March1863. 77 Ibid., 24 May 1863. Bubb mentions ‘cherry-merry’ being given by Stephens to placate workers and reward loyal ones. Bubb, ‘Class, Cotton, and “Woddaries” ’, p.1392. 78 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1863, 12 August, 19 August, and 11 November1863. 79 Ibid., 10 March1863. 80 Ibid., 29 August1863. 81 LNU, HA, JSA, F1B:1, Contract dated 2 June1865, Pachora. 82 Ibid., Contract dated 12 June1865, Bhuswal. 83 For a richer analysis of how colonial ofcials characterized Indian workers, which to some extent was informed by English notions of class morals, see Ahuja, ‘Origins of Colonial Labour Policy’, pp.66–73. 84 Mohapatra, ‘From Contract to Status?’, p.120. 85 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:1, Letter from Williamson to Joseph Stephens, 22 October1865. 86 Marx, Capital, pp.270–1. 87 Jairus Banaji, ‘The Fictions of Free Labour: Contract, Coercion, and So-Called Unfree Labour’, Historical Materialism, 11/3 (2003), pp.69–95. 88 Jairus Banaji, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 89 Banaji, ‘Fictions of Free Labour’, pp.79–80. 90 Kerr, ‘Working Class Protest’. 91 Neeladri Bhattacharya, ‘Lineages of Capital’, Historical Materialism, 21/4 (2014), pp.19–20. 92 Ibid., pp.20–1. 93 Z. M. S. Siddiqi, ‘Sanctions for the Breach of Contracts of Service (1843–1925)’, Journal of the Indian Law Institute, 25/3 (1983), pp.359–71. For a rough number of convictions and acquittals under various breach of contract laws, see National Archives of India, Delhi, Home Department, Judicial Branch, Proceedings 13 January1863, Prog. No. 10–12, Repeal of Sec. V Regulation 7 of 1819. 94 Roy and Swamy, Law and the Economy in Colonial India, 105–14. 95 Marx, Capital; E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38 (1967), pp.56–97. 96 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1863, 9 March1863. References Ahuja, Ravi, ‘Labour Relations in an Early Colonial Context: Madras, c. 1750– 1800’, Modern Asian Studies, 36/4 (2002), pp.793–826. Ahuja, Ravi, ‘Labour Unsettled: Mobility and Protest in the Madras Region, 1750– 1800’, Indian Economic& Social History Review, 35/4 (1998), pp.381–404. Ahuja, Ravi, ‘The Origins of Colonial Labour Policy in Late Eighteenth-Century Madras’, International Review of Social History, 44/2 (1999), pp.159–95. 54 Arun Kumar Anderson, M. R., ‘Work Construed: Ideological Origins of Labour Law in British India to 1918’, in Peter Robb (ed.), Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.87–120. Banaji, Jairus, ‘The Fictions of Free Labour: Contract, Coercion, and So-Called Unfree Labour’, Historical Materialism, 11/3 (2003), pp.69–95. Banaji, Jairus, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Leiden: Brill, 2010). Bhattacharya, Neeladri, ‘Lineages of Capital’, Historical Materialism, 21/4 (2014), pp.11–35. Bubb, Alexander, ‘Class, Cotton, and “Woddaries”: A Scandinavian Railway Contractor in Western India, 1860–69’, Modern Asian Studies, 51/5 (2017), pp.1369–93. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Chatterjee, Ramkrishna, ‘Masters and Servants: Their Relations in Early Industries—A Case Study’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 41 (1980), pp.585–92. Deakin, Simon and Frank Wilkinson, The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialization, Employment, and Legal Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Vintage, 1995). Horwitz, Morton J., The Transformation of American Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). Joshi, Chitra, ‘Dak Roads, Dak Runners, and the Reordering of Communication Networks’, International Review of Social History, 57/2 (2012), pp.169–89. Kerr, Ian J., Building the Railways of the Raj 1850–1900 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). Kerr, Ian J., ‘Labour Control and Labour Legislation in Colonial India: ATale of Two Mid-Nineteenth Century Acts’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 27/1 (2004), pp.7–25. Kerr, Ian J., ‘On the Move: Circulating Labor in Pre-Colonial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial India’, International Review of Social History, 51/S14 (2006), pp.85–109. Kerr, Ian J., ‘Working Class Protest in 19th Century India: Example of Railway Workers’, Economic and Political Weekly, 20/4 (1985), pp. PE34–40. Maine, Henry Sumner, Ancient Law (London: Murray, 1861). Mantena, Karuna, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Marx, Karl, Capital: ACritique of Political Economy, I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Vintage, 1977). Mohapatra, Prabhu, ‘From Contract to Status? Or How Law Shaped Labour Relations in Colonial India 1780–1880’, in Jan Breman etal. (eds), India’s Unfree Workforce: Of Bondage Old and New (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp.96–125. Mohapatra, Prabhu, ‘Regulated Informality: Legal Constructions of Labour Relations in Colonial India, 1814–1926’, in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Jan Lucassen (eds), Workers in the Informal Sector: Studies in Labour History, 1800–2000 (New Delhi: Macmillan India Limited, 2005). Life of Contract Capitalism and Building of Colonial Railway 55 Parthasarathi, Prasannan, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Robb, Peter (ed.), Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). Roy, Tirthankar, and Anand V. Swamy, Law and the Economy in Colonial India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Siddiqi, Z. M. S., ‘Sanctions for the Breach of Contracts of Service (1843–1925)’, Journal of the Indian Law Institute, 25/3 (1983), pp.359–71. Sinha, Nitin, ‘Contract, Work, and Resistance: Boatmen in Early Colonial Eastern India, 1760s–1850s’, International Review of Social History, 59/S22 (2014), pp.11–43. Sinha, Nitin, ‘“Servant Problem” and the “Social-Subaltern” of Early Colonial Calcutta’, in Nitin Sinha, Nitin Varma, and Pankaj Jha (eds), Servants’ Pasts: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century South Asia, 1 (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2019), pp.311–44. Song, Daniel, ‘From Status to Contract (and Back?): A Historiography of Contract Law and the Transition to Capitalism’, Ex Post Facto, XXII/Spring (2013), pp.127–38. Stanley, Amy Dru, From Bondage to Contract Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Steinfeld, Robert J., Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Thompson, E. P., ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38 (1967), pp.56–97. Tigar, Michael E., and Madeleine R. Levy, Law and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). Tinker, Hugh, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830–1920 (London: Hansib, 1993). Varma, Nitin, Coolies of Capitalism: Assam Tea and the Making of Coolie Labour (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017). Webb, Julian S., ‘Contract, Capitalism and the Free Market: The Changing Face of Contractual Freedom’, Law Teacher, 21/1 (1987), pp.23–31. DOI: 10.4324/9781003317227-3 3 Bureaucracy and Ideologies of Control in British India Social and Professional Networks and the ‘Contract System’ in Railway Building Radhika Krishnan Historians and economists working on the Indian railways refer to what they term the ‘railway mania’ of Britain in the 1840s, resulting ultimately in two principal achievements of the industrial revolution (the steamship and the steam engine) being brought to the colonies.1 Multiple rationales have been ofered to explain the spread of this ‘mania’ to India. Recounting the debate around the Indian railways, Bipan Chandra reminds us of the ‘strong political and economic pressure’ from textile manufacturers in Lancashire, who wished to access the vast supplies of cotton and wheat in India.2 Apart from being a source of opulent raw materials, India could also become a huge consumer of textile and other products manufactured in Britain, Daniel Thorner points out.3 In addition to the commercial and economic advantages, once put in place, the railways could be used to transport military personnel from one part of the vast colony to another in a relatively short time.4 These economic and political justifcations apart—many of which have been dealt with in great detail by a number of scholars of colonial India—we are left with the undeniable fact that railway construction remained a crucial endeavour of colonial rule in British India. The frst passenger railway line in India, covering 34km between Bori Bunder (Bombay) and Thane, was opened to trafc on 16 April1853, barely 28years after the world’s frst successful train ran between Stockton and Darlington in England in 1825. This was one of the frst railway lines in the country. Before passenger trains were introduced, there were a few trains used to transport stone and other material, such as on the Red Hill line in Chennai in South India. The frst short lines were followed by a rapid escalation of railway construction.5 In Ian Kerr’s estimate, by 1870, ‘excluding Russia (and thus Russian Asia), ffty-fve per cent of all operating railway mileage in Africa, Asia, and Latin America combined was located in India’. The fact that neither China nor Japan had operating lines at the time stresses the unique nature of railway construction in India.6 During these initial tumultuous years, the railway building project was held together by the ‘contract’ system. This was designed to protect private capital investment and to underwrite losses, and remained in place for Bureaucracy and Ideologies of Control in British India 57 three-quarters of a decade from 1849.7 Despite serious concerns being raised regarding the efcacy of this system (some details of which Iwill discuss in later sections of this chapter), the British administration decided to continue with it into the late 1860s. Scholars of railway history have by and large used an economic lens to explain this decision. In this study, Iwill contribute other rationales that go beyond economic rationalization of the work process to explain why the contract system remained in place for such a long time in India. The letters, correspondence, contracts, pay sheets, diaries, and accounts of the Anglo-Scandinavian entrepreneur Joseph Stephens allow us to look at the daily lived experiences of various actors within this system.8 Iuse insights from this archive to argue that the social and economic relations that kept the contract system together were incompatible with utilitarian justifcations of colonial rule in India. In other words, the nature of social and economic networks and relationships on the railway lines would have made their incorporation within direct colonial governance a difcult proposition. Adistance, convenient perhaps, between the colonial administration and the everyday world of railway contracts had to be maintained. The roots of the contract system can thus be located not merely in the ‘economic’ sphere, but also equally in the social and political spheres. ‘Contracts’ in Railway Building: ‘Macro’ and ‘Micro’ Views Scholars unravelling the complex history of railway building fnd themselves confronted with multiple archives. For years, historians and sociologists have pored over documents, in the process slowly piecing together various elements of the railway script along with its many diferent actors. The details are known to every student of Indian railway history: the nature of the frst railway contracts, which were heavily premised on private enterprise; the state underwriting the possible losses of the railway companies; and the government’s extensive supervision of railway policy and operations. In order to ensure private investment in railway construction and infrastructure, railway companies were guaranteed a return of 5 per cent per year on the capital they agreed to invest in India. In addition, the imperial government provided them with all the land they required, free of charge. In return, the state retained the right to stringently control and supervise the companies’ afairs. The contracts typically ran for a period of 25years, after which the government gave itself the option of buying back the lines from the private companies. As historical records and scholarship inform us, railway companies (such as the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR), on whose lines Joseph Stephens was awarded contracts) were successful in expanding the scale of railway lines across the country.9 To achieve this expansion, however, serious hurdles had to be overcome. Even as engineers employed by the railway companies and government employees supervising construction were dealing with the formidable material and technical challenges of building bridges and 64 Radhika Krishnan One can thus trace a strategy of inducement to ensure that work continued. Moreover, widely difering wage rates between individuals and between sites appear in the pay sheets. Masons, for instance, are paid anything between 8 and 16 annas per day. Dhiraj Kumar Nite, who has systematized the wage sheets, argues in this volume that wage rates were negotiated by workers, and were thus often a function of their ‘social identity’.35 Social custom, he states, continued to play a role in how labour relations were negotiated. Another interesting episode tells us much about the dynamics of labour on the railway lines. In February1863, Stephens writes in his diary of an accident on one of the worksites: a small boy broke one of his legs when a lot of earth fell on him. Some days later, Stephens mentions that the boy ‘died and was buried and the father and mother made a great noise over him’.36 Asum of Rs. 6 had to be handed over to the parents, which ‘quietened’ them, Stephens adds.37 What strikes us here is the informal nature of negotiations at play. Many aspects of work agreements on the railway line were informal, such as compensation paid after accidents on the worksite. There is scant evidence of written assurances of compensation; and the actual amount of compensation paid could well have been the result of micro-negotiations and entreaties. Cooperation, competition, and confict thus played out in multiple ways as contractors, engineers, supervisors, and Indian labour worked with often difering interests towards building the railways. Complex and interwoven networks were formed, human contacts (both social and professional) were built, the latter perhaps being as crucial to the railway project as the physical infrastructure that was simultaneously ‘constructed’. In fact, some of these networks and connections proved to be enduring, as is made apparent for instance by Stephens’ communications with the GIPR’s resident engineers Edward Dangerfeld and Alex Mackenzie after he settled in Sweden following his purchase of an ironmaking and agrarian estate, Huseby, in 1867. Stephens, now running the estate, continued to invoke his previous professional relationship with Dangerfeld and Mackenzie, ofering to sell iron and timber to the GIPR.38 His relationship with Mackenzie is the most telling. The JSA is replete with acerbic exchanges between the two. Yet social and professional connections are not so fragile, and Stephens attempted to maintain his earlier personal and work-related association with Mackenzie long after withdrawing from work on the railway lines in India. Bureaucracy and Ideologies of Control in British India In this fnal section, Ishall return to the question that Iraised at the beginning of the chapter. Why did the colonial administration decide to continue with the contract system in railway construction, despite there being strong views against it amongst its ofcials? The ofcials were of the opinion that the contracts were quite a heavy burden on the exchequer. The government had to ‘make good the defcit’ that arose from the need to ensure guarantees Bureaucracy and Ideologies of Control in British India 65 to the railway companies operating in India.39 Despite what seems to be an overwhelming body of opinion, the very same colonial state decided to continue with the contract system for three-quarters of a decade. The answer to this seeming conundrum, Iwill argue, had to do with the nature of the colonial state and the manner in which it went about addressing matters of governance, as much as it was mired in economic concerns. In the preceding section, we got a glimpse of Joseph Stephens’ everyday life as a railway contractor. We saw the networks that were strung together by contractors such as Stephens—networks which connected a range of actors in the elaborate script that was railway construction in 1860s India. The working of these formal and informal networks required negotiations between the various actors, negotiations that sought to address labour shortages, disputes over wages, and resentment over compensation for accidents and the like. It was not uncommon to see the individual contractor and his associates deal with these problems directly. The colonial administration was called upon to arbitrate on some of these episodes (as the fracas over the European inspector Harris’s behaviour, for instance, indicates). However, the JSA suggests that many of the problems arising on the railway lines, especially related to recruiting and managing labour, were resolved by individual contractors without the active intervention of the colonial administration. The colonial state is somewhat absent from the daily travails of constructing a railway line. One could argue that in efect it had contracted out not only railway construction but also much of the business of dealing with the day-to-day problems arising from it. Contractors such as Stephens drew upon social and professional networks as they sought to address obstacles that appeared on a routine basis. These networks were the very bedrock of the railways, as both the engineers’ and the contractors’ success depended on them. Arranging labour, dealing with a dispute amongst contractors or between workers and their employers, and negotiating wages and compensation all required these networks. The process of managing and recruiting labour, for instance—which included dealing with disgruntled workers and various problems that routinely arose on the worksite—required the invocation of these networks and the informal arrangements they were embedded in. In the JSA, we get a sense that the framework of these networks remained largely informal. Managing dissatisfed workers and negotiating payments took place through informal communications and settlements, without the formal intervention of the colonial state. It was perhaps in the management of labour that these networks were most often called upon. It is worth mentioning at this point that the imperial administration had put in place a series of legislative enactments (the Railway Acts of 1854, 1869, and 1890) to deal with recalcitrant workers and their demands. Laura Bear, Ian Kerr, and others have usefully introduced us to the dynamics of the British railway bureaucracy.40 Bear, commenting on the nature of labour in the Indian railways project, usefully describes 66 Radhika Krishnan the framework in which labour was framed and perceived by the empire, and consequently by the colonial railway administration. She tells us that the labour management regime was characterized by punitive fning, racial employment hierarchies, instability of service, and arbitrary practices of dismissal.41 In response to this regime, Ian Kerr speaks of simultaneous deference and defance amongst workers. As he looks at several dimensions of workers’ engagement with the railways project, ranging from recruitment, work, and working conditions to workers’ resistance, he discusses not just the ‘oppression, exploitation, brutality and harsh conditions at work-sites’, but equally the lack of passive acceptance of these conditions.42 Resistance, he points out, appeared in ‘many forms’, as ‘inaction’, as ‘direct’ and even violent action, even as ‘subtle and complex methods to control a work process’.43 Contractors, in turn, were called upon to respond to these ‘subtle and complex’ methods. As we have seen, they did so in multiple ways. For the colonial state and its ofcialdom, the contract system allowed these issues to be outsourced into a domain which was not within their immediate, everyday purview. It was an attempt to distance the administration from the complexity of everyday governance. The system, for all its fnancial porosity and inefciency, also allowed the colonial state to remain at a distance from its own subjects. While fnancially unproftable, the contract system thus persisted owing perhaps in part to the possibility it ofered of governing from a distance. At this juncture, the wider historical context needs to be kept in mind. In the early 1860s, the colonial empire in India was recovering from the jolt to its authority arising from the 1857 ‘mutiny’ (or the frst ‘War of Independence’, as the revolt against the British saw it). The empire not only had successfully squashed the fery rebellion from its colonized subjects but had also been alerted by it to the need for a more sensitive acknowledgement and reception of colonized Indians and their practices, especially in matters that could provoke social and religious sentiments. If we look at the construction and management of railway lines as a problem of governance for the colonial state, it may not be very surprising that the British retained the contract system for this purpose, in defance of the economic logic. It would be useful here to examine the broad ideological contours of British governance in India. Eric Stokes, as we know, delineated the philosophical foundations of colonialism, tracing for us the role utilitarianism played in establishing a popular discourse around and rationale for it.44 Several other scholars have spoken of the utilitarian ideal and its embedding within colonial policy. The impact of initiatives driven primarily by utilitarian motives—even with the distortions that accompanied their implementation—was considerable. Indian society could be ‘reformed’ and ‘transformed’ through legislation, and through the imposition of ‘legal’ law and order administered by the colonial state, went this argument. At the heart of the argument was a deep sense that Indians were to be taught the virtues of governance and efcient civil administration. The application of Bureaucracy and Ideologies of Control in British India 67 utilitarianism meant deeply ingrained notions of ‘the rule of law applied aggressively by an efcient judiciary’ and of the cult of ‘efciency’. Moreover, the means were more important than the ends and needed to appear blameless, thus necessitating ‘administrative and legal rationalism’. It was through this application of morally justifable means that the ‘world of chaos’ and ‘uncultivated society’ that was India, to quote James Mill, would be rid of political and religious despotism. We fnd the roots of a powerful discourse that sought to continuously make a case for ‘just governance’, untainted by embarrassing tales of vile behaviour, crass profteering, dubious deals, and rampant corruption. Mistakes as well as deliberate deviations from principles might have marred this grand utilitarian project.45 Nevertheless, imperial governance was arguably based on the ideological foundations of having to demonstrate ‘justness’, morality, and legality. How were these values of morality and legality to be showcased on the railway lines? Ian Kerr mentions in his detailed and well-argued book on mismanagement in early railway construction how the government repeatedly tried to safeguard itself against what it saw as massive scandals.46 As scholars of colonial India have pointed out, implementing ideas of the rule of law, based on ‘just’ and ‘rational’ principles, was not an easy task. More often than not, colonial ofcials realized that governing and the ‘rule of law’ were embedded in processes of daily negotiations and contestations. The system that was put in place was highly centralized, but the manner of its implementation was deeply embedded in context.47 Isuggest that the decision to continue with the contract system in the construction of railway lines was shaped not only by the immediate post-Revolt contingency of keeping a distance from the daily lives of the population, but also by the larger problem of governance. The colonial state realized that governance on the railway lines involved daily negotiations and contestations, as much as it did formal rules and legislation. The colonial state in a post-Revolt scenario was, Isuggest, more than happy to let the private contractor do the haggling, bargaining, and negotiating. A Network of Contracts and Contractors The contract system employed by the British for the purpose of railway construction emerges not just as a set of fnancial transactions, but also as a system that is embedded in informal and professional networks comprising workers, contractors, and colonial ofcials. These networks, while allowing us to see the everyday functioning of the contract system at work, also permit us to ofer a more complex picture of thehistory of railway building in colonial India. The colonial state was consciousof the fact that it was overriding economic logic in retaining the contract system, but as we have seen, this decision was not shaped by economics. The networks built and cultivated by contractors such as Joseph Stephens allowed the British to both control and at the same time remain at a distance from the day-to-day 68 Radhika Krishnan tribulations of railway construction. Social responsibilities and patronage become embedded within the contract system. Stephens (and other European contractors) now had to negotiate with their workers on a range of matters—paying compensation when accidents occurred, and resorting to informal coercion and manipulation of pay sheets to retain labour and contain resentment, for instance. These relationships, as Ihave noted, simultaneously exposed the ideological challenges and dilemmas which confronted the British administration. Railway building in India in the 1860s, grounded in formal as well as deeply informal social and professional networks and transactions, was a challenge for the imperial government to deal with. ‘Ofcial’ records in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and London speak of the infuriating frustrations faced by representatives of the Raj in dealing with the inherent lack of order and precision in daily transactions. In the 1860s, the colonial state was consolidating itself; in the process, it was putting in place several structures that were compatible with this process of consolidation. On the railway lines, governance via the contract system (rather than direct governance through a vast bureaucracy) emerged as one of the means to that end. Given the specifc post-‘Mutiny’ social and economic context of the 1860s and early 1870s, the imperial state could well have decided not to enter the everyday world of railway building in the manner that it did later. Instead, it chose to pursue a policy of benign ignorance and acceptance (as far as possible) in dealing with problems on the railway lines, allowing the system to function as long as the work was delivered. The potential and the strength of the Joseph Stephens Archive probably lie in the help it gives us in answering the conundrum of why the contract system was retained (in some form or other) for three decades, despite the obvious economic concerns involved. To conclude, Isuggest that the nature of the informal networks on the railway lines was a reason for the British to continue with this system. Having to deal with the underlying need to justify means as well as ends, the British possibly found it judicious to construct a carefully maintained (and convenient) distance between themselves and the messy, everyday world that constituted the contract system of railway building. Notes 1 See, for instance, Daniel Thorner, ‘Capital Movement and Transportation: Great Britain and the Development of India’s Railways’, Journal of Economic History, 11/4 (1951), pp.389–402. 2 Bipan Chandra, ‘Economic Nationalism and the Railway Debate, Circa 1880– 1905’, in R. Srinivasan, M. Tiwari, and S. Silas (eds), Our Indian Railway: Themes in India’s Railway History (New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2006), p.78. 3 Daniel Thorner, ‘The Pattern of Railway Development in India’, in Ian Kerr (ed.), Railways in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p.81. 4 Ian J. Kerr, Engines of Change: The Railroads that Made India (Westport: Praeger, 2007), pp.17–18. Bureaucracy and Ideologies of Control in British India 69 5 As Thorner points out in ‘Capital Movement and Transportation’ (p.391), by 1868 approximately 6,000km of railway lines had been opened. The number rose to 16,000km by 1882 and around 40,000km by the turn of the century. Between 1845 and 1875, about 95million pounds sterling (£) was invested in the Indian railways, representing what according to W. P. Macpherson, ‘Investment in Indian Railways: 1845–1875’, The Economic History Review, New Series, 8/2 (1955), p.177, is arguably the single largest injection of British capital in India. Stuart Sweeney, in Financing India’s Imperial Railways, 1875–1914 (London: Routledge, 2016), p.1, estimates that the railways accounted for an overwhelming 80 per cent of Britain’s industrial investments in India. By 1868, £80million had been invested, increasing to £135million by 1882 and £236million by 1902, according to Thorner’s calculations (op. cit., p.391). 6 Ian J. Kerr (ed.), Railways in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p.1. 7 Thorner, ‘Pattern of Railway Development’, p.95. 8 Kept in the Joseph Stephens Archive (JSA) at the Linnaeus University, Sweden. 9 Kerr, Engines of Change, p.25. 10 Ian J. Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj: 1850–1900 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp.10–11. 11 Thorner, ‘Pattern of Railway Development’, p.84. 12 Chandra, ‘Economic Nationalism’, p.80. 13 Thorner, ‘Pattern of Railway Development’, p.86. 14 Ibid., p.95. 15 See, for instance, Saraswathy Rao, The Railway Board: AStudy in Administration (New Delhi: S. Chand& Company Ltd., 1978); G. S. Khosla, Railway Management in India (Bombay: Thacker& Co. Ltd., 1972). 16 Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, The Financial Foundations of the British Raj: Ideas and Interests in Reconstruction of Indian Public Finance, 1858–1872 (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2005). 17 Ibid., pp.5–14. 18 Radhika Singha, The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Confict 1914–1921 (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2020). 19 Ian J. Kerr, ‘The Dark Side of the Force: Mistakes, Mismanagement and Malfeasance in the Early Railways of the British Indian Empire’, in Srinivasan, Tiwari, and Silas (eds), Our Indian Railway, p.190. 20 Ibid. 21 Linnaeus University (LNU), Huseby Archives (HA), Joseph Stephens Archive (JSA), F1A:5, Letter from G. B. Peck to Joseph Stephens, 24 July1867. 22 National Archives of India, PWD Proceedings July1868, Railways Department, ‘Memo by Captain C. J. Mead Ofciating Superintendent Engineer, Hyderabad Circle date 19/5/1868’ [manuscript], (New Delhi: Government of India, 1868), p.550. 23 Kerr, ‘Dark Side of the Force’, pp.187–212. 24 See R. Krishnan, ‘Contracting and Sub-contracting in British India: Exploring the Dynamics of Railway Building through Joseph Stephens’, in K. Myrvold and S. Billore (eds), India: Research on Cultural Encounters and Representations at Linnaeus University (Gothenburg: Makadam, 2017), pp.50–73, for an account of the social and professional networks forged by Europeans involved in construction of the railway grid, and the role of these networks in addressing the professional challenges of railway building in the 1860s. See also R. Krishnan, ‘Constructing the Indian Railways: Locating Perception and Self-perception in “Native” Responses’, in M. Petersson (ed.), Huseby in the World (Lund: Arkiv Academic Press, 2018). 25 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:4, Letter from Louis Pereira, 9 December1866; F1A:8, Letter from Joseph Stephens, 10 December1866. 70 Radhika Krishnan 26 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1862, 17 January1862. 27 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:3, Letter from Dadabhai Dorabjee, 12 January1868. 28 Edward Said conceptualizes the Orientalist ‘Other’ as irrational, weak, depraved, childlike, and ‘diferent’ from the European. See Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), p.40. 29 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A, Letter to J. P. Vansittart, 16 April1868. 30 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A, Letter from R. F. Stack, First Class Assistant Engineer, GIPR Akola, 8 March1867. 31 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:5, Letter from G. B. Peck, 10 August1865. 32 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:5, Letter from G. B. Peck, 14 February1867. 33 Anna, a coin valued at one-sixteenth of an Indian rupee. LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:5, Letters from G. B. Peck, 4 September and 16 October1865. 34 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1863, 24 March1863. 35 Nite, ‘Labour Practices and Well-Being: Construction Workers in 1860s Western India’, chapter5 in this volume. 36 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1863, 28 February1863. 37 ‘Rs’ here refers to the Indian currency, rupees. In the 1860s, Rs. 6 was approximately equivalent to the wages earned for 5–8 days of ‘skilled’ work, such as carpentry or masonry. 38 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:8, Letter to Alex Mackenzie, 12 March1868; ibid, Letter to Edward Dangerfeld, 20 September1869; E1:2, J. Stephens to G. Stephens 1860–9; E1:3a, G. Stephens to J. Stephens 1858–75. 39 Chandra, ‘Economic Nationalism’, p.80. 40 See Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007); Kerr, Building the Railways; Laura Bear, ‘An Economy of Sufering: Addressing the Violence of Discipline in Railway Workers’ Petitions to the Agent of the Eastern Indian Railway, 1930–47’, in S. Pierce and A. Rao (eds), Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism (London: Duke University Press, 2006), pp.245–8. 41 Bear, ‘Economy of Sufering’, pp.246–8. 42 Kerr, Building the Railways, p.169. 43 Ibid., p.170. 44 Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1959). 45 See, for instance, Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Sumit Sarkar, Modern Times: India 1880s–1950s, Environment, Economy, Culture (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014); Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 46 Kerr, ‘Dark Side of the Force’, p.211. 47 Cohn, Anthropologist Among the Historians, p.479. References Bear, Laura, ‘An Economy of Sufering: Addressing the Violence of Discipline in Railway Workers’ Petitions to the Agent of the Eastern Indian Railway, 1930–47’, in S. Pierce and A. Rao (eds), Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism (London: Duke University Press, 2006). Bear, Laura, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007). Bureaucracy and Ideologies of Control in British India 71 Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi, The Financial Foundations of the British Raj: Ideas and Interests in Reconstruction of Indian Public Finance, 1858–1872 (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2005). Bose, Sugata, and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (London; New York: Routledge, 1998). Chandra, Bipan, ‘Economic Nationalism and the Railway Debate, Circa 1880–1905’, in R. Srinivasan, M. Tiwari, and S. Silas (eds), Our Indian Railway: Themes in India’s Railway History (New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2006), pp.77–120. Cohn, Bernard, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). Kerr, Ian J., Building the Railways of the Raj: 1850–1900 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). Kerr, Ian J., Engines of Change: The Railroads That Made India (Westport: Praeger, 2007). Kerr, Ian J., (ed.), Railways in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). Kerr, Ian J., ‘The Dark Side of the Force: Mistakes, Mismanagement and Malfeasance in the Early Railways of the British Indian Empire’, in R. Srinivasan, M. Tiwari, and S. Silas (eds), Our Indian Railway: Themes in India’s Railway History (New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2006). Khosla, G. S., Railway Management in India (Bombay: Thacker& Co. Ltd., 1972). Krishnan, R., ‘Constructing the Indian Railways: Locating Perception and Selfperception in “Native” Responses’, in M. Petersson (ed.), Huseby in the World (Lund: Arkiv Academic Press, 2018). Krishnan, R., ‘Contracting and Sub-contracting in British India: Exploring the Dynamics of Railway Building Through Joseph Stephens’, in K. Myrvold and S. Billore (eds), India: Research on Cultural Encounters and Representations at Linnaeus University (Gothenburg: Makadam, 2017), pp.50–73. Macpherson, W. P., ‘Investment in Indian Railways: 1845–1875’, The Economic History Review, New Series, 8/2 (1955), pp.177–86. Rao, Saraswathy, The Railway Board: AStudy in Administration (New Delhi: S. Chand& Company Ltd., 1978). Said, Edward, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003). Sarkar, Sumit, Modern Times: India 1880s–1950s, Environment, Economy, Culture (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014). Singha, Radhika, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). Singha, Radhika, The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Confict 1914–1921 (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2020). Stokes, Eric, The English Utilitarians and India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1959). Sweeney, Stuart, Financing India’s Imperial Railways, 1875–1914 (London: Routledge, 2016). Thorner, Daniel, ‘Capital Movement and Transportation: Great Britain and the Development of India’s Railways’, Journal of Economic History, 11/4 (1951), pp.389–402. Thorner, Daniel, ‘The Pattern of Railway Development in India’, in Ian Kerr (ed.), Railways in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). DOI: 10.4324/9781003317227-4 4 Social Capital and Its Limits in Fortune Making Joseph Stephens’ Enterprises in India and Scandinavia, 1859–69 Dhiraj Kumar Nite I have now decided on coming home. Iwill not say much about what Icould do if Iremained. There are lots of contracts to be let daily at the present time, which can only be taken up by men with experience and capital; therefore, Ihave no doubt that Ishould get something if Iwas trying for it; but as to how much Icould make in two or three years, it is impossible to say. The chances are in favour of doing well, but so much depends on circumstances local and general that Imay make very little or worse lose health and life and lead the life of a slave, which Ihave now led so many years that Iam quite tired of it. Ihave made up my mind to give it up and come home with what Ihave got, which ought to be quite enough for me, as Iam not an extravagant and also allow me to follow pursuits in which Itake an interest and pleasure, which one cannot take in anything in India, where the whole and sole interest is to get done with it as soon as one can and pocket the proceeds.1 The foregoing excerpt from a letter of Joseph Stephens, written from Murtizapur (India) on 17 December1868 to his father, provides us with a snippet of his demanding, adventurous experience of life and business. Stephens, a Scandinavian man, was one of several such adventurers, European as well as non-European, who travelled around the world in the nineteenth century in pursuit not just of a livelihood, but of wealth.2 Asuccessful workman, he grew to become a contractor in the construction sector in the Bombay- Nagpur region in 1860s India. He secured a fortune to the tune of over Rs. 332,000 (more than £33,200, or Rs. 25million in today’s money), equivalent to over 600,000 Swedish riksdaler (or 34million Swedish krona today), over the period January1860–February1869.3 This fortune earned in India enabled him in 1867 to purchase and subsequently operate the substantial Huseby Estate in Sweden, consisting of about 6,000 hectares of agricultural and forest land, an iron foundry, a sawmill, a corn-grinding mill, and a manor house with furniture and other fttings.4 In the course of making his fortune, he lived a hard, itinerant life, endured illness, and was without what he described as any proper means Social Capital and Its Limits in Fortune Making 73 of amusement and intellectual stimulus in India.5 This chapter analyses the circumstances which, over the period 1859 to 1869, enabled Stephens to successfully make his fortune in India and were responsible for him relocating his venture to Sweden. It studies his experience of life in colonial India in the 1860s in order to explain his entrepreneurial agency and identify the implications for our understanding of business models. Stephens’ drive to make a fortune was one of the cogs in the advancement of commerce, industry, and transportation in later nineteenth-century world. The phenomenon of modern managerial industrial enterprises with their organizational capabilities and managerial hierarchy, as conceptualized by Chandler, was yet to emerge even in industrially prosperous countries.6 The Great Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR), a British joint-stock company, was one of the large frms involved in the construction and operation of railways in southern India in the 1850s–60s. However, it subcontracted the work of construction to a couple of medium-sized European and Indian contractors, which in turn usually subcontracted to a number of petty subcontractors. This web constituted a hierarchy of construction frms, and its members functioned as ‘merchant intermediaries’. They became part of a business network, refecting shared business attitudes, aspirations, and goodwill, and maintained it through contracts, partnership arrangements, and shareholdings.7 It is not self-evident from the thesis of business networks, as per its conceptualization by Casson and Rose,8 how members of such a network recognize opportunities, mobilize and allocate resources, work out necessary improvisation and innovation in the organization of factors of production, distribution, and frms, and legitimize their undertakings. Here, the study of Joseph Stephens’ enterprise ofers us a few clues. Stephens joined the business web, earned, and profted. Stephens arrived with virtually no fnancial capital and exemplifed the rise and growth of a business person from a subaltern background.9 From the vantage point of the business elite, his frm was a small player; while in comparison with several Indian subcontractors—who worked for him, and supplied labourers as well as raw materials—his was a medium-sized enterprise. Stephens’ business was not exceptional. The rise and growth of petty capitalists and small frms was widespread, bringing the economies of fexibility, informality, and labour-intensive methods in early modern, colonial, and postcolonial countries. Some of these petty capitalists originated from the humble background of productive classes.10 This chapter also underscores the signifcance of this phenomenon for our understanding of business history. My analysis of Stephens’ business practices critically engages with four viewpoints ofered by the literature dealing with the business approaches necessary to gain a fortune. First, entrepreneurs swiftly capitalized on and adjusted to the emerging pattern of accumulation in the ‘open world economy’ of the nineteenth century. They improvised where necessary to maximize profts, hedged uncertainties, displayed a preference for diversifcation,11 and, 80 Dhiraj Kumar Nite sufers more from the want of communications than anything else.’ ‘All the landowners would buy shares of the railway construction company even if the government investment did not come. They would ofer land, labour and material in return for their shares.’41 His swift involvement in eforts to modernize and develop this region of Sweden, and the lead he took in this regard, were a refection of the entrepreneurial predisposition he had acquired in India. The same could be said about his interest in the communication and transportation infrastructure and the treatment meted out to farm tenants. However, his symbolic capital as a railway engineer from India had already travelled to the region before he took this initiative. Both his symbolic and his cultural capital appear to have been at work in impressing the need for speedy execution of a new railway project on the Swedish landowners. Social Connections and ‘Sleeping Partners’ in Business The business world was impregnated with the signifcance of social connections, what Bourdieu describes as social capital. Stephens benefted from his social identity as a member of Abbott’s family. While he inherited some contacts from Abbott, he also cultivated intra-ethnic bonds with other Europeans, who occupied engineering positions in the GIPR and populated the world of professionals and other businessmen in western India. All this occurred as an outcome of both his unconscious and his deliberate eforts. In India, his social life and business networks were intertwined. His hobbies, besides gardening, were reading and writing, bird watching and hunting. Many railway engineers and other Europeans, mostly in their twenties and thirties, shared the last two of these hobbies. Stephens mentions the names of Brereton, Merrett, Manning, Darke, Winton, Hawkes, Mennie, Stack, Wells, Hunt, Ker, Abbott, and Glover, and joined them on hunts on several Sundays. They hunted black buck, waterfowl, deer, langur, blue bull (nilgai), and wild buffalo.42 Stephens regularly brought back birds and deer and consumed them for breakfast or dinner. The companionship formed on such adventures was consolidated when they assembled for regular Sunday champagne dinner parties, hosted mostly by railway and government engineers at their tents.43 Social connections qua social capital were not always sufcient, and the use of ‘sleeping partners’ was an additional necessity to facilitate business transactions. This is plainly evidenced by the letter which J. H. Davies wrote to Stephens in reply to the latter’s request for a favour. He advised Stephens to meet Mr. Bapty to secure a contract on the double-track line between Bombay and Bhusawal. I think you can make convenient to see Mr. Bapty and come to terms. He will fnd the Board either for a percentage, or he will be a sleeping partner. It may be necessary because J. H. Abbott is in England.44 In this case, it appears either that Stephens did not succeed in securing Bapty’s involvement, or else that Bapty was unable to muster enough infuence Social Capital and Its Limits in Fortune Making 81 with the GIPR Board. None of the contracts tendered for by Stephens for the double line came through from the Bombay ofce. On another occasion, J. S. Wells, with whom Stephens worked in 1861–3, brought a proposal to Stephens related to the No. 2 and No. 3 contracts on the Shoolapoor line. Wells proposed to furnish the security money and the initial investment of Rs. 50,000 towards the company’s works. To secure Abbott’s support for the project, Abbott and Stephens were promised half of the profts accruing from the contract.45 In this case, Abbott did not succeed in moving the Board in favour of Wells’ tender. Nonetheless, Wells gave Rs. 1,000 to Ingeborg Abbott in March1865.46 He had paid a certain amount of money to Abbot to clear his bills for about 11,000 cubic yards of ballasting done between Nandgaon and Challesgaon. The contract in question had fallen into some dispute in September1862, and was then referred to Abbott. At a rate of 9 annas (Rs. 0.56) per cubic yard, the total value of the bills was about Rs. 6,200, while Wells ‘bribed’ Abbott at the rate of Rs. 500 per 2,500 cubic yards in return for clearing the bills.47 Stephens, similarly, paid engineers like Abbott and Sandford for a certain contract.48 The use of sleeping business partners and bribes paid to helpful ofcials were some of the constituents of what Chatterjee describes as ‘the practice of power’ seen in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Europeans established their domination in colonial India.49 The social capital and availability of sleeping business partners also proved helpful to Stephens in securing livelihoods, business deals, and approval of contract bills. Stephens got most of his construction contracts from the local railway ofce at Munmar (Manmad), and they were sanctioned by Abbott in his capacity as Resident Engineer of the GIPR from 1864 onwards. Some other tenders were approved by railway engineers, including William Mennie, T. E. Darke, Edward Dangerfeld, and the agent of the MCPG Company, Major W. D. Ker, who were either Abbott’s close friends or mutual friends of both. Stephens enjoyed privileged access to tender notices from such familial and cultivated friendships. Furthermore, the notice of tender included a clause as follows: ‘The chief resident engineer does not bind himself to accept the lowest or any tender.’50 Evidently, Stephens’ tenders were accepted despite his quoting a higher price compared, in particular, with the Parsi (Indian) contractors. The latter usually quoted a price about one-half of Stephens’.51 Following rejection of their tenders, some Indian contractors joined Stephens as subcontractors to execute portions of his contract at a price about one-third to two-ffths lower than what Stephens received. The efcacy of Stephens’ social capital was, however, confned to the local ofces of the GIPR in the Deccan region (Manmad, Akola, Bhusawal, and Nagpur), which were headed by his kin and benefactors. This helped to secure acceptance at these ofces for the higher prices in his tenders, but could not achieve the same endorsement in the Bombay ofce of the GIPR. Indeed, Stephens’ very dependence on his locally efective social network for tenders also seems to have been a handicap when he attempted to branch out and compete for contracts at the higher level of the Bombay ofce. For Table 4.1 Proftability situation in rupees (Rs.) Type of construction work Rates paid to Joseph Stephens Rates Stephens paid to Diference (Rs. and %) Construction Company Indian subcontractors Earthworks 0.375/Cyd 0.35/Cyd 0.25/Cyd 0.1875 0.10 (29%) to 0.13 (33%) to 0.19 (50%) Slope earthworks 0.25/Cyd Embankments 0.375/Cyd 0.285 Cyd for 0.13 (33%) to 0.19 making up (50%) to 0.097 (34%) Signal works 0.25/Cyd Ballasting 0.625/Cyd 0.5/Cyd 0.25/Cyd 0.38 (60%) Excavation 0.5/Cyd Excavation in rock 2/Cyd Platelaying 1/Lin yd 0.5/Cyd 0.5 (50%) Laying points and crossings 2/Lin yd Fixing semaphores 60 each Fences (milk bush) 8/per 12 rail length both sides Masonry 0.094/Cyd 0.05/Cyd 0.044 (46%) Masonry (rubble with cornered 11/Cyd 10/Cyd 8.313/Cyd 2.69 (24%) to face) 1.69 (17%) Masonry (blocking course) 16/Cyd Masonry (ashlar) 1.3125/Cft Re. 1/Cft Tiling 2.75/Sq. ft. roof Donkey men 35/per 50 Cyd Average (rough) 39.17% to 46.7% 82 Dhiraj Kumar Nite Sources: Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1863, 6 February and 13 October1863. LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:1, J. S. Wells and Stephens, 16 September1862, 27 September1865; F1A:2, Stephens to Abbott, 9 June1866; F1A:3, R. Stack to Stephens, 13 April1867, and Stephens to a subcontractor in Penambla, 8 May1867; F1C:2, Tender for the doubling of line between Kalyan and Karjat, 12 October1866; F1B:1, Bago Kundo signed an agreement with Stephens, 15 April1865, Sastwa Rama and Ruggo Yesso signed a contract with Stephens, 2 October1865, and Bappa Mokinda signed an agreement with Stephens, 7 December1865. Cyd=cubic yard. Cft=cubic foot. Social Capital and Its Limits in Fortune Making 83 instance, J. R. Manning, Resident Engineer of the GIPR (Bhusawal), wrote to a Mr. Victor on 21 December1865: Mr. Stephens, a friend of mine having fnished his contracts on this part of the line is anxious to try his work in your part of the world. Ican recommend him and shall be glad if we can do something to help him.52 However, his recommendation was to no avail when Stephens tendered for the double line project at the Bombay ofce: I got your letter but am afraid Ican do nothing for you in the way of doubling. Coleman and Company have got the last length and Wells and Hover no. 5 Chalisgaum [Chalisgaon] to Mhyjee [Maheji]. They are both very low in prices and can not, Ithink, make much out of it. Ido not hear anything of the Parsi contractor, but as he does the work between.53 None of the tenders submitted by Stephens to the Satara ofce for an irrigation project, the Poona ofce for a masonry bridge project, and the Bombay ofce for a double line project was accepted. Nor did his tenders for the construction of cotton press and ginning factories, apart from those which Major Ker ofered him, succeeded.54 His higher quotes, locally fruitful social networks, and the limited fnancial capital in his possession proved a major constraint to his expansion as a bigger, competitive builder. Joseph Stephens was highly successful in leveraging his social connections to deal with disputes over his bills and the ‘unsatisfactory description’ of his construction. Some of his contracts for railway works and for the construction of two cotton ginning and press factories at Shegaon and Khamgaon were cancelled at the end of 1865. Some feld engineers of the GIPR and the manager of the MCPG Company were dissatisfed with the slow progress and ‘unsound’ quality of his work. Nonetheless, Stephens’ frm had no problems getting measurement of the works done and receiving payment for these unfnished projects. Mennie rescued him on several ‘unsound’ works done on the Nandgaon-Chalisgaon-Bhusawal line in 1865. Dangerfeld played the same role in 1867–8 with regard to his works between Bhusawal and Badnera. Major Ker saw to it that Stephens received payment for his unfnished work on the Shegaon and Khamgaon factories in 1866. Moreover, Stephens’ frm won some lucrative railway contracts on the Bhusawal and Nagpur route in 1866–8. Let us consider one particular instance of a dispute over billing to understand the manner in which this leverage operated. One bill of the Stephens Company, for Rs. 3,636 and 10 annas, was stuck at the ofce of J. R. Rushton (Chief Resident Engineer, GIPR Akola) from April1867. Rushton refused to certify the bills, relating to Budnaira (Badnera) station, from April to September because of some dispute over the account. Some prices 84 Dhiraj Kumar Nite claimed by Stephens in the bills were not sanctioned or were not mentioned in the schedule of prices agreed when the tenders were approved. The total cost exceeded the approved amount. Further, some items mentioned in a few bills required prior approval, as they were not mentioned in the schedule of prices drawn up at the time of the tender. Extra work undertaken, beyond the quantities estimated in the project plan, required an explanation. Rushton had, moreover, objected to the manner in which a portion of the work was measured in connection with the addition of a structure to Badnera station by Stephens. Stephens had been away from India visiting his parents in Scandinavia in June–December1867 and therefore could not promptly handle the disputed matters, nor could his deputy, G. B. Peck. Meanwhile, the higher authority, in this case Dangerfeld (Chief Resident Engineer, GIPR Nagpur), appointed R. F. Stack, another engineer, to carry out measurements for verifcation.55 Stephens approached Dangerfeld for his support over this matter. Dangerfeld’s reply was both professional and empathetic. The matter had gone to the Chief Resident Engineer in the Bombay ofce, who had found it unacceptable to pay for the use of old materials pulled down from station buildings to which Stephens had been adding an extension. Abbott denied having made any promises regarding Stephens’ use of and payment for the old materials. Then there were some issues of measurement.56 Stephens now looked for help from his old friend T. E. Darke, who had retired from the GIPR and been back in London. Darke promised to endorse his viewpoint: With reference to old work, it was certainly understood that you were to have the old materials pulled down but you were not to be paid for the labour in pulling them down; and it was also understood that you should be treated with reference to measurements, specifcation, etc. in the same way as had been customary with Mr. Lee, Watson and Aiton. Ihave not heard from Mr. Rushton on the subject but if he refers to me, Ishall, while no longer connected with the GIPR, be most happy to communicate with him.57 The Bombay ofce, fnally, cleared Rs. 1,799, 6 annas, and two pies, half the value of his actual bill, in Stephens’ favour in November1870.58 Stephens’ purchase and management of the Huseby Estate at a favourable price in 1867–9 similarly refected the infuence of his Scandinavian family and social connections, such as Hyltén-Cavallius, Fingal von Sydow (younger brother-in-law, a naval captain), and Mr. Wallenberg (brother-in- law of Sydow, a Stockholm banker).59 Business Conduct and Proft Margins The manner in which Stephens conducted his business was an adoption of the business-as-usual approach, as well as an improvisation on existing Social Capital and Its Limits in Fortune Making 85 business ethics. The business-as-usual approach involved a prioritization of maximum returns on efort, manipulation of raw materials and quality, and adherence to a quality of construction defned as an ‘average standard’. Stephens adopted two methods for executing construction tenders: the use of Indian subcontractors and the use of hired workers. He sublet a portion of his tender to several Indian subcontractors. There was a pattern to this. The assignments’ sublet during the early years of his business included earthworks, embankments, excavation, ballasting, and fencing. Stephens subcontracted many of these works to Indian (Vaddar and Maratha) (sub) contractors, including Gorwa Savana and Kundo Ancenda Muccadams, Chimma Bappa Wuddar, Chimma Yankoo Wudaree, Bago Kundo, Sastwa Rama and Ruggo Yesso, Ismael Hakem, Khader Shaik, Kasabhoy, Chimma Patel, Khaderbhoy, Bapa Darkoo, Lotan Patel, Hunmmanta Cowjee, and Perajee Herappa Woddaree (the supplier of stone, sand, and ballasting). These Indian subcontractors were the muccadams, the heads of labouring gangs, known for executing the labour-intensive earthworks. They mobilized their gang members, brought their own work tools, and supervised the workers’ performance. They received payment based on the task assigned or on a piecework basis. Stephens’ inspectors measured the latter together with the subcontractors.60 Reliance on these subcontractors gave Stephens a proft margin comparable to that provided by the use of hired workers during the early years. Acomparison of the fgures presented in Table4.1 with Table4.2 is evidence of this. The real attraction of the frst of these methods appears to have been that it relieved Stephens of the demanding responsibility for recruitment, control, and supervision of workers employed on the more labour-intensive components of his tenders. Stephens occasionally complained of the laziness shown and slow work performed by workers in his absence. Sometimes he scolded and threatened them for such work behaviour, and he had occasional rows with them.61 Furthermore, he appears to have taken into account the fact that the relevant component of his tender required the kind of technical input which Indian (sub)contractors were able to provide, even without the direct presence of Stephens and his inspectors. During the later years, especially after 1865, masonry, tiling, platelaying, and signal work were also sublet, among others to Reembhoy Casseembhoy, Sastwa Rama and Ruggo Yesso, Bago Kundo, Bappa Mokinda, NowroJee Pestrery, and the like, who were maistries (masons’ headmen) and Parsi subcontractors. These Indians delivered the sublet assignments, which required technical inputs, under arrangements similar to those worked out with the previous category of Indian subcontractors.62 As is shown below, the greater reliance on Indian subcontractors was a response to a rise in the wages paid to directly hired workers. The latter economic development resulted in the diminution of the proft margins available to Stephens using hired labour. Stephens had also relied on directly employing workers, in the range of 200 to 450, for construction activities to execute certain portions of his 86 Dhiraj Kumar Nite Figure 4.1 The contractor Mr. Clowser at his workshop at Oonee village. Constructions at Bhor Ghat. Source: Most likely photograph by Alice Tredwell, courtesy Huseby Bruk AB. tenders, normally those involving greater technical inputs. He proactively sought to expand access to working people and to establish greater control over the workforce. His strategy for recruiting and monitoring labour was adjusted to some of the existing practices. Apart from some European platelayers, construction workers came from several places in southern India. They included men, women, and children. Men worked in skilled professions, like masonry, blacksmithing, carpentry, and well digging, while they were joined by women and children in other sweat-labour jobs. All of them worked in diferent gangs headed and monitored by the labour recruitercum-gang leader, known as the maistry or the muccadam. The maistry and the muccadam received wage rates that were usually anything from onethird higher than to double those paid to their gang members. Workers frequently received advance payments upon recruitment, which the employer largely adjusted for in their monthly earnings. Such adjustments were not made in the case of the maistry and muccadam, an exception that seems to have been made in recognition of their services in overseeing advances or the Social Capital and Its Limits in Fortune Making 87 debt dependency relationship, and guaranteeing employers the compliance of their gang members. Workers belonged to a variety of caste, ethnic, and religious groups. Stephens’ frm introduced an innovation when it negotiated the payment of differential wage rates corresponding not just to the skill hierarchy of workers but also to their social status in the locality. The Tapkir and Nawguna, for instance, received rates about one-third and one-ffth higher, respectively, than other ‘coolies’ and ‘baggarees’, although they usually performed the same jobs. This is an indication of the existence of a segmented labour market, and of the ability of the Nawguna and Tapkir to claim higher, respectable wage rates. These caste groups were known as the cotton workers (Nawguna) from Dharwar and tobacco cultivators (Tapkir) from Khandesh. Another innovation by Stephens included a monetary incentive called ‘cherimerry’ (a present of money: baksheesh), regularly paid to the labouring gangs in the initial years (1860–3) and aimed at securing workers’ loyalty to their employer.63 Initially, Stephens entered into verbal agreements with Indian subcontractors and labour agents, but sufered losses when they did not deliver their subcontracts. Subsequently, from 1863 to 1864, he sought to have written contracts, containing penalty clauses in the event of failure or delay. Signed receipts for payments between them were also introduced to formalize the agreements. According to Roy, such a mechanism for contract enforcement was a new economic institution that was gradually emerging in the Indian subcontinent.64 Stephens was relatively successful in his endeavour to secure the supply of working people and mobilize labour to meet exigencies. His success also depended on a utility-oriented and equity-bound approach that he adopted in his exchanges with Indian labourers and suppliers. Some episodes recorded in his diaries exemplify this. Stephens reported to E. N. Mutow, the agent of Wythes& Jackson Construction Company, about an encounter which took place between Mr. Smith (Commander of Marines) and some masons on 27 March1861. The former brought the case for trial before the magistrate, Mr. Tyler. Stephens considered that ‘Smith has been at fault in the matter’. Mutow wrote back to Stephens: No doubt as you say, Smith has been at fault in the matter. Icannot help wishing that the magistrate will decide in his favour, even though at the expense of justice. For it is morally certain that if the natives get best of, there will be no holding them afterwards.65 Mutow expressed a racist, colonial view of the relationship between the imperial British and the colonial natives, which increased in the aftermath of the large uprising in 1857, the brutal repression that followed and the re-organization of British rule under the crown on the subcontinent.66 Stephens seems, however, to have remained aloof from such an outlook. When 88 Dhiraj Kumar Nite his waterman was arrested by his security guard (ramosy) for stealing grass, he did not want him imprisoned for three months. Instead, on 26 February1862, he got the case settled and the person let of.67 Barry’s cook stole Stephens’ gun and many other things on the night of 10 June1862. They chased the cook and found several things on the road and at his hut. The gun remained untraceable. Stephens did not push for the cook to be punished.68 Furthermore, he presented a gift of a puggery (turban or headgear) and scarf worth Rs. 10 to some of his (sub)contractors, including Chimma Wooddary. Here, Stephens recognized the respectability of these Indian (sub)contractors, as well as establishing a patronage network with them.69 He fostered a business network with the Parsi and other Indian materials suppliers and subcontractors, necessary for the construction business, according to a principle that was distinguishable from his sense of social belonging with his European friends. How can Stephens’ equity-bound, utility-oriented approach be explained? Bubb describes it as a display of cultural sensitivity towards and accommodative arrangements with the ‘natives’. It refected, argues Bubb, the efect of the 1857 rebellion against British rule in India, which left an impression on the Europeans that their meddling with the native’s culture was provocative.70 As against this, my research suggests that Stephens’ father, George Stephens, a Methodist and pan-Scandinavian, had impressed on his son the need to deal with both European and Indians in a magnanimous manner for his own self-advancement: advise you [Joseph] to be a noble English employer of labour—the feudal Baron or petty Prince of our times—who always should be the father and protector of all under you, English or native born, for whatever their faults, they are all our brethren. The natives are so in a way you little imagine. There is no doubt, as far as history and language and tradition can prove anything, that the English are descended from the same stock as the Hindoo, that there was a time when the fathers of each of these races were dwelling in the same tents, encamped in the same Indian woodland, the cradle of our Indo-European family. The diference has been the work of time, migration, climate, teaching and above all of debasing heathenness, on the one hand, and soul-lifting heart-purifying Christianity, on the other.71 The correspondence between father and son during the period 1860–3 contains vignettes of such ethical teaching ofered by the professorial father to his struggling son based in a distant land. The former repeatedly admonished the young Stephens ‘that he ought to read as much as possible on Sunday. He should treat all people alike in business’.72 Another source of inspiration in Joseph Stephens’ dealings with the Vaddars, in particular, was Wells. The latter impressed upon him the need to keep in the good books of the industrious community of earthworkers, especially the Vaddars, for the speedy execution of construction work.73 Stephens brought this paternalist, utility-oriented Social Capital and Its Limits in Fortune Making 89 approach to the Huseby afair as well. In July1869, he reported to his father that he ofered the same food to the peasants on the Huseby Estate as he had served to the dignitaries attending the meeting of landowners.74 This judicious mix of business acumen and an equity-based approach towards the native labourer and (sub)contactor enabled Stephens to achieve early success in his endeavours. During the early years, Stephens’ share in the total value of tenders executed under the method of hired labour was over two-ffths, after the deduction of payments to workers, to his inspectors, and for materials. This share slowly dwindled as the cost of labour surged from the latter half of 1862 and 1863 onwards.75 Table4.2 presents an indicative estimate of proft margins under this arrangement for the period 1862–7. This economic scenario of diminishing returns provided the context for Stephens’ view, quoted at the beginning of this book, in November–December1868. His new opinion sprang from anxious mixed feelings about his business prospects in India, as well as from self-deprecating refection on his life in India. Stephens’ business dealings were associated with a quality of construction that was variously termed as of ‘an average standard’ or ‘of inferior description’. The issue of quality refected as much the proft consideration as the notion of an acceptable standard of construction itself. Several cases of ‘unsound construction’ executed by Stephens drew sharp criticism from the railway engineers: there were the collapses of viaducts in 1862 and 1867, an engine pit in 1865, the slovenly manner of raising embankments and building fences in 1867, and the substandard construction of cotton ginning and press factories in 1865. By the late 1860s, over 2,000 GIPR bridges, buildings, and other masonry structures had failed amidst accusations that some of the original work had been of a poor quality.76 The matter of quality fared up even before a scandalous spate of collapses of railway structures and consequent accidents that occurred in 1867–8.77 Let us consider one such case. Dangerfeld accepted a report submitted by Stack, the District Assistant Engineer, and Sharpe, the GIPR Inspector, which found several construction works executed by Stephens at Shegaon on the Nagpur extension line to be of ‘unsound description’. They complained about the use of poor mortar, inferior and imperfectly burned lime, a ratio of sand to lime higher than 1½ to 1, dirty sand, and improperly designed masonry.78 Dangerfeld went as far as to state that: I cannot, therefore, consent to accept it for the company, ... Iwould also refer to the nature of the work which ... Ihave observed in other parts of the line where you have buildings in construction. Iinstance the addition to the booking ofce at Akolah [Akola] and the goods shed at Sheegaum Station where neither the masonry nor woodwork is up to the mark.79 Stephens’ reply to the charge of inferior construction perturbed and amazed the critical ofcial. The contractor defantly and confdently argued that this 96 Dhiraj Kumar Nite 28 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:1, Barker to Stephens, 12 September1861. 29 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1862, 30 October1862. 30 Ibid., Joseph Stephens’ diary 1863, 24 August1863. 31 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:1, G. Williamson to Stephens, 29 August1865. 32 Ibid., F1A:3, Vantilart to Stephens,1 July1868. 33 Ibid., F1A:1, Sandford to Stephens, 22 November1865. 34 Ibid., F1A:1, Sandford to Stephens, 7 September1865. 35 Ibid., F1A:3, Vantilart to Stephens, 1 July1868. 36 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: ASocial Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996 [1984]), pp.13–14, 23. 37 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:3, Stephens to Dangerfeld, 16 March1867. 38 Ibid. 39 Bourdieu, Distinction, pp.282, 286, 291. 40 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:2, A. H. Macaulay, Deputy Commissioner of Akola District, to Stephens, 11 May 1866; J. Fitz Gerald, Assistant Commissioner of Amravati District, to Stephens, 30 August1866. 41 LNU, HA, HEA, E1:2, J. Stephens to G. Stephens, 23 July1869. 42 Ibid., J. Stephens to G. Stephens, 22 January1861. 43 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1862, 23 February1862; ibid., Joseph Stephens’ diary 1863, 4 February, 28 June, and 26 July1863; LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:2, Sandford to Stephens, 8 October1866. 44 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:1, Davies to Stephens, 27 April1865. 45 Ibid., F1A:4, Wells to Stephens, 7 January1865. 46 LNU, HA, HEA, E1:3a, G. Stephens to J. Stephens, 20 March1865. 47 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:1, Wells to Stephens, 21 December1862. 48 Ibid., F1A:2, Sandford to Stephens, 8 October1866. 49 Similar observations are made in studies of business enterprises in early nineteenth-century eastern India: Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Webster, ‘An Early Global Business’; Bhattacharya, Colonial State. 50 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:1: Abbott to Stephens, 27 April1864; Tender notice (W. Mennie), 19 April1865; Mennie to Stephens, 5 May and 2 November1865; ibid., F1A:2, Abbott to Stephens, 25 April and 13 July1866; F1D:1, Contract No. 13, July1866. 51 Ibid., F1A:2, G. Shepherd to Stephens, 8 December1866; J. R. Manning to Stephens, 13 December1866. 52 Ibid., F1A:1, Manning to Stephens, 21 December1865. 53 Ibid., F1A:2, Manning to Stephens, 13 December1866. 54 Ibid., F1A:1, Satara Collectorate to Stephens (tender for an irrigation works), 4 February1864, and Stephens to R. S. Sellon (tender for a river bridge in Poona), 15 February1865; F1C:2, Stephens to Siegfried Company (tender for a press house in Khamgaon), 14 September1868; Tender for Kherwady station: booking ofce platform, wooden house for booking ofce, and Tender for residence of store clerk, store room, and store ofce at Munmar station, 26 April1866; and Tender for the doubling of line between Callian and Kurjut, 12 October1866; F1A:2, Secretary to the GIPR Agent to Stephens, 15 and 23 November1866; F1A:3, Julles Siegfried& Com, Bombay to Stephens, 28 September1868. 55 Ibid., F1A:3, Dangerfeld to Stephens, 8 July and 30 September1867. 56 Ibid., F1A:3, Dangerfeld to Stephens, 15 January1868. 57 Ibid., F1A:3, Darke to Stephens, 30 December1867. 58 Ibid., E1:12a, Miscellaneous incoming correspondence, 18 November1870. 59 LNU, HA, HEA, E1:3a; E1:2; E1:12a. 60 LNU, HA, JSA, F1B:1, Contract papers; F1E:1, Pay lists.  Social Capital and Its Limits in Fortune Making 97 61 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1863, 12 May and 7 July1863. 62 LNU, HA, JSA, F1B:1, Contract papers; F1E:1, Pay lists. 63 LNU, HA, JSA, Diary 1860–1 and pay sheets; Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diaries 1862 and 1863. 64 Tirthankar Roy, Company of Kinsmen: Enterprise and Community in South Asian History 1700–1940 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010). Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy, Law and the Economy in Colonial India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 65 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:1, Mutow to Stephens, 28 March1861. 66 Bhattacharya, The Financial Foundation of the Raj, p. 53. 67 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1862, 26 February1862. 68 Ibid., 10 June1862. 69 LNU, HA, JSA, F1C:1, Puggery [turban or headgear] for Chimma Wooddary, 11 May1863. 70 Bubb, ‘Class, Cotton and “Woddaries”’. 71 LNU, HA, HEA, E1:3a, G. Stephens to J. Stephens, 5 February1862. In this observation, nineteenth-century Indians were regarded as debased and in need of soul-lifting Christianity. 72 Ibid., 3 July1861 and 21 July1862. 73 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1863, 14 February1863. As far as the relationship between Stephens and his Indian subcontractors was concerned, it was patterned on the kind of reciprocal partnership between imperials and colonials that was occasionally found in the Bombay Presidency in nineteenthcentury India. Businesspersons like Trawadi Arjunji Nathji and Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy epitomized it in the early part of that century and Premchand Roychand and Jamshedji Dorabji (a major railway contractor) later in the same century. These episodes ft well with the viewpoint maintained by Markovits in Merchants, Traders and Entrepreneurs: Aracial and communal mix and partnership played a signifcant role in the growth and dynamism of the economic subsystem of Bombay Presidency. The latter witnessed less discrimination and less antagonism on the part of the imperials towards the colonials. It was a product of the fact that western India fell under British colonial control relatively late compared with the Bengal and Madras regions. This circumstance, as well as the fact that a good number of princely states were located in this region, was conducive to the control exercised by Indian merchants over the channels of information and knowledge related to the trades. 74 LNU, HA, HEA, E1:2, J. Stephens to G. Stephens, 23 July1869. 75 I have examined wage relations in the construction sector in a separate chapter, titled ‘Labour Practices and Well-Being’. The factors responsible for a steep rise in money wages paid to workers were an increase in the cost of living, the workers’ struggles for higher wages, and increased competition for workers in the expanding economy of 1860s Deccan. 76 Kerr, Engines of Change, p.28. 77 Bubb, ‘Class, Cotton and “Woddaries”’. 78 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:3, Dangerfeld to Stephens, 8, 21, and 26 March1867, 1 July1868. 79 Ibid., Dangerfeld to Stephens, 8 March1867. 80 Ibid., Stephens to Dangerfeld, 16 March1867. 81 Ibid., Dangerfeld to Stephens, 27 March1867. 82 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:4, Wells to Stephens, 9 August1862. 83 Kerr, Engines of Change, pp.19–36. 84 This fnancial policy was the product of an ideology of empire. Its followers believed in the need to encourage capital investment in a social overhead for the promotion of exports of useful primary commodities from the colony. The  98 Dhiraj Kumar Nite scheme needed state guarantees or some form of subsidy. The government was inclined to aid the capitalists indirectly, rather than playing an entrepreneurial role. J. S. Mills emphasized this role of government in a backward economy. James Wilson, the Gladstonian Finance Member, felt that the foremost duty of the colonial government was to provide public works and roads with a view to increased production of exportable raw materials, like cotton. The railway companies lobbied for the government to support India in performing a special role, supplying raw materials. See, Bhattacharya, The Financial Foundation of the Raj, pp. 40–4. 85 Quoted in Bubb, ‘Class, Cotton and “Woddaries”—British Library, India Ofce Records (IOR)/L/PWD/3/66 [railway letter no. 118 and accompanying letter]. The one dissenting vote on the Viceroy’s Council came from General Mansfeld, who testifed to the ‘bad, scamping work’ which he had ‘heard a great deal of’ in the Bombay Presidency. 86 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:1, G. Williamson to Stephens, 29 August1865; Alex Mackenzie to Stephens, 29 September and 5 October1865; H. Macaulay (manager of the Mofussil Press and Ginning Company) to Stephens, 29 December1865; F1A:2, Major Ker to Stephens, 26 February1866. 87 Ibid., F1A:2, Budden Jennings to Swan, 2 February1866; Swan to Stephens, 6 June1866. 88 Markovits, Merchants, Traders and Entrepreneurs, pp.132–7. 89 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:2, Oriental Bank to Stephens, 6 December1866. 90 Ibid., F1A:3, Letter of the sale of Stephens’ share, 11 August1868. 91 Ibid., F1A:3, Elphinstone Land and Press Company Ltd, balance sheet, 30 June1868; F1A:8, Stephens to Oriental Bank, Bombay, 27 March1867. 92 LNU, HA, HEA, E1:2, J. Stephens to G. Stephens, 26 February1869. 93 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:7, Rogers& Co. to Stephens, 11 January1868. 94 LNU, HA, HEA, E1:3a, G. Stephens to J. Stephens, 2 April1868. References Bagchi, Amiya Kumar, Capital and Labour Redefned: India and the Third Worlds (London: Anthem Press, 2002). Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi, The Colonial State: Theory and Practice (New Delhi: Primus, 2016). Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi, The Financial Foundation of the British Raj: Ideas and Interests in the Reconstruction of Indian Public Finance 1858–1872 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005 [1971]). Birla, Ritu, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2009). Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: ASocial Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996 [1984]). Bubb, Alexander, ‘Class, Cotton and “Woddaries”: AScandinavian Railway Contractor in Western India, 1860–69’, Modern Asian Studies, 51/5 (2017), pp.1369–93. Casson, Mark, and Mary B. Rose, ‘Institutions and the Evolution of Modern Business’, Business History, 39/4 (1997), pp.1–10. Chakrabarti, Shubhra, ‘The English East India Company and the Indigenous Sloop Merchants of Bengal: Ankrur Dutta and His Family, 1757–1857’, Studies in History, 20/1 (2004), pp.131–57. Chandavarkar, R., ‘Industrialisation in India before 1947: Conventional Approaches and Alternative Perspectives’, Modern Asian Studies, 19/3 (1985), pp.623–68. Social Capital and Its Limits in Fortune Making 99 Chandler, Alfred D., Jr, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1990]). Chari, Sharad, Fraternal Capital: Peasant Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalisation in Provincial India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004). Chatterjee, Partha, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Chattopadhyay, Swati, and Bhaskar Sarkar, ‘Introduction: The Subaltern and the Popular’, Postcolonial Studies, 8/4 (2005), pp.357–63. Connell, Carol Matheson, ‘Jardine Matheson& Company: The Role of External Organisation in a Nineteenth-Century Trading Firm’, Enterprise& Society, 4/1 (2003), pp.99–138. Derbyshire, Ian, ‘The Building of India’s Railway: The Application of Western Technology in the Colonial Periphery 1850–1920’, in Ian J. Kerr (ed.), Railways in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.268–304. Douglas, Paul H., ‘The Cobb—Douglas Production Function Once Again: Its History, Its Testing, and Some New Empirical Values’, Journal of Political Economy, 84/5 (1976), pp.903–16. Goswami, O., ‘Sahibs, Babus and Banias: Changes in Industrial Control in Eastern India’, in Rajat K. Ray (ed.), Entrepreneurship and Industry in India, 1800–1947 (New Delhi: Oxford, 1993), pp.233–56. Gupta, Bishnupriya, ‘The Rise of Modern Industry in Colonial India’, in Latika Chaudhary, Bishnupriya Gupta, Tirthankar Roy, and Anand V. Swamy (eds), New Economic History of Colonial India (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp.67–83. Harriss-White, Barbara, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Kerr, Ian J., Building the Railways of the Raj 1850–1900 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). Kerr, Ian J., Engines of Change: The Railroads that Made India (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007). Kling, Blair B., Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). Lee, Robert (ed.), Commerce and Culture: Nineteenth-Century Business Elites (New York: Routledge, 2016). Markovits, Claude, Merchants, Traders and Entrepreneurs: Indian Business in the Colonial Era (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Misra, Maria, Business, Race, and Politics in British India 1850/1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Piatt Andrew, Abram, ‘Indian Currency Problems’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 15/4 (1901), pp.483–516. Roy, Tirthankar, A Business History of India: Enterprise and the Emergence of Capitalism From 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Roy, Tirthankar, Company of Kinsmen: Enterprise and Community in South Asian History 1700–1940 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010). Roy, Tirthankar, and Anand V. Swamy, Law and the Economy in Colonial India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Rutten, Mario, and Carol Upadhya (eds), Small Business Entrepreneurs in Asia and Europe: Towards a Comparative Perspective (London: SAGE, 1997). Subramanian, Ajantha, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). 100 Dhiraj Kumar Nite Subramanian, Lakshmi, Three Merchants of Bombay: Business Pioneers of the Nineteenth Century (London: Portfolio, 2016). Timberg, Thomas A., The Marwaris: From Jagat Seth to the Birlas (London: Penguin Books, 2014 (1978)). Tripathi, Dwijendra, and Jyoti Jumani, The Concise Oxford History of Indian Business (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007). Webster, Tony, ‘An Early Global Business in a Colonial Context: The Strategies, Management and Failure of John Palmer and Company of Calcutta 1780–1830’, Enterprise and Society, 6/1 (2005), pp.98–133. DOI: 10.4324/9781003317227-5 5 Labour Practices and Well-Being Construction Workers in 1860s Western India Dhiraj Kumar Nite Even as they helped connect the Indian subcontinent through the railways, what life opportunities were made possible by the wages paid to the humblest construction workers in colonial India? My study draws upon the documents, including pay sheets (also referred to as pay lists), contract documents, and private diaries, of one of the subcontractors who became a contractor, Joseph Stephens, who carried out construction projects in the Deccan region of India in the 1860s. This chapter provides a comprehensive view of the wage relations and economic conditions of construction workers in this region, which have received little attention until now. One of the leading scholars of construction of the railways in India, Ian Kerr, has lamented the paucity of wage data for the study of the economic conditions of railway building workers. According to him, railway companies usually hired labour agents to recruit, supervise, and distribute wages among construction workers. As far as we know, the pay sheets of these labour recruiters mostly never made their way into the archives, making the Stephens’ documents a rare and valuable source.1 In Indian historiography, the period of the 1850s–70s saw some defnitive socio-economic developments. The progress of railway construction in this period led to both the emergence and the integration of labour markets. As argued by Kerr, this development helped workers to regain bargaining power in the economy, which they had lost in the frst half of the nineteenth century.2 Other scholars share a similarly optimistic view of the recovery of per capita income overall and the real income of the productive classes.3 My study pays close attention to this narrative of recovery. It ofers a more nuanced understanding of the circumstances responsible for the new bargaining power and wage gains secured by construction workers during the 1860s. My enquiry brings to the fore fve key features which are particularly relevant to observe: (1) the real income of workers improved; (2) the ‘subsistence ratio’—the ratio of total income to the cost of the subsistence basket of sweat labourers—remained less than unity; (3) the element of a constraining contract characterized the work relationship; (4) these workers secured an income sufcient for basic household subsistence only by increasing 102 Dhiraj Kumar Nite the supply of total family labour in the labour market and agitating for improvements in wages; and fnally, (5) women and children received a wage increase far below that of adult males. The study traces the factors responsible for this scenario for the economic life of construction workers. As this study shows, the coercive and constraining institution of labour control and contract enforcement, used by contractors and subcontractors on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR), was an essential feature of contractual employment and the commercialized economy on the railway lines connecting central India with the metropolitan cities. It aimed to control labour recruits, both their mobility and their demands for enhanced welfare. Simultaneously, some of the subcontractors and contractors paid relatively attractive wage rates to workers to secure better labour eforts and achieve results. In this contractual system of employment, workers secured an increase in real wages. We therefore need to modify a perspective that has highlighted the use of unfree, coerced, and dependent labour to depress the pay of labourers below the market-clearing wage available in a free labour market.4 This study underscores that, in railway construction in the 1860s, the use of coerced labour, on the one hand, and a policy of competitively attractive wages, on the other, were not mutually exclusive, but can be explained by the prevailing circumstances.5 The material situation of workers was built partly on the macroeconomic conditions of railway construction in India. The state guaranteed attractive returns for the railway companies on their capital investment, while keen competition for labour power among contractors was at work as the economy expanded. In the case of contractors like the Joseph Stephens Construction Company and their management of labour, the microeconomic efects proved relatively favourable for the workers, owing to a policy of ofering competitive and attractive wages in return for regular, efcient performance. As this investigation shows, the workers’ material conditions rested partly on their ability to bargain collectively for improved wages. The wage levels they aspired to were set to match price changes and household budgets. Workers looked for a wage structure that would enable them to achieve the respectable status of a male earner, whereas women and children generated a supplementary income for the household. As a social custom, this precluded the articulation of any question of a comparable increase, let alone an equal wage for women. The social tradition of a nexus between caste, race, and gender, on one side, and occupations, on the other, maintained signifcant wage inequality. One of the perspectives on labour practices and their connection with welfare returns to workers maintains that enhanced welfare for the productive classes in the latter half of the nineteenth century was a product of a marketization of labour as part of economic growth, labour mobility, and a reduction in the transaction costs of labour power. The marketization of labour as part of a commercialization of the economy led to institutional change, that is, from custom- and status-based employment arrangements Labour Practices and Well-Being 103 to contractual employment. This resulted in a fall in transaction costs and was also connected to labour mobility.6 Here, the problem of the relatively ‘depressed’ standards of living for working people has been attributed to a combination of factors, such as excess labour, low productivity, and imperfect or inadequate institutional settings for contract design, and enforcement. Imperfect or inadequate institutional settings such as the ‘tenancy laws’ were responsible for low productivity in agriculture, while the Breach of Contract Act was responsible for some of the problematic consequences of labour relations. This perspective also argues that constraining institutions such as the Penal Labour Act and the Breach of Contract Act were ‘a cruel solution to the contractual problem’ in the form of the ‘opportunism’ of working persons, without necessarily being injurious to welfare returns to those persons.7 This position underestimates the coercive and constraining element of many contractual employment arrangements and the ‘adverse’ efects it was claimed to have on welfare outcomes and labour mobility. The nature of these contracts therefore requires an in-depth study—which this chapter attempts—to prevent erroneous conclusions about macro- and microeconomic trends. Furthermore, the perspective described overlooks the root of the imperfect or inadequate institutional framework. The imperfect institutional matrix may be attributed to the power structure implicit within it and, more so, the fact that it was preferred on account of its cost-efec- tiveness in achieving surplus extraction, political stability, and labour control. The connection between labour relations, the institution of contract enforcement, and economic performance was never frictionless, and this study intends to clarify these intermeshed processes.8 Construction Work In the frst All-India Census in 1872–3, ‘labourers’ make up 12.3 per cent of a total population of 238.8million, and the number of construction workers is estimated at about 0.9million.9 This low fgure for construction workers seems to have included only masons, who were all men. One decade earlier, in 1861, the construction of railways in its initial phase employed over 250,000 men, women, and children.10 An average of 150 workers were engaged on each mile (1.67km) of railway line under construction in nineteenth-century India. This average included those who were engaged in bridge construction, tunnelling, and platelaying. There were, however, signifcant seasonal variations in daily employment levels, with work most intense during the winter months when bridge-building and brickmaking peaked. Depending on the landscape through which the line passed, between one and fve miles of railway track could be built in a month.11 The workers in our study were largely engaged in the construction of railway structures between Egatpoora (Igatpuri) and Duskheda, covering about 211 miles, and between Bhusawal and Badnera, a distance of approximately 104 Dhiraj Kumar Nite 149 miles. The structures built included railway tracks, bridges, culverts, railway stations, engine pits, fences, water tanks, and other railway buildings. These workers were also involved in the construction of four cotton presses and ginning factories in Amravati, Akola, Shegaon, and Khamgaon. The construction workers recorded in Stephens’ accounts performed various tasks. Both adult and experienced workers and adolescent, inexperienced, and aged workers were classifed as coolie (or ‘cooly’ in the accounts). Their gang headman was listed as a muccadam. The same division was also applied to the masons, whose headman was titled maistry. The accounts also included carpenters and blacksmiths. In addition, we fnd the positions of cartman, housekeeper, horsekeeper, ramosy (guard), carcoon (clerk), a writer who kept attendance and accounts, and the inspector who acted as a manager. The class of coolie also included workers who were classifed by their caste identity, such as the Nowguna, Tapkir, Sopkar, and Baggarie. One set of masons described by their caste identity was the Goundy. Such an occupational and social profle of the workforce can be gleaned from Stephens’ pay list of September1862, detailing the workers involved in the construction of two viaducts at Ulusana (now: Alasana) and Jullumb (Jalamb). The 435 workers were listed under 16 categories, which were representative of such work. Women constituted about 16 per cent of the total workforce and over 25 per cent of the total coolie labour force (including Cooly, Tapkir, and Nowguna). Boys made up less than 5 per cent of the total coolie workforce. Apossible reason for this low percentage was the fact that males of Table 5.1 Occupational pattern Number of individuals Work category 4 Maistries 53 Masons 2 Watermen 10 Muccadams 24 Tapkirs (tobacco cultivators from Khandesh) 91 Nowgunas (cotton cultivators and packers from Dharwar) 80 Coolies 13 Boys 5 Storekeepers 7 Blacksmiths 1 Carpenter 61 Drillers 72 Women 1 Nightwatchman 9 Cartmen 2 Guntun and Batta (weighmen) Source: Pay list kept by Joseph F. Stephens, September1862, Alasana and Jalamb.12 Labour Practices and Well-Being 105 the age of 15 and females of the ‘cohabitation’ age of 13 were regarded as adults. Only those below the age of 13 were counted as children.13 However, the All India Census of 1872–3 shows an adverse sex ratio of 940 females per 1,000 males. Avery small number of girls were occasionally listed in the pay sheets, in a way that indicates that, unlike boys, they would have shouldered responsibility for kitchen and household work, and for minding toddlers.14 The occupational and social make-up of the workforce difered on earth-moving, ballasting, and platelaying sites. The frst two were generally subcontracted to Indian petty contractors or subcontractors. Among these, Ismael Hakem, Khader Shaik, Chimma Patel, Khadar Bhoy, and Hunmmanta Cowjee were noted down in Stephens’ accounts. Their names indicate that they were Muslim, Hindu, as well as Parsi, belonging to the well-of echelons of their respective communities. Coolies were mostly engaged in moving earth and ballasting. For these heavy ‘unskilled’ tasks, women and children formed nearly half of the total labour force. The workers’ pay sheets allow us to compile statistical data on their earnings. In these, an adjustment of the money wages for price levels in the subsistence basket shared by workers reveals the trend in real wages over time. The labour market was not fully integrated in the 1860s. This means that workers received diferent wage rates from the same employer and for the same type of work at the diferent worksites. In addition, prices varied in the diferent markets for food grains and clothing, the two principal items forming the workers’ subsistence basket. Workers on the new construction sites received wages in cash. The pay sheets indicate that most of them received monthly wages. They generally received certain advance payments upon recruitment and cherimerry (gifts of cash) during the working month. Such advances and cherimerry were to some extent adjusted in the worker’s monthly wage payment. The wages paid difered according to the skill premium, profession, gender, age, experience, and social identity of the workers. The wage tables (Tables 5.2–5.4) show that, amongst male sweat labourers, customarily called coolies, rates varied to the tune of 14–43 per cent between experienced adult workers, on the one hand, and the young, aged, and what Stephens described as the ‘lazy’, on the other. Between men and women, wages difered by between 33 and 57 per cent. The wages paid to Nowgunas and Tapkirs were substantially higher than those of experienced coolie men. There could be a twofold explanation for this wage diferentiation amongst sweat labourers. Nowgunas and Tapkirs were migrants from the Dharwar and Khandesh regions. They may have charged a higher rate to cover the costs of migration and a temporary stay in thatched huts close to the project sites. It also appears that they negotiated a wage rate in accord with their social identity as cotton workers and tobacco cultivators, thereby remaining socially superior to the coolies who had a degraded status.15 The muccadam invariably received a wage rate nearly two-thirds higher than the members of his gang. He acted as a labour agent or middleman 112 Dhiraj Kumar Nite of central India, Central Province and Berar division and Hyderabad, was 20.4million in 1800, whereas the 1881 census counted 30.9million inhabitants: an increase of 51 per cent. In western India (Bombay Presidency and adjacent states), the population was 12.84million in 1800; the comparable fgure for 1872 was 21.08million, an estimated increase of 64 per cent.29 This rise in population would, on the one hand, create a demand for housing construction and, on the other, increase the supply of sweat labourers more than skilled. This correlation would break down if per capita income, real wages, and productivity showed recognizable growth. Such growth would entail a rise in investment in human capital. By contrast, a combination of agrarian depression, deindustrialization, ruralization, and sedentarization caused the economy to contract during the frst half of the nineteenth century.30 Berar region was no exception. In this caste-stratifed society, however, supplies of sweat labour and artisanal labour would be proportionate to the social stratum. We thus observe that second-grade masons, hired at a lower rate than their senior colleagues, joined the labour market in almost the same proportion as their coolie counterparts. This was refected in comparable percentage increases in their wages. The new spate of construction and its dynamics in the 1860s appear to have been the single most crucial factor. This expanding sector was seeking an increased number of employees and, at the same time, looking to reduce costs by showing a preference for coolies and masons of the second grade. Hence, the larger percentage increases in wages went to them. Having established that a marked increase in wages was secured by construction workers, let us now examine the consequences of this increase by considering the standards of living workers were able to attain. Living Standards One indicator of living standards is the ratio of a person’s total annual earnings to the cost of his or her yearly subsistence basket, what Robert C. Allen has termed the subsistence ratio.31 This is a narrow indicator of wellbeing; an adequate indicator would also cover social opportunities, workplace safety, ecological integrity, security of life, freedom of participation and thought, political entitlement, and other sources of happiness.32 Here, this narrow indicator of well-being in terms of the cost of the subsistence basket is deployed to get a sense of the degree of improvement or sufering faced by workers. Our estimate of annual earnings takes into account the method of payment and the actual working days performed by workers. The methods of daily wages, piece rates, and task-based payments existed side by side. The number of days worked by the diferent occupational groups, as indicated before, varied between an average of 24 and 26 per month. The working year, excluding days away from worksites on account of interruptions caused by the monsoon and festivals, was between 288 and 264 days. Additionally, Labour Practices and Well-Being 113 employers frequently recorded workers’ performance as amounting to half or three-quarters some days and calculated wages accordingly, while the workers themselves considered such days to be full workdays. Therefore, the annual earnings of workers—wage rates multiplied by workdays—were in all likelihood lower than what we have, for the sake of convenience, roughly calculated here. The total household income of a coolie family combined the earnings secured by both husband and wife, referred to as family labour. Earnings of boys and girls are left out in our calculation, since their overall presence in the workforce was small. The subsistence basket is based on the consumption pattern of workers (see Table5.7). It is larger than the ‘bare bones basket’ used by Allen in his comparative study of global inequality.33 It includes an average caloric intake of 2,480 per adult in the family, that is, 2,730 for an adult man and 2,230 for an adult woman performing ‘moderate work’, as recommended by the National Institute of Nutrition (Indian Council of Medical Research) since 1944.34 It also includes cloth consumption of an average of eight yards per person, which was the national average of cotton consumption in the 1860s–70s. The basket is a conservative one from the standpoint of modern workers, who would consume and use tea, furniture, footwear, and more clothes, and spend money on a child’s education and urban dwellings.35 Doubtless, the customary subsistence necessaries of peoples, as both David Ricardo and Karl Marx noted, vary between civilizations and between classes within a civilization. They correspond to the habits and scales of moral and economic progress in societies.36 Adiference between wages and the workers’ moral sense of comfort necessarily infuenced both wage bargaining and management of actual household budgets. The cost of subsistence of a worker’s family is based on the view, as proposed by Guha, that a family or household in nineteenth-century India (the Deccan) consisted of an average of 4.5 persons. These families included on average 1.44 adult men and a lower proportion of women, given the skewed sex ratio of 134 men to every 100 women aged 12 and above.37 The overall consumption size of a family would be 3.5 adults, if we assume that a child up to the age of 12 would be equivalent to 0.5 of an adult consumer (see Table5.8). The fgures for subsistence ratios (Table5.9 generally and Graph 5.3a in particular) reveal that none of the coolies and second-grade masons earned sufciently to meet even the subsistence costs of their entire families in 1861–2. After that, wage increases helped second-grade masons to satisfy the prevalent social code of a respectable male earner in the artisanal community. By contrast, coolies deployed the maximum number of working members of the family, involving women and available children in wage work, in order to secure the necessary household income. Consequently, a family-labour economy was prevalent amongst coolies.38 114 Dhiraj Kumar Nite Table 5.7 Subsistence basket Nutrients/day Quantity/person/year Calories Proteins Rice 93–120 kg 922.4–1,190 19.3–24.9 Jowar 94–120 kg 778.8–994.2 28.3–36.1 Beans/gram 13–19 kg 129.8–179.7 6.5–9 Meat 3 kg 21 1 Butter/ghi 3 kg 72 0 Sugar 2 kg 21 0 Salt 4 kg (11 g per day) Spice 2.9 kg (7.7 g per day) Liquor/beer/tobacco 4–5% of total expenditure Soap 2.6 kg Cotton 4–8 yds House 5–10% of consumer spending Lamp oil 2.6 kg (edible oil) Fuel 3million BTU Mat, cot, bedding, furniture Kitchen and eating utensils Medical care Education and Re. 1 a year per apprenticeship young child Books, newspapers, library, museum Recreation and amusement Transportation and communications Total 1,945–2,478 55.1–71 Source: Adapted from the table Subsistence Income: Basket of Goods, India, prepared by Allen (‘India in the Great Divergence’, p.23). See also R. C. Allen and Roman Studer, ‘Prices and Wages in India, 1595–1930’, 12 September2009, gpih.ucdavis.edu/fles/India_Allen-Studer_ v2,pl.xls, accessed 29 September2016. The fgure of four yards of cotton cloth replaces Allen’s fgure of 3m. The former is taken from the estimate constructed by Roy (‘Indigo and Law’, pp.22–3). Jowar (sorghum) was the frst-choice food grain among commoners in nineteenthcentury Deccan. See Satya, Cotton and Famine, p.193; Guha, Agrarian Economy. Table 5.8 The cost of subsistence (Rs.). (Family size of 4.5 persons, corresponding to 3.5 adult consumers) Year Person/day Person/year Person/month Family/year Family/month 1830–50 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 0.058 0.067 0.075 0.082 0.097 0.097 21.16 24.30 27.30 30.00 35.23 35.51 1.76 2.02 2.27 2.50 2.94 2.96 74.08 85.04 95.53 104.99 123.29 124.30 6.17 7.09 7.96 8.75 10.27 10.36 1866 0.098 35.95 3.00 125.83 10.49 Labour Practices and Well-Being 115 Year Person/day Person/year Person/month Family/year Family/month 1867 0.088 32.07 2.67 112.24 9.35 1868 0.087 31.63 2.64 110.71 9.23 Source: Price data are adjusted from Allen and Studer, ‘Prices and Wages’. For the fgures on household size in nineteenth-century India, see Guha, Health and Population, pp.107–9. 0.00 0.50 1.00 1.50 2.00 2.50 3.00 3.50 1830-50 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 Mason 2 Mason 1 Cooly 2 Family Labour Cooly 2 Cooly 1 Family Labour Cooly 1 Graph 5.3a Subsistence or welfare ratios 0.00 0.50 1.00 1.50 2.00 2.50 3.00 3.50 4.00 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 Cooly 1 Cooly 1 Family labour Cooly 2) Cooly 2 Family labour Mason 1 Mason 2 Graph 5.3b Subsistence ratios (bare-bones subsistence basket) 116 Dhiraj Kumar Nite Table 5.9 Subsistence ratios: Annual earnings for 264 days/cost of subsistence basket Year Coolie 1 Coolie 2 Mason 1 Mason 2 Individual Family Family Labour Individual Family Family Labour Individual Family Individual Family 1830s–50s 2.08 0.59 0.89 1.56 0.45 0.74 7.80 2.23 1861 2.04 0.58 0.97 1.70 0.49 0.87 6.79 1.94 2.72 0.78 1862 (Sept–Dec) 3.02 0.86 1.38 1.81 0.52 1.04 8.46 2.42 3.63 1.04 1863 2.48 0.71 1.10 1.93 0.55 0.94 7.70 2.20 3.30 0.94 1864 2.81 0.80 1.34 2.34 0.67 1.20 6.56 1.87 4.68 1.34 1865 3.25 0.93 1.33 1.86 0.53 0.93 7.43 2.12 3.72 1.06 1866 2.75 0.79 1.18 2.29 0.66 1.05 6.43 1.84 3.67 1.05 1867 3.60 1.03 1.47 2.06 0.59 1.03 10.29 2.94 5.15 1.47 1868 3.65 1.04 1.49 3.13 0.89 1.34 10.43 2.98 5.22 1.49 Labour Practices and Well-Being 117 Roy argues that an increase in the supply of labouring family members to the labour market had the efect of keeping wages stagnant in the long run. These depressed wages, he continues, were not necessarily a welfare loss, since the increased supply of labouring members also enabled many families to gainfully utilize surplus labour.39 We do not have access to any alternative standpoint on the part of sweat labourers, regarding whether they regretted their inability to achieve a ‘respectable’ family life on a par with that of masons. Neither we know whether they were unhappy about the presence of children on worksites, either for wage work or to mind toddlers. Nor do we have any alternative opinion of women about why were they unable to bargain for an increase in wages comparable to their male counterparts. How did the labouring poor meet exigencies such as the extra costs of marriages, funerals, sickness, festivals, and births? They devised ways to keep the cost of their consumption basket at a minimum. They consumed inferior and cheaper food grains, like jowar and bajra (millet) rather than rice.40 Their consumption of cotton cloth remained on average four yards per person, well below the all-India average of eight yards per person in the 1860s. Their cloth consumption was the barest minimum, involving a pair of loin clothes Figure 5.1 Railway workmen’s quarters at the Great Ravine near Rajmachi Fort, 1856. Source: Photograph by Alice Tredwell, courtesy Huseby Bruk AB. 118 Dhiraj Kumar Nite (dhoti) for men, and a pair of sari for women. Moreover, their preference was for cheaper, coarse cotton fabrics.41 They walked and worked barefoot. They lived in houses which the settlement surveyor and census reporter described as being of an inferior sort, constructed of mud and thatch. Migrant coolies and masons stayed in thatched huts put in place as temporary shelter in the vicinity of worksites (Graph 5.3b).42 They had much in common with the image of the indebted cultivator. The social reformer Jotirao Phule commented critically on the neediness and anguish of the productive classes thus: The Malis and Kunbis labour in the felds and pay the taxes. They don’t even get clothes to cover their bodies. Tiny little children tend the cattle. They have no shoes; their feet are bare.... He has no time to learn anything; the father is in anguish. See, he blames the gods for his misfortune.43 The labouring poor also frequently sought the payment of advances and cherimerry from employers. In addition, they took loans from moneylenders and gang headmen. Payment of advances was widespread. The workers negotiated advance payments on recruitment, a small part of their overall pay that was adjusted for in their monthly remuneration. Such advances were of the order of one-ffth to one-quarter of a worker’s total expected monthly earnings. In many cases, the old advance was rolled over to the next month. In parallel with this transaction, workers sought cherimerry from their employers. Cherimerry related to festivals seems to have been in the form of cash gifts, called baksheesh (a gratuity or charitable gift), comparable to a similar custom prevalent between landowner and labourer in agrarian society. However, cherimerry paid other than on festive occasions was supplementary to advances, and was normally adjusted for in the monthly payment.44 In a way, coolies and most masons became indebted to their employers in order to be able to aford their routine household necessaries within the temporality of work and monthly payments. Loans from sowcars (moneylenders) were designed to deal with other contingencies and exigencies. The life stories of these workers seem quite close to those of small peasants, who borrowed money from moneylenders and took advances from planters and merchants for cultivation, and to meet the costs of social, religious, and other exigencies and contingencies.45 In many of these cases, the situation of the productive classes seems to have been close to what Breman calls ‘neo-bondage’, what Ahuja terms ‘hireling labour’, and what Banaji refers to as ‘coerced wage labour (formal subordination of labour to capital)’.46 The next section dwells on the function of these kinds of economic transactions in labour relations and the appropriation of labour power. Labour Relations From the Standpoint of Income and Subsistence Having defned the role of wages and bonuses, we may now better understand the role of labour relations for the income and subsistence situations Labour Practices and Well-Being 119 of labourers. Workers regularly became indebted to their employers. But what was the signifcance of such debt dependency as a form of neo-bond- age in the labour market? How were male coolie labourers able to bargain for signifcant increases in their wages? Why were women and boys unable to get the same increases in pay? And why, despite the rise in wage levels, did the subsistence ratios of sweat labourers and second-grade masons remain so ‘depressed’? There were three types of working arrangement: directly employed workers, subcontracted work, and work managed by the materials suppliers, such as the Vaddars (‘Woodaries’) supplying stone, the tiles contractor, the chunam (lime) supplier, and the cart contractor. Within these three forms, native muccadams and maistries were invariably hired to recruit, supervise, control, and train gang members. Writers were around the worksites to maintain attendance registers (pay lists) and record the progress of work, known as taking quantities. On top of all of them, the project inspector superintended the work, gave instructions on the engineering design of the structure, known as giving levels, determined the quality of the work, made payments to all employees, procured raw materials, and secured labourers. In the case of subcontracted works, the subcontractor himself had a dual role, acting as one of the project inspectors. Workers were hired at both time and piece rates when subcontractors and contractors employed them directly. In such cases, the vigilance maintained by the contractor and his inspectors and writers was regular and frm. Inspectors chased workers on the worksite and scolded them for any laxity in their performance.47 The pay sheets had a section for remarks, which frequently included the comment ‘lazy’ for some workers, implying that it would have some bearing on their remuneration. In the case of subcontracted works, which primarily included earthworks, ballasting, quarrying, fencing, and platelaying, the native petty subcontractor received payment based on the task or a piece rate. These subcontractors paid gang members either a daily or a piece rate. A close look at the tables of both money and real wages reveals two points at which there were signifcant increases: September1862–December1863 and 1867–8. These changes were, following the argument made by Kerr and Lucassen in other studies, partly an outcome of the bargaining power exercised by workers.48 They went on strike, obstructed work, and withdrew their labour on many occasions in 1861–8, and particularly so in 1862–3. For instance, workers went on strike on 7 January1862 on the site of J. S. Wells, seeking a higher wage.49 The local masons and maistry stopped work and demanded an upward revision of the wage rate on 8–9 December1862. John Smith Wells, a railway (sub)contractor, is known to have contemplated bringing masons from Poona. Wells believed that the Poona masons claimed relatively high rates and were suitable for arch construction. He wanted to deploy them only on the arches and keep them away from the local masons.50 Workers on two other sites were reported to have made a noise about their wages on 28 October and 1 November1862.51 120 Dhiraj Kumar Nite Masons also went on a strike for two days on 29–30 October1863 to demand a higher wage rate.52 Measurement of piecework, recording of workdays, and the corresponding remuneration, rather than wage rates, were contentious issues at times. The scenario of a strike by masons around a maistry, Sultan Bhoy, becomes evident from an account of events on 19–22 May1863. The men refused to start work on Morgaon Bridge after the payment made on 15 May.53 They were demanding the full payment and were reluctant to begin work despite the ofer of an advance of Rs. 2 for each of them. They complained that they had nothing to eat. The dispute emerged over the time sheet maintained by Stephens. Sultan Bhoy asked for the time sheet for his men, which Stephens refused to show him. The masons complained that they were being paid for fewer days than they worked in the month. The time sheet or pay sheet reveals that the writer and inspector marked three-quarters, half, or quarter of a day for men who had supposedly arrived late at the worksite, thereby recording a smaller number of days as the total attendance than the workers believed was due.54 Workers objected to the discrepancies in these records, resulting in ‘much noise, trouble and dispute over the payment of wages’.55 Some other workers, in February1863, refused to accept their monthly pay because of diferences over the measurement of piecework and, hence, the amount of payment.56 For the years after 1863, unfortunately, we do not fnd a daily diary of Stephens. However, some instances of workers deserting work in 1867–8 are found in the pay sheets. Masons and coolies separately sought increases in wages. The muccadam or maistry represented them in their protests and negotiations. He was likely to have yielded to the pressure exerted by gang members, who found their wages inadequate and complained of being poorly fed despite performing hard and regular labour.57 The caste ties among gang members helped them to forge solidarity within their occupational group, while the same factor militated against any inter-occupational solidarity between coolies and masons. Their ability to forge unity based on bonds of caste within an occupational group and to negotiate collectively for better wages also seems to have been responsible for the reinforcement of a gender-segmented labour market, in which women coolies were confned to the jobs of loader and carrier and women’s wages slipped further behind those of their male counterparts. Scholars who valorize and romanticize the role of caste and community ties in popular protests aimed at economic bargaining, it could be said, overlook their adverse efect on society as a whole.58 What were the workers seeking to secure when they bargained for an increase in their wages? The apparent reason is generally regarded as a desire to adjust earnings in line with infation. This does not seem a suffciently motivating factor, however, especially for the years 1867–8, when prices moderated following the end of the cotton boom (1861–5) and despite the drought and crop failures in the Deccan during these two years. Labour Practices and Well-Being 121 -0.01 0.01 0.03 0.05 0.07 0.09 0.11 0.13 0.15 0.00 0.50 1.00 1.50 2.00 2.50 3.00 3.50 1830-50 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 Subsistence basket Rice Jowar Graph 5.4 Trend in price of subsistence basket, jowar, and rice Workers appear to have expressed a desire to raise their ‘depressed’ levels of subsistence and to improve their consumption basket, to include more rice than jowar, more than four yards of cloth a year, and an upgrading of their housing. Masons could spend a larger amount on all these items as compared to coolies (Figure5.1).59 They maintained the custom of excluding the women of their families from masonry work. Coolie men would, in all likelihood, have looked forward to becoming ‘respectable earners’ like their mason counterparts, by securing sufcient earnings to cover the entire household budget. In this scheme of things, therefore, coolie women were unable to assert parity in wages; they remained constrained by the image of being supplementary earners. The wage exchange mentioned earlier took place amid an expanding economy, increased competition for labour, and a specifc labour-manage- ment relationship in 1860s Deccan. Some modern centres of industry, plantations, and railway transportation sites, on the one hand, and an expansion of agriculture stimulated by rising prices of agrarian produce, on the other, both created and expanded the labour market. These developments heralded some new labour practices from the 1850s. The construction of two railway lines—Bombay to Jabalpur and Bombay to Madras from the 1850s, and the Nagpur extension between Bhusawal and Nagpur from 1862—coincided with an expansion of the cultivation of cotton in the Deccan and wheat and jowar in central India from the 1850s and, in particular, the cotton boom in 1861–5. The acreage under cultivation also increased.60 Cotton pressing and ginning factories multiplied in Berar. Similarly, wheat processing mills were opened in central India. Landowners and district ofcers complained about a scarcity of labour and a land-labour ratio favourable to workers in the 1860s and 1870s.61  128 Dhiraj Kumar Nite Comparison of GDP Per Capita, 1600–1871’, Explorations in Economic History, 55 (2015), p.62. 22 Chaudhary notes that working only as a postman in the colonial period was not economically superior to working as a skilled labourer, but the combination of postman and primary school teacher generated high returns to a person’s human capital, ranging from 4 to 29 per cent. Latika Chaudhary, ‘Caste, Colonialism and Schooling: Education in British India’, in Chaudhary etal. (eds), New Economic History, p.170. 23 For similar cases, see Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Colonialism and Indian Economy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), p.258; Lucassen, ‘Ichapur Gunpowder Factory, I’, pp.48–55. 24 Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘The Skill Premium and the “Great Divergence”’, European Review of Economic History, 13/1 (2009), pp.121–53; Pim de Zwart, Globalisation and the Colonial Origins of the Great Divergence: Intercontinental Trade and Living Standards in the Dutch East India Company’s Commercial Empire, c. 1600–1800 (Leiden: Brill Press, 2016), pp.145–9. 25 Satya, Cotton and Famine, pp.106, 213–23; Guha, Agrarian Economy, p. 75; Crispin Bates, ‘Class and Economic Change in Central India: The Narmada Valley 1820–1930’, in Clive Dewey (ed.), Arrested Development in India: The Historical Dimension (New Delhi: Manohar, 1988), p.257. Banking and Monetary Statistics of India, Bombay: Reserve Bank of India, 1954, p.690. Amiya Kumar Bagchi, The Presidency Banks and the Indian Economy 1876–1914 (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp.125, 181, 227. A. K. Bagchi, The Evolution of the State Bank of India: The Roots, 1806–76 (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006 [1987]), pp.414–20. 26 De Zwart, Great Divergence; Jan Lucassen and Pim de Zwart, ‘Poverty or Prosperity in Bengal c.1700–1875? New Evidence, Methods and Perspectives’, paper presented at 11th AILH International Conference on Labour History, 21–23 March2016. 27 Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp.6, 59–60; Broadberry, Custodis, and Gupta, ‘India and the Great Divergence’, p.67; Bagchi, Colonialism and Indian Economy, p.xxii. 28 See Sumit Sarkar, Modern Times: India 1880s—1950s, Environment, Economy, Culture (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), pp. 317–21; O’Hanlon, Caste, Confict, and Ideology. 29 Guha, Health and Population, pp.51–8. It should be noted that Guha revises the population fgure for India, which some scholars consider to have been about 207million in 1801. According to the latter estimate the rate of population growth was 0.30 per cent per annum, as opposed to Guha’s estimate of 0.75 per cent, from 1801 to 1881. 30 Chaudhary et al. (eds), New Economic History; Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, Peasant History of Late Pre-Colonial and Colonial India (New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2008). 31 Allen, ‘Real Wages’, pp.111–30. 32 See Jan Luiten van Zanden, Joerg Baten, Marco Mira d’Ercole, Auke Rijpma, Conal Smith, and Marcel Timmer, ‘Global Well-Being Since 1820’, in Jan Luiten van Zanden, Joerg Baten, Marco Mira d’Ercole, Auke Rijpma, Conal Smith, and Marcel Timmer (eds), How Was Life? Global Well-Being Since 1820 (IISH: OECD, 2014). 33 Robert C. Allen, ‘India in the Great Divergence’, in T. H. Hatton, K. H. O’Rourke, and A. M. Taylor (eds), The New Comparative Economic History: Essays in Honour of Jefrey G. Williamson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), pp.9–32; R.  Labour Practices and Well-Being 129 C. Allen and Roman Studer, ‘Prices and Wages in India, 1595–1930’, 12 September 2009, gpih.ucdavis.edu/fles/India_Allen-Studer_v2,pl.xls, accessed 18 October2016. 34 National Institute of Nutrition and Indian Council of Medical Research, Dietary Guidelines for Indians: AManual (Hyderabad: Indian Council of Medical Research, 1998), pp.89, 117. 35 D. K. Nite, ‘Reproduction Preferences and Wages: The Jharia Coalfeld, 1895– 1970’, Studies in History, 30/1 (2014), pp.55–87. 36 David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London: John Murray, 1975 [1821]), pp.93–4; Karl Marx, Capital, I: The Process of Production of Capital (London: Penguin Books, 1976 [1867]), p.275. 37 Guha, Health and Population, p.55. 38 Prison costs in Bombay province in 1868 were Rs. 38.44 for food and Rs. 5.88 for clothing, or a total Rs. 44.32 a year. See Heston, ‘National Income’, p.455. 39 Roy, ‘Growth of a Labour Market’, p.192. 40 Satya, Cotton and Famine, p. 193. 41 Ibid., pp.192, 199; Tirthankar Roy, ‘Consumption of Cotton Cloth in India, 1795–1940’, Australian Economic History Review, 52/1 (2011), pp. 23–4; David E. U. Baker, Colonialism in an Indian Hinterland: The Central Provinces, 1820–1920 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p.154. 42 Census of India 1872–73, pp.11–12; Census of Bombay Presidency 1872–73, pp.28–9. The better sorts of houses were usually of masonry and tiled. 43 Jotirao Phule, Brahman Teachers in the Education Department, Satyadipika (Pune: June1869), p.87. Ashort ballad quoted in O’Hanlon, Caste, Confict, and Ideology, p.214. 44 LNU, HA, JSA, Pay lists and pay sheets. 45 Satya, Cotton and Famine, pp.204–46; Guha, Agrarian Economy, pp.75–8; H. Fukazawa, ‘Agrarian Relations: Western India’, in Kumar and Desai (eds), Cambridge Economic History of India, 2, p.194; Jairus Banaji, ‘Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: The Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Banaji, Theory as History, pp.277–332. 46 Jan Breman, Outcast Labour in Asia: Circulation and Informalization of the Workforce at the Bottom of the Economy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012); Ravi Ahuja, ‘A Freedom Still Enmeshed in Servitude: The Unruly “Lascars” of the SS City of Manila or, AMicro-History of the “Free Labour” Problem’, in Ravi Ahuja (ed.), Working Lives and Worker Militancy: The Politics of Labour in Colonial India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2013), pp.97–133; Banaji, ‘Capitalist Domination’. 47 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diaries 1862 and 1863. 48 Kerr, Engines of Change; Kerr, Building the Railways; Jan Lucassen, ‘The Brickmakers’ Strikes on the Ganges Canal in 1848–1849’, in Rana P. Behal and Marcel van der Linden (eds), India’s Labouring Poor: Historical Studies, c. 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2007), pp.47–84. 49 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1862. 50 LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:4, Correspondence. 51 Ibid. 52 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1863. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 2 May1863. 56 Ibid., 14 and 23 February1863. 57 Ibid., 19 May1863.  130 Dhiraj Kumar Nite 58 One such attempt is discernible in Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘The Poonamalle Insurrection of 1796’, in Bhattacharya and Behal (eds), Vernacularisation of Labour Politics, pp.133–45. 59 Berar was known to import rice and wheat, regarded as luxury items, for consumption by its better-of households. Satya, Cotton and Famine, p.287. 60 Ibid., pp.184–6; Michelle Burge McAlpin, ‘The Efects of Expansion of Markets on Rural Income Distribution in Nineteenth Century India’, Explorations in Economic History, 12 (1975), p.295; Baker, Colonialism in an Indian Hinterland. 61 McAlpin, ‘Efects of Expansion’, p.294. 62 LNU, HA, JSA, F1F:1, Diary 1860–1. 63 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1863, 14 February1863; LNU, HA, JSA, F1A:1, Wells’s letter, 21 December1862. 64 Huseby Estate, Joseph Stephens’ diary 1863, 24 March1863. 65 Kerr, Engines of Change, p.26. 66 Ibid., pp.26, 173. In the 1850s–60s, the railway companies earned an average proft of about 2 per cent, the rest coming from the public treasury. 67 The Cornwallis Code of 1793 and the Bombay Regulation IV of 1827 were in force concerning business transactions. 68 LNU, HA, JSA, F1B:1, Contract papers. 69 Ibid. 70 We fnd one dispute coming to court. The action was fled, however, by a native supplier against Stephens. 71 For a convincing exposition of the functioning of this labour institution, though in the 20th-century factory setting, see Chitra Joshi, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and Its Forgotten Histories (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005). 72 See Behal, One Hundred Years. 73 Baker, Colonialism in an Indian Hinterland, p. 160. 74 The list of relevant studies is long. Among others, see Bishnupriya Gupta, ‘Falling Behind and Catching Up: India’s Transition from a Colonial Economy’, Economic History Review, 72 (3) (2019), pp.803–27; Amiya Bagchi, Capital and Labour Redefned: India and the Third World (London: Anthem Press, 2002); Jefrey Williamson, Trade and Poverty: When the Third World Fell Behind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), pp.75–100, 145–67. 75 Census of India 1872–73, pp. 13; Census of Bombay Presidency 1872–73, pp.72–5, 194. England had a life expectancy of 44.2 and a mortality rate of 22.6 in 1871. 76 Kerr, Engines of Change; Kerr, Building the Railways. 77 Cf. Lucassen, Ichapur Gunpowder Factory; Lucassen, ‘Brickmakers’ Strikes’. References Ahuja, Ravi, ‘A Freedom Still Enmeshed in Servitude: The Unruly “Lascars” of the SS City of Manila or, a Micro-History of the “Free Labour” Problem’, in Ravi Ahuja (ed.), Working Lives and Worker Militancy: The Politics of Labour in Colonial India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2013), pp.97–133. Ahuja, Ravi, Pathways of Empire: Circulation, Public Works and Social Space in Colonial Orissa, c. 1780–1914 (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009). Allen, Robert C., ‘India in the Great Divergence’, in T. H. Hatton, K. H. O’Rourke, and A. M. Taylor (eds), The New Comparative Economic History: Essays in Honour of Jefrey G. Williamson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), pp.9–32. Allen, Robert C., ‘Real Wages in Europe and Asia: AFirst Look at the Long-Term Patterns’, Robert C Allen, Tommy Bengtsson, and Martin Dribe (eds), Living Labour Practices and Well-Being 131 Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.111–30. Allen, Robert C., and Roman Studer, ‘Prices and Wages in India, 1595–1930’, 12 September2009,gpih.ucdavis.edu/fles/India_Allen-Studer_v2,pl.xls, accessed 18 October2016. Bagchi, Amiya Kumar, Capital and Labour Redefned: India and the Third World (London: Anthem Press, 2002). Bagchi, Amiya Kumar, Colonialism and Indian Economy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010). Bagchi, Amiya Kumar, The Evolution of the State Bank of India: The Roots, 1806– 76 (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006 [1987]). Bagchi, Amiya Kumar, The Presidency Banks and the Indian Economy 1876–1914 (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1989). Baker, David E. U., Colonialism in an Indian Hinterland: The Central Provinces, 1820–1920 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). Banaji, Jairus, ‘Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: The Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in J. Banaji (ed.), Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Leiden; Boston: Brill Press, 2010), pp.277–332. Banaji, Jairus, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Leiden; Boston: Brill Press, 2010). Bates, Crispin, ‘Class and Economic Change in Central India: The Narmada Valley 1820–1930’, in Clive Dewey (ed.), Arrested Development in India: The Historical Dimension (New Delhi: Manohar, 1988), pp.241–82. Behal, Rana P., One Hundred Years of Servitude: Political Economy of Tea Plantations in Colonial Assam (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2014). Breman, Jan, Mobilising Labour for the Global Cofee Market: Profts From an Unfree Work Regime in Colonial Java (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). Breman, Jan, Outcast Labour in Asia: Circulation and Informalization of the Workforce at the Bottom of the Economy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012). Brereton, R. M., Reminiscences of an Old English Civil Engineer, 1858–1908 (Portland: Irwin Hodson Company, 1908). Broadberry, Stephen, and Bishnupriya Gupta, ‘Indian Economic Performance and Living Standards, 1600–2000’, in Latika Chaudhary, Bishnupriya Gupta, Tirthankar Roy, and Anand V. Swamy (eds), A New Economic History of Colonial India (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp.15–32. Broadberry, Stephen, Johann Custodis, and Bishnupriya Gupta, ‘India and the Great Divergence: An Anglo-Indian Comparison of GDP per Capita, 1600–1871’, Explorations in Economic History, 55 (2015), pp.58–75. Chaudhary, Latika, ‘Caste, Colonialism and Schooling: Education in British India’, in Latika Chaudhary, Bishnupriya Gupta, Tirthankar Roy, and Anand V. Swamy (eds), A New Economic History of Colonial India (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp.161–78. Chaudhary, Latika, Bishnupriya Gupta, Tirthankar Roy, and Anand V. Swamy (eds), A New Economic History of Colonial India (New York: Routledge, 2016). Chaudhuri, Binay Bhushan, Peasant History of Late Pre-colonial and Colonial India (New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2008). 132 Dhiraj Kumar Nite Chittibabu, Kali, Patterns of Labour Migrations in Colonial Andhra (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). Derbyshire, Ian, ‘The Building of India’s Railways: The Application of Western Technology in the Colonial Periphery 1850–1920’, in Ian J. Kerr (ed.), Railways in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.278–9. Dhar, Bidisha, ‘Mapping Artisan Labour in Lucknow, c. 1860s–1940s’, in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Rana P. Behal (eds), The Vernacularisation of Labour Politics (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2016), pp.212–51. Divekar, V. D., ‘Regional Economy (1757–1857): Western India’, in Dharma Kumar and Meghnad Desai (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of India, 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [1989]), pp.332–55. Fukazawa, H., ‘Agrarian Relations: Western India’, in Dharma Kumar and Meghnad Desai (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [1989]), pp.177–207. Guha, Sumit, Health and Population in South Asia: From Earliest Times to the Present (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). Guha, Sumit, The Agrarian Economy of Bombay Deccan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985). Gupta, Bishnupriya, ‘Falling Behind and Catching Up: India’s Transition from a Colonial Economy’, Economic History Review, 72/3 (2019), pp.803–27. Heston, A., ‘National Income’, in Dharma Kumar and Meghnad Desai (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of India, 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [1989]), pp.376–462. Hofmeester, Karin, and Pim de Zwart (eds), Colonialism, Institutional Change, and Shifts in Global Labour Relations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). Joshi, Chitra, ‘Fettered Bodies: Labouring on Public Work in Nineteenth-Century India’, in Marcel van der Linden and Prabhu P. Mohapatra (eds), Labour Matters: Towards Global Histories (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2009), pp.3–21. Joshi, Chitra, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and Its Forgotten Histories (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005). Kerr, Ian J., Building the Railways of the Raj 1850–1900 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). Kerr, Ian J., Engines of Change: The Railroads that Made India (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007). Linden, Marcel van der, Karl Heinz Roth, and Max Henninger (eds), Beyond Marx (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2014). Lucassen, Jan, ‘The Brickmakers’ Strikes on the Ganges Canal in 1848–1849’, in Rana P. Behal and Marcel van der Linden (eds), India’s Labouring Poor: Historical Studies, c. 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2007), pp.47–84. Lucassen, Jan, ‘Working at the Ichapur Gunpowder Factory in the 1790s, Part I’, Indian Historical Review, 39/1 (2012), pp.19–56. Lucassen, Jan, ‘Working at the Ichapur Gunpowder Factory in the 1790s, Part II’, Indian Historical Review, 39/2 (2012), pp.252–71. Lucassen, Jan, and Pim de Zwart, ‘Poverty or Prosperity in Bengal c.1700–1875? New Evidence, Methods and Perspectives’, paper presented at 11th AILH International Conference on Labour History, 21–23 March2016. Marx, Karl, Capital, I: The Process of Production of Capital (London: Penguin Books, 1976 [1867]). Labour Practices and Well-Being 133 McAlpin, Michelle Burge, ‘The Efects of Expansion of Markets on Rural Income Distribution in Nineteenth Century India’, Explorations in Economic History, 12 (1975), pp.289–302. Mies, Maria, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (London: Zed Books, 2014 [1986]). Mohaptra, Prabhu, ‘From Contract to Status? Or How Law Shaped Labour Relations in Colonial India, 1780–1880’, in Jan Breman, Isabelle Guerin, and Assem Prakash (eds), India’s Unfree Workforce: Of Bondage Old and New (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp.96–125. Nite, Dhiraj Kumar, ‘Reproduction Preferences and Wages: The Jharia Coalfeld, 1895–1970’, Studies in History, 30/1 (2014), pp.55–87. O’Hanlon, Rosalind, Caste, Confict, and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1985]). Parthasarathi, Prasannan, ‘The Poonamalle Insurrection of 1796’, in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Rana P. Behal (eds), The Vernacularisation of Labour Politics (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2016), pp.133–45. Parthasarathi, Prasannan, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Phule, Jyotirao, Brahman Teachers in the Education Department, Satyadipika (Pune, June1869). Ricardo, David, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London: John Murray, 1975 [1821]). Roy, Tirthankar, ‘Consumption of Cotton Cloth in India, 1795–1940’, Australian Economic History Review, 52/1 (2011), pp.3–35. Roy, Tirthankar, ‘Indigo and Law in Colonial India’, Economic History Review, 64 (SI, 2011), pp.60–75. Roy, Tirthankar, ‘The Growth of a Labour Market in the Twentieth Century’, in Latika Chaudhary, Bishnupriya Gupta, Tirthankar Roy, and Anand V. Swamy (eds), A New Economic History of Colonial India (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp.179–94. Roy, Tirthankar, and Anand V. Swamy, Law and the Economy in Colonial India (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Sarkar, Sumit, Modern Times: India 1880s–1950s, Environment, Economy, Culture (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), pp.317–21. Satya, Laxman D., Cotton and Famine in Berar, 1850–1900 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997). Singha, Radhika, The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Confict 1914–1921 (Noida: Harper Collins, 2020). Swamy, Anand V., ‘Law and Contract Enforcement in Colonial India’, in Latika Chaudhary, Bishnupriya Gupta, Tirthankar Roy, and Anand V. Swamy (eds), A New Economic History of Colonial India (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp.218–32. Williamson, Jefrey, Trade and Poverty: When the Third World Fell Behind (Cambridge: MIT, 2011). Zanden, Jan Luiten van, ‘The Skill Premium and the “Great Divergence”’, European Review of Economic History, 13/1 (2009), pp.121–53. Zanden, Jan Luiten van, Joerg Baten, Marco Mira d’Ercole, Auke Rijpma, Conal Smith, and Marcel Timmer, ‘Global Well-Being Since 1820’, in Jan Luiten van 134 Dhiraj Kumar Nite Zanden, Joerg Baten, Marco Mira d’Ercole, Auke Rijpma, Conal Smith, and Marcel Timmer (eds), How Was Life? Global Well-Being since 1820 (IISH: OECD, 2014). Zwart, Pim de, Globalisation and the Colonial Origins of the Great Divergence: Intercontinental Trade and Living Standards in the Dutch East India Company’s Commercial Empire, c. 1600–1800 (Leiden: Brill Press, 2016). DOI: 10.4324/9781003317227-6 6 Circulation of Knowledge, Capital, and Goods Scandinavia and the British Empire Eleonor Marcussen In Scandinavian history writing, colonialism has often been limited to minor geopolitical conquests and trading outposts of the nation states, both of which have been viewed as benign rather than violent and oppressive.1 Only since the 1990s has research begun to examine the surge in Scandinavian exploration, scientifc and religious expeditions, resource extraction in Asia, the Americas, and Africa, and ‘internal colonialization’ in the Arctic region during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 Scandinavian colonial settlements and business and military expeditions coincided with the expansion of the major imperial powers of Europe in the early modern period, yet assumed another form than those of the dominant military powers.3 While the trading houses and Scandinavian states left records which, compared to conventional, enduring imperial archives, have been more complicated to track down and access owing to their short-lived character and the disruption they have sufered,4 historical works are increasingly attempting to trace the entanglement of people, material culture, and places in order to explore how the small and grand narratives of empires intersected in the modern period. This turn in understanding Scandinavian colonialism follows a general shift in imperial and global history towards research on the circulation of knowledge, people, and commodities, rather than exchanges between geographical regions or between nation states and colonies.5 As Patricia Purtschert and Harald Fischer-Tiné argue in the case of Switzerland’s history, a general understanding of the nation’s past confnes it to persons, events, and social processes within its geopolitical borders.6 In South Asian history, for instance, London has been taken as the a priori centre of empire, while relatively recent research points to Switzerland and Germany as important nodes for anti-colonial networks.7 On the other hand, for Switzerland, a ‘country without colonies’, colonialism played a central role in the development of businesses that would come to represent economic interests of the nation state in the postcolonial period.8 Building on previous research into the relationship between minor colonial nations such as Sweden and Switzerland and colonialism, this chapter argues that regions beyond the colonizers and the colonized played an important role in realizing the ambitions of imperial expansion. The Huseby Estate in southern 136 Eleonor Marcussen Sweden, where Joseph Stephens arrived after working in India, was one such site, where the logics of resource extraction and trading networks could be utilized in a similar manner to that found within colonial spaces. At the same time, the question arises as to the role of European imperialism in the processes of modernization in Scandinavia and Sweden at this point in history. The case of Joseph Stephens’ colonial career in India in the 1860s serves to illustrate how and why imperial ambitions and wealth intersected with the development of international business and infrastructural expansion in southern Sweden. Since the archiving of Joseph Stephens’ papers related to his ‘Indian period’ (1860–9) was set in motion in 2008, a series of publications and a recent exhibition have contributed new perspectives on Scandinavia’s role in the colonial period.9 Fascinatingly, the newly discovered material covers the business activities of Joseph Stephens in India before he bought the Huseby Estate in 1867 and until the end of 1869, when he wrapped up the last business commitments of his contracting and settled at Huseby. The material from India constitutes an intriguing part of the ‘Stephens period’ in the large Huseby Archives, which encompasses an archive collection covering the wide-ranging business papers of the estate from the late medieval period, through its industrial development after Stephens took over, up to the end of the family’s era at Huseby.10 The Indian material, covering Stephens’ work and social life in India over approximately 10years, has proved a rare source in terms of containing a wide range of labour and construction contracts between Stephens and labourers, the railway company, and other building and railway contractors. In a colonial context, the archival holdings stand out as a rich source for understanding the everyday socioeconomic lives and professional relationships of labourers, middlemen, and contractors involved in the expansion of the railway and related infrastructure.11 At the same time, an idea has formed about the professional life of Europeans making a career out of imperial expansion: how men like Joseph Stephens acquired capital as well as skills and professional networks in colonial contexts. Building upon recent research from the Joseph Stephens Archive (JSA), this chapter provides a more comprehensive picture of how professional life and experiences in India shaped Joseph Stephens as a businessman and actor in colonial networks after settling in Sweden. The chapter, which follows an individual’s life history in the context of specifc historical structures and contexts, is methodologically aligned with Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects and chapters in the anthology Colonial Lives Across Empire.12 By providing an individual and subjective perspective on the building of a colonial career, it aims to give insights into the choices and opportunities that formed part of the larger economic and social transformations that are the concern of economic historians and histories of nation states. This is done by means of a brief sketch of the Stephens family, the socio-economic context of southern Sweden, and an analysis of Joseph Stephens’ trade and interactions on the Huseby Estate from 1867 until 1874. Circulation of Knowledge, Capital, and Goods 137 The chapter suggests that Stephens’ business strategies should be understood and interpreted in a global context, in which the British Empire’s political and territorial expansion simultaneously contributed to the development of businesses in countries that had only minor colonies. As a case study, this chapter sets out to capture change, development, and connections between people and places during Joseph Stephens’ frst years on the Huseby Estate. Among the primary sources drawn upon, business and private correspondence, cash books of expenses and bank withdrawals, and receipts, from the Huseby Estate Archive (HEA) and the JSA between 1867 and 1874, are the main ones used for an analysis of the professional relations and informal networks that were part of developing the estate. In Joseph Stephens’ case, his almost 10-year-long career as a contractor on the expansion of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR) would be decisive in forging a fortune that enabled him to acquire the large landed estate in southern Sweden in 1867, at the same time as these were formative years that paved the way for his future enterprises. In that, the lives of the Stephens family provide a fascinating trajectory of how British imperialism shaped networks, professionalism, and mobility, and thereby wealth acquisition, this chapter examines the question of how countries beyond the imperial heartlands became sites of interest for colonial wealth, knowledge, and migration. The purpose is thus twofold. First, the chapter examines, through the life history of Joseph Stephens, how and why British imperialism had an impact on local and regional business development in Scandinavia. Secondly, the chapter revises the narratives of socio-economic changes in Sweden during the late nineteenth century by considering the impact of larger global transformations to a far greater extent than so far acknowledged. The chapter suggests that Stephens’ experiences from his ‘colonial career’ can serve as an example of how and why the expansion of British imperialism would come to impact the late industrialization of southern Sweden. Making a Career: Skills and Capital Accumulation Joseph Stephens’ career in India and return to the country of his birth, Sweden, were largely facilitated by his family’s networks and ambitions. Yet his return was not to the cultured milieus of Stockholm and Copenhagen, where he was born and spent his adolescence, respectively, but to a region unfamiliar to him and at the same time ‘known’ by his father George Stephens (1813–95) and, not least, his godfather, Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Caval- lius (1818–89). Both men proved to be instrumental in the acquisition of the Huseby Estate through a curious combination of personal relationships, economic interests, and ethnographic feldwork.13 To all three men involved in the transaction, the investment in a landed property represented the successful completion of what the family perceived as Joseph Stephens’ hardworking years in India.14 Not unlike the situation for Scots and Irishmen, a