• ISBN13: 9780199474424
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: HistoryLaw and Criminology
• Publisher: Oxford UP
• Publisher Imprint: Oxford UP
• Publication Date: June 17, 2018
• Pages: 372
• Original Price: INR 1195.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 540 grams

The colonial administration passed a Factory Act in 1881, producing the first official definition of ‘factory’ in modern Indian history as a workplace using steam power and regularly employing over 100 workers. In 1891, the Act was amended: Factories were redefined as workplaces employing over 50 workers the upper age limit of legal ‘protection’ was raised weekly holidays were established and women mill-workers were brought within its ambit.Sarkar analyses the two versions of the Act and reveals the tensions inherent within the project of protective labour regulation. Combining legal and social history, he identifies an emergent ‘factory question’. The cotton mill industry of Bombay, long considered as one of the birthplaces of modern Indian capitalism, is the principal focal point of his investigation. Factory law, though experienced as a minor official initiative, connected with some of the most potent ideological debates of the age. Trouble at the Mill explores a shifting set of themes and raises questions rarely thematised by labour historians the ideologies of factory reform, the politics of factory commissions, the routines of factory inspection and the earliest waves of strike action in the cotton textile industry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Aditya Sarkar teaches history at the University of Warwick, UK. His current research interests include the long history of labour movements in colonial and post-colonial India and the history of the Indian left.