This session of SOCIAL will open with a lightning talk by Debolina Majumder titled “Deconstructing the construction “labour camp”: the colonial inheritances of contemporary labour control and periurban development in the Delhi NCR,” followed by Michelle Buckley on Imperial Histories of Labour Brokerage in Uttar Pradesh.
Within much literature on contemporary migrant labour intermediation, recruitment and trafficking from South Asia, labour recruiters are chiefly understood as state-evading market actors who are embedded in illegal networks of brokerage and who profit off the demand for cheap labour in destination countries. However, to historians of the British imperial indenture system in the subcontinent and critical legal studies scholars, labour recruiters of the 19th and early 20th century are understood as actors working for or alongside the state, subjects firmly situated within imperial Britain’s plantation regime of accumulation.
This talk explores these discrepancies in the legal and normative conceptualization of the recruiter subject in North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which accounts for the highest numbers of migrant workers going to the Gulf. Drawing on archival materials such as colonial reports on the structure and operation of recruitment networks in the region that is present-day Uttar Pradesh, we examine the colonial state’s organization of historical labour recruitment networks that laid the foundations for contemporary recruitment networks in the region. We focus on two regulatory logics of structure and control of ‘up country’ recruiters by the British state – subcontracting and licensing practices – to understand the enduring colonial scaffolding of contemporary racialized constructions of the ‘unscrupulous middle-man’.
About the speakers
Michelle Buckley (she/her) is an urban and economic geographer in the Department of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research is broadly concerned with precarious labour, labour rights and human rights in the construction and building materials industries in Canada, India and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Her current work examines the colonial and other historical sediments that inflect contemporary conditions of precarious work, migration and employment, and the political economy of gender, race, caste and class that transect these conditions.
Debolina Majumder (she/her) is an urban and labour geographer interested in questions of everyday urban political economy, infrastructural labour, and social reproduction. She is currently an ESRC research fellow at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. Her project, The Hidden Abodes of the Urban, considers the roles of so-called “surplus” populations, informal essential workers, and their households in shaping processes of urban development. Her doctoral dissertation at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge takes a long-durée approach towards analysing the relationship between labour informalisation, trans-local working-class social reproduction, and urban change in the Delhi NCR. Her forthcoming research turns to the figure of the worker as a geopolitical actor and subject amid intensifying geopolitical rivalries, neocolonial warfare, and crises of multipolarity.
