The International Review of Social History (Cambridge University Press)is preparing a supplement on Indian Labour History. The supplement will also be available as a separate paperback, and will be edited by Rana Behal (New Delhi) and Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam).

Theme
Recent years have witnessed a renewed scholarly interest in the historical studies of labour in India. A decade ago the discipline of labour history was considered to be in serious crisis. With the current phase of globalization, which coincided with the rapid decline of the industrial working class, the retreat of the state, and the emergence of subcontracting doubts emerged about the foundations of labour history. However, the slow but steady revival of interest in labour and labour history is remarkable. The prospect of India as the manufacturing hub and major services outsourcing destination of the next decade along with the phenomenal expansion of the informalisation process have all pushed the labour question to the centre stage. This revival is different both in its location as also in its central concerns. It has emerged from the countries of the South and its concerns are not confined to the traditional working class alone. An urgent need is felt for reconstituting the older frameworks which had revolved around fixed binaries of space, time and social relations. Labour historians have to increasingly contend with the existing notions of "pre-modern" and modern, free/unfree, formal/informal forms of labour relations and traditional spatial divisions such as factory and field, urban and rural, etc. With the expansion of the process of informalization and feminization of work force, the focus on the male, unionized factory worker is perhaps no longer justified. Areas that have gained prominence in recent years include issues of labour mobility, changing legal construction of labour relations, notions of solidarity, gender relations, multiplicity of labouring identities and the impact of new technologies on work. This supplement seeks to consolidate and showcase the best of the new research in the field of labour history in India.

Selection criteria for papers
We invite papers on Indian Labour History that

1. study these recent fields of interest, and/or
2. put (certain aspects of) Indian labour history into a comparative perspective, and/or
3. employ newly defined concepts and/or tools.

Time schedule
1 February 2005: brief outlines of articles by authors
March 2005: Letter of acceptance (or rejection) of proposals
1 September 2005: First draft of articles
November 2005: Letter by the editors to authors about necessary revisions
1 February 2006: Second draft of articles
April 2006: Final version of manuscript to copy editor December 2006: Supplement is published
Please send abstracts to the e-mail address shown below.