Titas Chakraborty – författare

During global capitalism's long ascent from 1600–1850, workers of all kinds—slaves, indentured servants, convicts, domestic workers, soldiers, and sailors—repeatedly ran away from their masters and bosses, with profound effects. A Global History of Runaways, edited by Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum, compares and connects runaways in the British, Danish, Dutch, French, Mughal, Portuguese, and American empires. Together these essays show how capitalism required vast numbers of mobile workers who would build the foundations of a new economic order. At the same time, these laborers challenged that order—from the undermining of Danish colonization in the seventeenth century to the igniting of civil war in the United States in the nineteenth.

During global capitalism's long ascent from 1600–1850, workers of all kinds—slaves, indentured servants, convicts, domestic workers, soldiers, and sailors—repeatedly ran away from their masters and bosses, with profound effects. A Global History of Runaways, edited by Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum, compares and connects runaways in the British, Danish, Dutch, French, Mughal, Portuguese, and American empires. Together these essays show how capitalism required vast numbers of mobile workers who would build the foundations of a new economic order. At the same time, these laborers challenged that order—from the undermining of Danish colonization in the seventeenth century to the igniting of civil war in the United States in the nineteenth.

Empire of Labor tells the story of how hired workers experienced and responded to the rise to power over the long eighteenth century of the English East India Company (EIC), which perennially hired thousands of people in and around its settlements in Bengal. Focusing on boatmen and silk reelers as well as sailors and soldiers—a remarkable look at both indigenous and European workers—the story begins with the earliest accounts of the EIC's dealings with hired labor in the region, from 1651. Prior to EIC dominance, hired workers drove hard bargains with their employers, making demands that drew upon their own notions of wages, work rhythms, and time. When their demands were not met, they ran away, often to rival indigenous or European employers. Empire of Labor explores these demands and how they conflicted with the EIC's notions of discipline. Analyzing Bengali literary sources and Dutch and English archival materials, the book rethinks the ascendancy of the company state as a violent process involving removing competing employers, imposing army and police power, introducing new production technologies, and instituting draconian regulations which eliminated indigenous cultures of work. Most importantly, it depicts the lifeworlds of these recalcitrant workers, showing how they lived and resisted. A major intervention in histories of colonialism, labor, migration, and law, Empire of Labor ultimately recasts colonial rule as a novel form of state-labor relationship.