The Labour in Asia research programme is, it seems to me, a particularly important initiative because it registers and aims to build on the growing scholarly interest and increasing activity in the 1990s in Indian and Asian labour studies. It is significant that the first volume to appear in the newly projected Economic History of South-East Asia is Elson's The Death of the Peasantry, and Amarjit Kaur's work on labour is, I understand, due shortly to follow. Among historians and social scientists of India, the working classes, broadly construed, have also commanded increasing attention, as several conferences (at least two here in Amsterdam) and perhaps, more substantially, the numerous books, articles and theses which have recently been published, testify. Recent conferences in Calcutta, Bombay and most recently Delhi have suggested a quite considerable depth of interest and output. In the University of Cambridge alone, not in this field known for its radicalism or its particular concern with the history of subordinated and oppressed groups, there have been a dozen or more doctoral theses written or in progress on various aspects of the working classes in India – from studies of communism to the political movements of the urban poor, gender relations and household formation, child labour and the spatial politics of neighbourhoods, mill townships and urban squatter settlements, labour movements and caste, ethnic and communal conflicts.