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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Glossary
- Map 1: Western India, 1931
- Map 2: Municipal wards and districts of Bombay City, 1931
- 1 Problems and perspectives
- 2 The setting: Bombay City and its hinterland
- 3 The structure and development of the labour market
- 4 Migration and the rural connections of Bombay's workers
- 5 Girangaon: the social organization of the working-class neighbourhoods
- 6 The development of the cotton-textile industry: a historical context
- 7 The workplace: labour and the organization of production in the cotton-textile industry
- 8 Rationalizing work, standardizing labour: the limits of reform in the cotton-textile industry
- 9 Epilogue: workers' politics — class, caste and nation
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge South Asian Studies
2 - The setting: Bombay City and its hinterland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Glossary
- Map 1: Western India, 1931
- Map 2: Municipal wards and districts of Bombay City, 1931
- 1 Problems and perspectives
- 2 The setting: Bombay City and its hinterland
- 3 The structure and development of the labour market
- 4 Migration and the rural connections of Bombay's workers
- 5 Girangaon: the social organization of the working-class neighbourhoods
- 6 The development of the cotton-textile industry: a historical context
- 7 The workplace: labour and the organization of production in the cotton-textile industry
- 8 Rationalizing work, standardizing labour: the limits of reform in the cotton-textile industry
- 9 Epilogue: workers' politics — class, caste and nation
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge South Asian Studies
Summary
In 1661, Britain acquired Bombay from the Portuguese as part of Charles II's dowry on his marriage with Catherine of Braganza. Eight years later, it was transferred as a worthless possession to the East India Company by the Crown. In 1788, it was almost abandoned by Cornwallis, the defeated hero of Yorktown. For nearly a century and a half, this sparsely populated cluster of islands off the west coast of India was more notable for its pestilential swamps than its commercial value. Fortune hunters were better advised to rely upon their winnings from whist rather than risk the slim pickings of trade. Arrack alone, it was said, could ‘keep the soldiers from the pariah houses’. Alcoholic fevers and venereal diseases made up the white man's burden.
At the close of the seventeenth century, it appeared impossible ‘that Bombay from its situation could ever become a place of trade notwithstanding the great attention paid to it by the Government’. By 1872, however, this inhospitable fishing hamlet, where Englishmen did not expect to survive two monsoons, had become the second city of the Empire.
It was only in the 1780s that Bombay began to replace Surat as the largest trading port and major commercial centre of the region.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in IndiaBusiness Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940, pp. 21 - 71Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994