Fighting Free to Become Unfree Again: The Social History of Bondage and Neo-Bondage of Labour in India

Labour bondage is a major feature of the peasant economies that have dominated the subcontinent of South Asia from an unrecorded pre-colonial past until the post-colonial present. Discussing when, why and how servitude originated on the tribal–peasant frontier in West India and was instituted in the rural landscape, this book draws on engagement in anthropological fieldwork from the 1960s onwards to offer a historical perspective on the collapse of bondage. The author argues that the global...