Trade Unions and Politics in Ceylon

Trade Unions and Politics in Ceylon offers the first sustained analysis of how a rapidly expanding labor movement helped shape—and was shaped by—the politics of a newly independent, modernizing society. Tracing trade union growth from the late colonial period through the first post-independence decade, Robert N. Kearney shows how Ceylon’s unions combined “economic” functions (wages, conditions, dispute resolution) with explicitly partisan roles that recruited, socialized, and mobilized work...