Lineages of the ‘labour question’: from ‘subaltern workers’ to ‘classes of labour’ in the Punjab canal colonies

ABSTRACT

This article charts the historical emergence of an 'agrarian question of labour' in one zone of the global south: the canal colonies of Punjab, Pakistan. It maps the factors through which diverse types of workers were subsumed under a three-tier labour regime on the region's large estates and highlights the forces that dampened the potential for solidarity between workers, allowing landlords to reconfigure them into classes of labour in the postcolonial era. It thus underscores the importance of tracing the rural roots of contemporary ‘informality’ than focusing solely on the informalization of formal wage labour.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour regimes
• classes of labour
• tenancy
• caste
• Punjab
• Pakistan

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my colleagues at the Department of Economics at the Information Technology University (ITU) Lahore, in particular Dr. Akmal Hussain and Dr. Fahd Ali, for their support. The initial research for this paper was undertaken while I was a Post-Doctoral fellow at the Oxford Department of Global and Area Studies (OSGA) and I wish to thank my friends and colleagues there. I also want to thank the British Library India Office Staff and the Punjab Economic Research Institute (PERI) Lahore staff for their assistance in providing the bulk of the archival material used in preparation for this manuscript. Thanks are also due to the two anonymous referees for their extremely useful comments. Finally, to Professor Barbara Harriss-White for her generosity and the years of encouragement she has provided. All errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See (Williams 1996) for a discussion of labour tenancy.

2 See also (Owen 1981) on the extensive use of labour tenants in Egyptian cotton farms in the 19th century.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Muhammad Ali Jan

Muhammad Ali Jan in Economics and Development Studies at the Information Technology University, Lahore. He is also a Research Associate of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme (CSASP) at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, where he has taught political economy. He works on the political economy of agricultural markets and agrarian change in Pakistani Punjab and his articles have been published in Journal of Agrarian Change and Economic and Political Weekly. He has also contributed chapters for edited volumes on agrarian political economy in general and South Asia in particular.