This project excavates the relationship between labor migration and health in 19th and early 20th century British India and Ceylon. The emergence of the free contract produced a paradigm shift in the political economy of empire. This post-slavery labor regime wedded free contract with the discourse of labor welfare and protectionism in order to distance itself from its predecessor. Sundar argues that health was the cornerstone of imperial humanitarianism that fused scientific promise of progress with the legal denunciation of slavery. As medical authority surveilled, disciplined and engineered ‘coolie’ bodies, it advanced new hierarchies and segmentation of the labor market. If these efforts sanitized colonial unfree labor regimes on the one hand, they normalized the advancement of intimate technologies of labor control on the other. Sundar examines how the double invocation of the ‘coolie’ as both diseased and an instrument of efficiency inaugurated the most capacious and subversive claim on labor— restraining worker action to demands of welfare, while reconciling protection and profit.
The project stresses the relevance of historical studies of labor market institutions to understand how the imperial discourse of labor protection paradoxically amplified health inequalities. It also offers a conceptual rethinking of labor studies to approach critical contemporary questions regarding welfare economics, labor market segmentation, and the predicaments of collective action strategies.
