This posthumously published collection of nine brilliant essays by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar underline the loss of so able a social historian. Edited by a team of his friends—Jennifer Davis (who wrote the introduction), Gordon Johnson, and David Washbrook (who wrote the postscript)—this thoughtful volume serves not only to remind us what a pioneer in the field of labor history Chandavarkar was, but how greatly he will be missed as a fellow scholar. His short career as a Reader in the History and Politics of South Asia, Fellow at Trinity College, and Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at Cambridge was nonetheless stellar. His path-breaking study of Bombay mill workers, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), went on to become an instant classic, challenging previous understandings of labor history and formulations of class in...

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