This article challenges the view that the English East India Company was unable effectively to dominate society in the colonial metropolis of Madras before the end of the eighteenth century. Instead it is argued that colonial interventions, even into the social organization of labour, were persistent in goals and methods and acquired institutional forms in the latter half of the century. Hence an early colonial labour policy is clearly discernible. The ruling block's strategies concerning the regulation of labour were not based on laissez-faire ideas but rather on a paternalistic brand of contemporary English social theory. This ideological disposition found practical expression in interventions into the city's labour relations by means of various “police committees”. Moreover, British legal techniques were used to regulate labour relations in Madras. On the whole, early colonial labour policy was distinguished from contemporary practices in Britain by a far higher level of coercion.

This article examines the ways in which working practices and workloads changed in the course of British industrialization by tracing the experience of one group of skilled workers: iron forgemen. A well-established historiographical tradition assumes that workers were subjected to a more burdensome discipline during the Industrial Revolution. However, empirical studies of workplace practice in early industrial Britain are scarce, and those few studies that have been attempted stress the continuity of workers' experience. But this study argues for discontinuity, exploiting a range of data on the output levels achieved by individual forge crews c. 1750–c. 1850 to identify substantial increases in the burdens imposed upon forgemen.

“No nation is supposed to be so advanced as the British nation, no race so progressive as the white”, declared Cotton's Weekly, the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Canada. “BUT HERE IN TORONTO NO CHINESE, NO HINDOOS, NO JAPS, NO INDIANS, NO BLACKS, NO FOREIGNERS NEED BE IMPORTED. WHITE GIRLS AND MEN OF BRITISH BIRTH BREAK THE STRIKES.” It was 1911. The newspaper was commenting on strike-breaking by “white” workers during a strike at a Toronto garment factory where male and female Jews had walked out. The newspaper compared this with cases out West: “In British Columbia when miners rise up in rebellion against the shameful conditions, Chinese are brought into the mines. In this and other western provinces, Japs, Hindoos, and Indians fill the places of the white toilers because they live on cheaper food and under such intolerable conditions no white people can stand it.”

In post-colonial India labour was given the connotation of work in industry. The labourer as a social figure became linked to the modern economy, a direction in which Indian society was to develop at a rapid rate. The agrarian–rural mode of life and work would soon fade away to be replaced by an industrial-urban order. The close association of labour economics with industrial employment was a logical consequence of this restructuring. The expectation of the transformation that was going to take place makes it understandable why authors of authoritative textbooks on the shape of the working class and the trade union movement were able more or less to ignore the non-industrial way of life of the large majority of the working population.

The “Guide to the International Archives and Collections at the IISH, Amsterdam” (GIA), edited by Atie van der Horst and Elly Koen, was first published in 1989. Since 1990, a description of recently acquired archives and collections as well as major accruals to archives received by the IISH has been published annually in the IRSH to keep this survey up to date. From 1994 on, a list of microfilms of archives or collections held in other repositories, of which the IISH has received a copy, was added to this survey.

In September 1999, a new edition of the GIA will be published by the IISH. The recently acquired archives and collections as well as major accruals to archives received by the IISH over 1998 are included in this new edition. Therefore, no GIA supplement over 1998 is published in this volume.

Information on this new GIA edition can be obtained from Stichting beheer IISG, Cruquiusweg 31, 1019 AT Amsterdam, The Netherlands; tel: + 31 20 668 58 66; fax: + 31 20 665 64 11; e-mail: st.beheer@iisg.nl.