Bombay History

This volume reclaims Mumbai's legacy as a global financial centre of the 19th to the first half of the 20th century. It shows how Mumbai, or erstwhile Bombay, once served as a central node in global networks of trade, finance, commercial institutions, and most importantly trading communities. In doing so it highlights that this city more than any other Indian city still possesses all these virtuous elements making it an appropriate location for a financial Special Economic Zone - an idea shelved temporarily.

This study draws on extensive archival research to explore the social history of industrial labor in colonial India through the lens of well-being. Focusing on the cotton millworkers in Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the book moves beyond trade union politics and examines the complex ways in which the broader colonial society considered the subject of worker well-being.