"„[…] for a Railway may be as a little kingdom.“ Labor Hierarchies and Governing the Great Indian Peninsula Railway in the 19th Century"

This paper investigates the role fine tuned labor hierarchies played in governing the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company (GIPR) in the second half of the 19th century. Workers of the company were categorized according to race, caste, skill and wage. The result was a meticulously maintained stratification of the labor force, which could be felt in virtually all aspects of company life. It will be argued that this was the main tool for the company’s management to maintain stable labor relations, which allowed for the continuous running of traffic. The stratification will be explored through the lenses of spatial segregation, the wage differential, company paternalism and its consequences for the outcome of industrial struggles. The investigation is based on considerable archival research in India and the United Kingdom, which I conducted for my ongoing PhD project.
The GIPR was one of two pioneering railway companies in South Asia and opened the first railway line on the subcontinent in 1853. By the 1870s it operated a vast railway network in what today is Western India. Over time it grew to one of the single largest employers of industrial labor, especially around its headquarters in Bombay (today Mumbai). Thus, the labor force arrangements of the company had a significant impact on the history of the industrial labor force of South Asia as a whole. This significance has, however, not resulted in profound studies of the company and its labor force. My paper will address this research gap and indicate its importance for both Business and Labor History. The impulse for this study also comes from recently raised voices to bring Business History and Social History closer together again. Labor History has seen a notable revival in recent years but prospects of a closer engagement with Business History have rarely been explored.