Regulating Work : Decasualisation of Dock Labour in Colonial India

Frank Broeze describes port cities as the gateways through which particular regions of the world are connected with overseas. As true ‘brides of the sea’, port cities integrate their hinterlands and forelands in dynamic union, giving birth to urban communities of a very special character and atmosphere. Even when the significance of ports and port cities is realised, port and dock work itself and the regime it has been subjected to, has scarcely been studied. The workers here are said to perform such labours that Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker would term as ‘labours of expropriation’ which is generally taken by historians as a given ‘the field is there before the ploughing starts; the city is there before the labourers begins the working day, likewise for long-distance: the port is there before the ship sets sail from it; the plantation is there before the slave cultivates its land’.