This article examines the business strategies employed by early twentieth-century Bombay mill owners in work organization and wage differentiation. The traditionally highly segmented and fluctuating domestic textile markets in India were further complicated by colonial free trade policies, making them highly competitive. This prompted Bombay mills to adopt various strategies, including maintaining a flexible workforce, product diversification, tailoring sales strategies to the Indian market, and increasing labour inputs, related to their heavy reliance on short-stapled Indian raw cotton. Using detailed and disaggregated data reported by textile mills in Bombay during the 1920s and 1930s, this article investigates how employers adopted these strategies in tandem with distinct wage-setting systems as management tools to depress the wage bill. By analysing the motivations behind the adoption of or resistance to these tools across different operations within the production process – such as weaving, spinning, reeling, and winding – the article reveals how gendered and social-class stratifications shaped these strategies and led to wage disparities across the industry. Ultimately, these labour-intensive strategies, conditioned by the broader colonial context in which India's textile industry developed, were at the root of the lower productivity of Indian workers, with long-run adverse consequences for India's general industrial development.

中文翻译：

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“印度的人类太便宜了”：工资和工作组织是孟买晚期殖民纺织业的商业策略


本文研究了 20 世纪初孟买工厂主在工作组织和工资差异化方面采用的商业策略。印度传统上高度细分和波动的国内纺织品市场因殖民地自由贸易政策而进一步复杂化，使其竞争激烈。这促使孟买工厂采取了各种策略，包括保持灵活的劳动力、产品多样化、为印度市场量身定制销售策略以及增加劳动力投入，这与他们严重依赖印度短绒原棉有关。使用 1920 年代和 1930 年代孟买纺织厂报告的详细和分类数据，本文研究了雇主如何采用这些策略以及不同的工资设定系统作为压低工资账单的管理工具。通过分析在生产过程中的不同操作（如织造、纺纱、缫丝和卷绕）中采用或抵制这些工具的动机，本文揭示了性别和社会阶级分层如何塑造这些策略并导致整个行业的工资差距。归根结底，这些劳动密集型战略受到印度纺织业发展的更广泛殖民背景的制约，是印度工人生产力较低的根源，对印度的整体工业发展产生了长期的不利影响。