The Coolie's Great War

Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921

Bibliographic Data

ID19973863
AuthorsRadhika Singha (corresponding author)
Year2020
Pages256
Publication date2020-10-15
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueCoolie's Great War (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/oso/9780197525586.001.0001
OpenAlexW4242160990
Open LibraryOL29856921M
ISBN9780197525586
LanguageEN
Citations received12

Though largely invisible in histories of World War one, over 550,000 men in the ranks of the Indian Army were followers or non-combatants. From porters and construction workers in the ‘Coolie Corps’, to ‘menial’ servants and those who maintained supply lines and removed the wounded from the battlefield, Radhika Singha draws upon their story to give the sub-continent an integral rather than ‘external’ place in this world –wide conflict. The labor regimes built on the backs of these 'coolies' had long sustained imperial militarism. This was particularly visible in the border infrastructures put in place by combinations of waged work, corvee, and, tributary labor.These work regimes, and the political arrangements which sustained them, would be bent to the demands of global war. This amplified trans-border ambitions and anxieties and pulled war zones closer home. Manpower hunger unsettled the institutional divide between Indian combatants and non-combatants. The ‘higher’ followers benefitted, less so the ‘menial’ followers, whose position recalled the dependency of domestic service and who included in their ranks the ‘untouchables’ consigned to stigmatised work. The book explores the experiences of the Indian Labor Corps in Mesopotamia and France and concludes with an exploration of the prolonged, complicated nature of the ‘end of the war’ for the sub-continent. The Coolie's Great War views the conflict unfolding over the world through the lens of Indian labor, bringing new social, spatial, temporal and sensory dimensions to the narrative

Ancient history · Art · Battlefield · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Militarism · Narrative · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · History · Law · 1914-1918 · India. Army · Indian Participation · Military history · World War

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