'The Distress Is Impossible to Convey' : British and German Trade-Union Reports on Labour in India (1926–1928)

This book series is interested in tracing at the example of work the historical connections between regions and in critically engaging with the idea of the North Atlantic World as "normal" and the rest as "exceptional" and "in need of explanation." Books to be published in the series should address the history of commodified labor and investigate one or more of its many forms on a global scale: wage labor, but also serfdom and slavery, self-employed, domestic and "reproductive" labor and the various forms of subsistence and cooperative labor - paid and unpaid work beyond wage labor that constantly has been made invisible. These various labor forms need to be studied both in their specifities and as elements in a linked history of labor. The history and current situation of Africa offer rich examples for. If one of the virtues of labor history in recent decades has been its microhistorical focus on workers and work in relation to the range of social processes in a particular milieu, this series mainly attempts to look beyond both locality and region toward wider spatial relationships. The aim is to publish studies that change focus back and forth from the intimacy and complexity of relationships in specific places and their connections to distant places and long-term processes of change. If you are interested in submitting your manuscript to the editors, please write to: rabea.rittgerodt@degruyter.com Editors: Andreas Eckert , Humboldt University Berlin Sidney Chalhoub , Harvard University Mahua Sarkar , Binghamton University Dmitri van den Bersselaar , Leipzig University Christian G. De Vito , Bonn University

Asian industrial competition, from Japan, China but also India, attracted greater public attention in Europe during the inter-war period than ever before. Indian industrial employment became the subject not only of extensive official enquiries, intensified legislation, a growing number of academic studies and of more popular writings, but also of debates within and between European trade unions.