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In a history of labouring women in Calcutta, the author demonstrates how social constructions of gender shaped their lives and how the long-term trends in the Indian economy devalued their labour. The study makes a significant contribution to the social and economic history of colonial India.

Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the preferred packaging material of global trade, transporting the world's grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon. Jute was the second-most widely consumed fiber in the world, after cotton. While the sack circulated globally, the plant was cultivated almost exclusively by peasant smallholders in a small corner of the world: the Bengal delta. This book examines how jute fibers entangled the delta's peasantry in the rhythms and vicissitudes of global capital.Taking readers from the nineteenth-century high noon of the British Raj to the early years of post-partition Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century, Tariq Omar Ali traces how the global connections wrought by jute transformed every facet of peasant life: practices of work, leisure, domesticity, and sociality; ideas and discourses of justice, ethics, piety, and religiosity; and political commitments and actions. Ali examines how peasant life was structured and restructured with oscillations in global commodity markets, as the nineteenth-century period of peasant consumerism and prosperity gave way to debt and poverty in the twentieth century.A Local History of Global Capital traces how jute bound the Bengal delta's peasantry to turbulent global capital, and how global commodity markets shaped everyday peasant life and determined the difference between prosperity and poverty, survival and starvation.

Effluent from electroplating industries contains various toxic heavy metal ions such as chromium, nickel, lead, cadmium, copper and zinc. Recovery of the valuable heavy metals by environment friendly approach for recycling in various useful applications could be significant from the perspectives of clean process development with techno-economic viability. Zinc is an important component of electroplating effluent found in high concentration (80–750 mg/L). The present study investigates on recovery of zinc from electroplating effluent using an efficient biochar synthesized from jute industrial wastes. Biochar characteristics and metal removal mechanisms were established using BET surface area, zeta potential, FESEM-EDAX, elemental mapping, XRD, FTIR, XPS, XRF, Raman spectroscopy and roles played by functional groups. Optimum adsorption capacity of 526.32 mg g−1 was obtained for Zn(II). Zn(II) binding was achieved by ion exchange, complexation with functional groups, electrostatic interactions, adsorption and micro-precipitation. The techno-economic analysis was performed for biochar prepared by chemical carbonization process and found competitive in comparison with other reported biochar obtained by slow pyrolysis process. Further, the disposal of the toxic metal-laden spent adsorbent is a critical issue that needs to be addressed. In the present study recycling potential of the exhausted Zn(II)-laden biochar was explored for the development of micro-fertilizer for plants and soil-fertility improvement. Application of the Zn(II)-laden biochar mixed with soil revealed a positive influence on Cicer arietinum seed germination, plant growth parameters, protein and chlorophyll a and b content. Significantly, there were no changes in the antioxidant enzymes activities, superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT) between the plants grown in control soil and different Zn(II)-laden biochar-mixed soil, suggesting that 15% of the Zn(II)-laden biochar could not be excess condition of zinc. The present study thus addresses an important aspect of solid waste management of jute industry considering significant volume of jute waste production of ~ 0.04 MT/day in India along with the remediation of electroplating and other metal-bearing industrial effluent. Further, micro-fertilizer application of the metal-laden sludge and soil productivity improvement at low cost, environmentally safe and fruitful manner makes the study significant from ecological as well as societal perspectives.

This article describes and explains three patterns in the entry of Indian entrepreneurs in large-scale industries in South Asia, 1850–1947. It begins with Marwari businessmen in the jute industry in Calcutta. Then I discuss the success of the Parsi community in the Bombay cotton industries, and, finally, Gujarati (mainly Hindu) industrialists in Ahmedabad. I focus on three variables that might explain the timing, degree, and social and cultural variations in the emergence of indigenous industrialists in these cities. These variables concern: first, the colonial attitude towards indigenous industrialists in this field; second, whether or not these men belonged to a (religious) middleman minority; and, finally, their social and, in particular, occupational background.

Economic globalization has been a key force shaping British society since the mid nineteenth-century. This article uses a case-study of Dundee and its jute industry to examine the major issues that have arisen as the effects of those global forces have been responded to. Dundee was especially prone to detrimental effects from globalization because of its character as ‘juteopolis’, a one industry town with that industry subject to powerful competitive pressures from Calcutta producers from the 1880s onwards. In the 1930s these pressures became overwhelming, as cheap jute goods from India undercut the Dundee industry's home as well as export markets, and mass unemployment ensued. The local responses to this pressure were sharply divergent. There was both a ‘United Front’ between many elements in the local labour movement, mirroring the much-contested national calls for joint Labour and Communist party efforts, and a quite different ‘front’ bringing together jute employers, jute unions, local MPs, and the city council to call for protection for the industry. It is argued that this divergence can be used to explore key issues in the nature of the forces, national as well as local, operating on industrial cities and their populations.

This essay explores labor politics in Bengal in the period between 1890 and 1939. It investigates numerous supposed paradoxes in labor politics such as the coexistence of intense industrial action marked by workers' solidarity and communal rioting between Hindus and Muslims, labor militancy and weak formal trade union organization. In existing historiography, these paradoxes are explained through a catch all phrase 'peasant worker'--a concept that perceives Indian workers as not fully divorced from rural society and thus were susceptible to fragmentary pulls of natal ties that acted as a break on the emergence of class consciousness. In contradistinction to such historiography this paper argues that religion, language and region did not always act as a break on workers' ability to unite. It demonstrates that workers' politics was informed and influenced by notions of customary rights based on mutuality of shared interests at workplaces. When workers perceived that management violated such customary rights, they formed alliances among themselves and engaged in militant industrial action. In such circumstances, workers' natal ties assisted in producing solidarities. By drawing upon Chandavarkar's works, this essay accords importance to the contingency of politics in the making and unmaking of alliances among workers and thus argues that in different political circumstances religious or other forms of natal ties acquired different meanings to different groups of workers.

An analysis uses firm-level data from jute mills in Bangladesh to analyze the effects of privatization upon employment and output. The privatization program provided an almost controlled experiment on the economic effects of a change in ownership. Thirty-one of the 62 mills in the sector were privatized, with the rest remaining in the state sector, which allowed the latter to be used as a control in order to separate the time-varying industry-wide effects. It is found that privatization has reduced employment significantly, while the reduction in output is not statistically significant.

Farming in Bangladesh is confronted with various types of uncertainties, which contribute to farmers income volatility over the years. As a result, cereal, mainly rice, which is a less riskier crop remained dominantly planted in the current farm plan. But the return generated from rice cultivation has not been able to improve the livelihood of the poor, as rice profitability is low compared to some profitable but risky crops like jute and vegetables. To investigate the behavioral pattern of the farmers towards risk, Dhaka division, largely known as central region of Bangladesh, is selected. The prevailing farm plan of Dhaka division is compared with the efficient one at the current level of expected return in order to check whether the current farm plan is risky or otherwise. Quadratic and MOTAD as well as linear programming techniques have been employed for the analysis. The result of the study reveals that the prevailing farm plan in Dhaka division is risky compared to the efficient plan. Since the current return level is low, the study has recommended that more jute and vegetables should be planted to achieve higher remuneration.