| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Samita Sen. Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry. (Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society, number 3.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xviii, 265.

Samita Sen's ambitious study is of women in the Bengal jute industry in late colonial India, by which she means the end of the nineteenth century to independence. She chose the jute industry as the only registered industry (under the Factories Act of 1881, amended in 1891) that employed any substantial number of women, some twelve to twenty-one percent of the work force from 1897 to 1950. Other industrial employers of women were smaller and more casual undertakings, such as cotton mills, rice mills, and bone mills, where women formed forty, thirty-five, and thirty-two percent of the work force respectively (p. 11). Presumably the choice was made because sources were more plentiful. Sen uses colonial records and legislative materials, jute mill and trade union records, and some interviews. Drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty's Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (1989), she adds a few years to his Table 1.1 (p. 10 in Chakrabarty, p. 5 in Sen) and much additional material on women in Bengal and the jute mills there (Chakrabarty's index shows fifteen pages on women versus Sen's 247-page book). . . .

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