Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour
Case Studies and Debates

This book focuses on the relationship between economic growth in Third World agriculture and the employment of bonded labour

By contrast, it is argued that the incidence of unfree labour is much greater than generally supposed, may be increasing in specific contexts, and that in certain situations rural employers actually prefer this kind of workforce. The bonding of increasingly landless agricultural workers in many Third World contexts amounts to deproletarianisation, and it is therefore wrong to assume that economic development in agriculture always requires the emergence of a rural proletariat, and thus to categorize unfree production relations as anachronistic.

Introduction: towards a definition of bonded labour. Part 1
Case studies: bonded labour in Eastern Peru
bonded labour in Northwestern India
bonded labour in Northeastern India. Part 2 Debates: neoclassical and Marxist approaches to capitalism and unfree labour
the Latin American "enganche" system
attached labour in India
unfree labour, culture and nationalism.