Urvi Khaitan, Harvard University
Cite this article: Khaitan, U. (2025) ‘Empire’s Labouring Women’, Economic & Political History Review, 1(1), pp. 3-14.
Women’s labour has both shaped, and been shaped by, the intricately entwined histories of colonialism and capitalism. Over three centuries, colonial capitalism engineered the transformation of the very fact of labour itself, its commodification to unprecedented levels, enabling the spread and entrenchment of waged work, and the forced movement of enslaved and indentured peoples across the globe. In the process, geographies, landscapes, and societies were metamorphosed. New institutions were forged into a form of colonial governance, and gender was a primary site through which colonial rule came to be actualized.
Colonial administrators understood gender relations in the regions that they colonized through a lens that was western and Eurocentric. In the nineteenth century, this took the form of codifying norms that they perceived, often incorrectly, as representative of, and traditional to, the societies they were governing. This intersected with metropolitan gender norms and a hegemonic construction of masculinity and femininity that by the Victorian era was rooted in a separation of spheres for men and women (Horrell and Humphries 1997). A gendered division of labour premised on a male breadwinner/female homemaker model had taken root (Simonton, 1998) and it was with this learned framework that colonial systems attempted to govern colonized peoples. If men worked in waged labour in factories or mines, the woman’s realm was within the home, her labour providing the sustenance, nourishment, and care that supported her working husband and nurtured the children who would form the next generation of working-class families.
This reductive cultural script that essentialised the woman’s domain as the domestic sphere did not reflect the realities of life in colonies across Asia and Africa. Women’s economic activity and proximity to the market have been persistently misunderstood and underestimated, both by the colonial state and by its historians. Women were fundamental to agricultural production, working on land owned by the family or otherwise, and raising and milking cattle. They frequently took produce to marketplaces where they traded and negotiated. They went into forests to pick firewood and gather resources. They wove and they spun. They were builders and artisans. They brewed, they cooked, and they carried water. They cared for their families,and they carried medical knowledge. Women did domestic work and worked for the market. The boundaries between home and the world, the household and the economy, were porous, not distinct.
Enabled by colonial government policies, European entrepreneurs embarked on expropriating the natural wealth of resource-rich regions. The extraction of resources went hand in hand with the extraction of labour from vulnerable populations. British colonisers targeted mineral resources like iron, coal, bauxite, and mica in the Chotanagpur Plateau in central India, copper in central Africa, diamonds and gold in southern Africa, gold on the Gold Coast, and tin in Malaya. They logged teak forests in Burma and established huge plantations of rubber in Malaya and tea in India. The French Empire extracted timber from its African colonies and rubber from Indochina; the Dutch acquired spices and various cash crops in Indonesia. The Belgians took copper and cobalt from the Congo. Mines and plantations wrought devastating change, dispossessing indigenous populations of the lands and forests they had lived in for centuries. These economic engines were fueled by exploitative labour regimes ranging from migrant and convict labour to indenture, corvée, forced labour, and enslavement. These terms often homogenise and de-gender; but many women were part of these labour forces, and the fact that they were women shaped their experiences and conditions of work.
This commentary explores the relationship between the colonial state and working women. It interrogates both the colonial establishment’s perceptions of women’s labour and women’s own experiences within these regimes. I argue that the colonial establishment depended on the extraction of underpaid and deliberately devalued women’s labour to sustain its economic systems. The state and elite actors sought to discursively define the acceptable conditions and limits of women’s labour, but these constructions bore little resemblance to realities on the ground. Contrary to assumptions in much of the historiography, the state was highly interested in women’s labour. Yet this engagement largely disregarded women’s own experiences, motivations, and compulsions, framing them primarily through their cultural roles in society rather thanconsidering their economic activity. Despite the many constraints on their economic agency, many women participated actively in labour markets, supported themselves and their families, and demanded recognition and legitimacy as economic actors. I close with a reflection on why studying women’s labouris key to understanding the structural inequalities that were embedded in colonial systems.
The Colonial State and Women’s Labour
Gendered perceptions about the kinds of work that were considered appropriate, apposite, or suitable for women came to characterize colonial discourse by the mid-nineteenth century. Both the colonial state and middle-class society assigned masculine and feminine ideals to work based on normative beliefs about a division of labour between a male breadwinner and a female homemaker—even in the face of clear contradictory evidence that this did not reflect lived realities for many. Women’s labour was increasingly interpreted as domestic labour even though millions of women worked a double shift: in unpaid labour within the home, and in paid work outside it.
The colonial extractive economy created the conditions for the rapid expansion of waged labour markets in various parts of the world, employing millions of women, children, and men in factories, mines, and plantations. This employment creation was necessarily accompanied by dispossession, in the cases of mines and plantations, or pressuring farmers to cultivate commercial crops like cotton, opium, and indigo, which were then processed in factories. It also made millions of people intensely vulnerable to economic turbulence in an increasingly interconnected globaleconomy. For precarious populations, engaging with waged work became essential for survival. In many poor households, every able member of the family worked in some capacity or the other.
Agricultural work was the mainstay of the vast majority, but new opportunities were expanding. In African colonies, male migrant labour was more competitive in urban waged labour markets and in mines, but Diana Jeater and others have shown that this resulted in an increasing dependence of rural economies on female labour (Jeater 2004). Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian have demonstrated that ‘despite the range of “colonialisms”, whether there was intensive labor migration or not, whether there were white settlers and plantations or peasant cash cropping, whether there was matrilineal or patrilineal descent, African women’s status declined, work burdens increased, and safety nets disappeared, as women bore increasing responsibility, across the continent, for social reproduction’ (Allman and Tashjian 2000, 223).
In India, by the early twentieth century, women were equal in number to men in the tea plantation workforce, comprised nearly 40 per cent of the labour force in coal mines, were significant in mica and manganese production, and formed a substantial part of the factory workforce in textiles. Nearly half a million women were employed in the back-breaking task of plucking leaves in eastern Indian tea plantations, and Piya Chatterjee argues that the assigning of women to ‘‘nimble’ and ‘delicate’ business’ forged ‘fetishized connections between women’s bodies and their labor practices’ (Chatterjee 1995, 54).Although certain forms of work were increasingly feminised, working women also carried out manual labour in mines and construction sites, work that was widely regarded as masculine.
The idea that some tasks were inherently femininedeveloped alongside the idea that women needed protection from the worst of industrial working spaces through labourlegislation. This had taken root in Western Anglophone discourse around protective labour legislation, which in the nineteenth century prioritised elite humanitarian considerations and took on a particularly gendered configuration (Rose 1996).The 1881 Factories Act, according to Samita Sen, heralded an ‘era of protection’, representing a discursive shift brought about by pressure from British and Indian labour reformers to safeguard the health and wellbeing of women and children conceptualised as ‘weak, helpless creatures’ (Sen 1999, 2008). This discourse devalued women’s earning capacities by emphasising domesticity and motherhood, and legislative restrictions on working hours, night work and the use of machinery in turn disadvantaged them in the labour market. In her work on the Bengal jute industry, Sen argues that mill-owners drew on such discourse to dispense with female labourduring the 1930s depression. These developments had an exclusionary effect, leading to an overall decline in female labour force participation. A 1901 act that limited women’s migrations to tea plantations by making consent from male guardians compulsory constructed marriage as a ‘juridical barrier’ to mobility and tightened familial control over women(Sen, 2004). Radha Kumar’s work on the Bombay cotton mills argued that the conception of the ‘family wage’ was not widespread until the late 1920s and early 1930s. From this period, assumptions about men as primary earners and women as wives and mothers began to take root and shaped efforts to rationalize the working class family and the textile industry(Kumar 1983).
Some 90,000 women worked in Indian mines above and below the surface in the early twentieth century, but the continued employment of women underground came under threat as a campaign to protect ‘wives’ and ‘mothers’ from the dangers of the underground mine gained steam. In the early twentieth century, only three countries in the world ‘allowed’ women to work underground—India, Russia, and Japan. The British Mines Act of 1842 prohibited women and children from going underground in a landmark piece of legislation that Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt argues had a butterfly effect in its establishment of the ideals of ‘decent work’ for women based onVictorian norms (Lahiri-Dutt 2020). The colonial Indian government banned children from underground work with the 1923 Mines Act. After much debate, a similar prohibition was extended to women, enforced gradually from 1929 to 1937, putting 40,000 women out of work. Six years later, during war and famine, an Allied coal crisis prompted the colonial government to reverse the ban in 1943. Of 77,000 women mineworkers, 20,000 underground workers were once again thrown out of employment when a transnational humanitarian campaign forced the ban’s reimposition in 1946 (Khaitan 2020).
What were presented as progressive regulations hadconsequences that were deeply regressive: they took away crucial income-earning opportunities for women and drastically reduced household incomes. This was devastating for the millions of families living in poverty who depended on women’s paid labour for their survival and subsistence. The colonial state relied on women’s labour when it was expedient but dispensed with them when the social costs of their employment outweighed the convenience of an underpaid, devalued female workforce.
Working Women and the Colonial State
Contrary to the assumed paucity of archival material on women’s work, several historians have uncovered a great deal of evidence that testifies to the colonial state’s enduring interest in issues around women’s labour. What remains far more difficult to uncover is how these labouring women understood and negotiated their relationship with the colonial state and the labour regimes in which they were embedded. Women’s ownperspectives on their work and their economic agency were rarely considered by the state and elite commentators who wrote on the subject. My work on coal mining women demonstrates how several activists and trade unions seeking to represent their interests completely misunderstood their ground realities. By taking a pro-regulatory stance to reimpose the ban on women’s work underground, these activists thought they were protecting women from gruelling and exploitative working conditions. However, they failed to consider that such employment was income-generating and lifesaving for women operating in a constrained and shrinking labour market (Khaitan 2020).
Discussions of women’s employment tended to overlook economic drivers, concentrating instead on abstract cultural ideals and the perceived need to safeguard women’s ‘honour’. Women workers caused bureaucrats and parliamentarians in the metropole and the colonies considerable anxiety due to the perception that women working outside the home were either deeply immoral or were more susceptible to having their morality corrupted. Charu Gupta shows how the motivations of women migrating on indenture contracts were sidelined in the nationalist campaign to end indentured migration. In the Hindi print sphere, these women were reduced to ‘innocent victims’ or ‘guilty migrants’ and the threats of waged work to their honourwere sensationalized (Gupta 2016). However, women indentured labourers found elements of both exploitation and liberation, with mobility allowing them to shed the constraints of caste, unhappy marriages, or coercive families even as they werebound to the disciplines and demands of the plantation system. Their productive and reproductive labour was essential for the plantation labour regime in islands in the Caribbean, Mauritius, Fiji, and British Malaya, affording them a degree of bargaining power and for future generations, a path out of the trap of downward mobility (Bahadur 2013, Gounder et al. 2021, Pande 2020, Dutta 2021).
Although women played crucial roles in the global supply chains of agricultural products and bore primary responsibility for cooking food, they were often the last to eat and consumed the least. The unequal allocation of resources within households anyway disadvantaged their female members. Furthermore, employers consistently assigned women employees lesser rations and lower calorific entitlements than men, even when they performed labour-intensive work. This was also the case inindustries where women faced no impediments to their access to paid work and were key to the production process, such as in tea plantations (Khaitan 2024).
Food insecurity had increased as colonial policies changed distribution patterns and prioritized cash crops over food production. Famines raged and ravaged the world (Davis 2000). In colonial India, famine relief programmes took the form ofstate employment on public works. Madhavi Jha shows how the allocation of tasks and wages were gendered. Women were more often associated with carrying tasks, which were seen as less skilled and strenuous than digging, a typification that was used to justify a lower female wage. However, women actively contested these norms and wage differentials. Some women refused to work if they were forced to carry instead of dig orsubverted their allotted tasks if they were not happy with the jobs they were given. The famine code’s task-gender association was never accepted wholesale, but Jha notes that ultimately ‘the power of the state lay in the very exercise of moving towards these ideals’ (Jha 2020).
However, it is important to note that these ideals were not simply imposed from the metropole but were forged through interaction and transnational connections. Elise van NederveenMeerkerk has compared and contrasted women’s work in the Netherlands and Java, highlighting the influence of colonial policies and their intended and unintended consequences, one of which was the rising labour force participation of Javanese women, which ran counter to the imperial imposition of the male breadwinner ideal. The Dutch East Indies economy relied on the intensification of women’s labour in rice cultivation, in cottage textiles industries, and the underpaid labour of women and children in its plantations. Colonial connections impacted women’s economic roles and their use of time and energy in both the colony and the metropole (Van Nederveen Meerkerk2019).
One of the most powerful cases demonstrating the resistance of women to their economic and political marginalization by the colonial state is the Egba women’s tax revolt in Abeokuta, Nigeria in 1947-48. Women had been central to the expansion of capitalism in Yorubaland, processing, trading and distributing cash crops. For them, their status as taxpayers reinforced their economic independence and fostered expectations that the colonial state would protect their interests. When it became clear this would not happen, Egba women built a coalition to launch a tax revolt; embedded within their demands was a call for recognition of women’s economic and social position and their contribution to the state. The colonial state was forced to make important concessions, and even though some were eventually overturned, the revolt marked a turning point in redefining women’s relationship with the colonial administration (Byfield 2003).
Working women agitated, protested, and went on strike the world over, confronting the entrenched power inequalities they faced. Despite the colonial state’s attempts to define them as ‘docile’ and to confine their interests to narrowly defined ‘women’s issues,’ their demands extended beyond natalist concerns to include higher wages, improved working and living conditions, and dignity at work. Even within the constraints imposed on their economic and social worlds, working women resisted attempts to discursively define and limit the possibilities of their economic engagement.
Doing Gender, And Why Studying Women’s Labour Matters?
So why does the relationship between labouring women and the colonial state matter beyond its own significance? Many might ask, and have asked, what the broader implications are. For long relegated to the margins of historical and economic analysis, it is increasingly, although not quite yet universally, accepted that gender matters and is integral to the histories of colonialism and capitalism. For the last five or so decades, thishas meant a preoccupation, and rightfully so, with writing women back into accounts of the past. Pioneering historians, anthropologists, and sociologists developed theoretical frameworks to integrate gender into analyses of societies and economies. Historians of colonialism have been trailblazing in this regard, reinterpreting colonial archives and widening itstraditional definition to recover the agencies of women in the past. This has often meant a focus on women from elite and privileged backgrounds, who had the time and resources to leave behind accounts in their own voices. Visibly active in politics, culture, and society, yet unjustly rendered invisible by male centred history-writing, works that tell the stories of these female actors significantly challenge unidimensional narratives of life under colonial rule and expose the gendered paternalism that underscored its premise and its practice.
Consequently, the realities and conditions of women from socially and economically marginalized groups have been shrouded in relative darkness, minoritized despite their making up the numeric majority. These women were not subject to elite or upper-caste restrictions confining them to the domestic sphere. They frequently and typically engaged with the market economy and the labour market. By engaging with their histories, we can begin to untangle the structural and systemic inequalities shaping everyday lives in colonized societies. A gender lens can help reveal how families in poverty sustained and endured. Colonial archives have left behind a wealth of primary sources on women’s labour, both qualitative and quantitative, that were shaped by a Eurocentric gaze. Recent work by economic historians shows the possibilities of using hefty government reports and censuses to tell histories of gendered labour that also tell us about the wider economic and social context in which they were embedded (Van NederveenMeerkerk and Dixit 2025, Fenske et al. 2022). The colonial bureaucracy’s unique record-keeping practices offer rich material for historical research—and what better way to subvert the colonial gaze than by turning this evidence on its head? Used with care, the archives of the colonial state hold immense potential to provide insight into the day-to-day negotiations of women and their families, and to bring together microhistories with macroeconomic perspectives.
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