3 - Working Lives

Summary

Tracking rural South Asians from their lives as peasant farmers to their roles as lascar seamen, waged labourers and petty traders, Chapter 3 examines their remarkable working lives. It situates their experience of waged labour within that of other non-white immigrants, as well as that of the (mostly white) native working class. It proposes that current understanding incorrectly concludes that the fluidity of South Asian men’s working lives was a response to structural discrimination in the British labour market. In contrast, it asserts that many maintained their own agenda for economic independence. The chapter contends that South Asians often self-financed their migration to take up self-employment as pedlars in Britain, rather than simply being lascar seafarers jumping ship. This undermines claims that peddling was an imposed form of precarity. As fare-paying passengers, the growing number of pedlars during the 1930s resembles the economic migration of the post-Partition era. Thus the forms and networks of immigration were created prior to, and were bolstered by, the Second World War, rather than being solely a product of the post-war era.