As “They Came in Ships” by the Guyanese poet Mahadai Das suggests, scholarship on indentured immigration is not an exclusively academic concern in Caribbean countries with sizeable Indian populations. An international conference on Indian diaspora held recently at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago, was not only covered by national news media, but also attended by Trinidadians (almost exclusively of Indian descent) unattached to the university, some of whom also contributed papers, helped to organize and run it. In Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, contestations over national identities are grounded in and self-consciously refer to a shared historical archive. This includes conventional, written material such as colonial administration records, newspapers, travelogues, and memoirs that reflect the concerns of privileged observers: government officials, reporters and editors, missionaries, labour activists, historians, anthropologists. It also includes memories and accounts of personal and group experiences by others in these societies, transmitted orally or through other popular media, and they all simultaneously and unevenly undermine as well as authorize each other.

The advent of capitalism has traditionally been associated with a transformation of the economic and political functioning of the family. Capital is presumed to weaken, certainly to modify, gender and age hierarchies by undermining the productive role of the household. The labour market takes over the organization of work and age of consent legislations undermine parental authority in order to create the new legal subject capable of entering “free” labour contracts. The family, though it remains outside the norms of capitalism, primarily undertakes the physical and social reproduction of labour within the capitalist sphere. Such a transformation of the “family” is, however, not inevitable. In nine-teenth-century India the colonial state, though avowedly committed to a free market in labour, in practice often upheld familial claims on women's labour and sexuality. As a result, gender and generational controls within the family were enhanced rather than weakened.

Everybody knows that refuse is a ragpicker's raison d'être. Continuous collection of the waste from big city consumption, along with the rubbish and the refuse, led to collection efforts that gradually brought about a wholesale trade and an industry for recycling these wastes back into production. Until the famous prefectorial decree of 24 November 1883, garbage was left on the public thoroughfares and collected by the dust carts of the licensed garbage collectors at daybreak. During the night, the bins were searched by the ragpickers, who constituted a unique category of workers known as ramasseurs (gatherers). They seemed to work with standard equipment from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. Each carried a hook, a basket suspended from the back (a “dummy”), and a lantern. They sought and garnered a wide variety of products, from fabric to cork, ranging through metals, bones and skins, each item serving a specific purpose, from the most common-place (old papers and rags for paper production) to the most extraordinary (crusts of bread for the crumbs used by butchers for frying). Around 1900, the ragpicker's take consisted of all kinds of old papers, twine, rags for manufacturing paper (50 to 60 per cent), all types of bones (20 to 25 per cent), and an infinite variety of objects (15 to 30 per cent). At this time, however, the rag industry changed dramatically as a result of technological advances (especially the new manufacture of paper from wood pulp). The subsequent collapse of most of the markets exacerbated the recent differentiation between ragpickers. Nevertheless, ragmen still siphoned off 13 per cent of the tonnage of garbage in Paris. Annual exports of this capital resource by the rag trade totalled 27 million francs.