This chapter is the first of two focused on the period between 1919 and 1947 bookended by, on the one hand, India’s membership of the new International Labour Organisation in 1919 and, on the other, the birth of independent India in 1947. Together these chapters chart the origins of a social insurance-led model for a future Indian welfare state directed towards an industrial working class. The chapter also documents how - facing rising industrial unrest - the newly elected provincial government of Bombay, the historic centre of India’s textile industry, began to experiment with social insurance. Limited decentralisation under successive Government of India Acts had provided greater autonomy to provinces in the field of labour policy. Bombay was the first to introduce maternity benefits. It then became the first to support sickness insurance for industrial workers as a means of labour force stabilisation. However, given fierce inter-regional competition within India’s textile industry, the adoption of sickness insurance did not proceed because without national coordination Bombay would have been disadvantaged in competition with regions without labour regulation.

Chapter six examines the impact of liberalization on the lives of Egyptian workers and the growth of industrial unrest in the 2000s. After a slow start, the pace of liberalization began to accelerate in the mid-1990s, sparking the beginning of the largest strike-wave since the early 1970s. In response, the regime sought to placate the workers by increasing wages and public sector employment. Beginning in 2004, the government of businessmen reinvigorated the neoliberal project. Between 2004 and 2008, privatizations accelerated significantly and labour market reforms stripped workers of what rights they retained. By 2008, the number of strikes increased dramatically, and the official trade union movement was unable to contain the discontent against the regime. A new generation of workers, many of whom were radicalized women, would begin to question the legitimacy of the regime and struggle to create an independent union movement. These struggles, while not as visible as the student protests of Tahrir Square in 2010-11, would ultimately signal the beginning of the end of the Mubarak regime.