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  • The East India Company's London Workers: Management of the Warehouse Labourers, 1800-1858
  • Laura Tabili (bio)
The East India Company's London Workers: Management of the Warehouse Labourers, 1800-1858, by Margaret Makepeace; pp. x + 242. Woodbridge and Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2010, £60.00, $99.00.

In the early nineteenth century, the East India Company, with over three thousand employees, was London's largest single employer of manual workers. A critical sinew of the British Empire, the Company arguably exercised disproportionate impact on London's labor market in an era when small workshops predominated in the metropolis. Margaret Makepeace, Senior Archivist of the India Office Records, has produced a fascinating study of relations between the East India Company and its thousands of workers. She reveals the Company as a pioneer of "enlightened" paternalistic labor relations normally attributed to a later era (10). The book does much more than this, however. A richly textured history from below, The East India Company's London Workers [End Page 350] is pieced together imaginatively from Company records surviving an 1858 purge, correspondence in other companies' records, Old Bailey trials, newspapers, workers' wills, and provincial records. It brings to life the early-nineteenth-century urban milieu through telling observation and well-chosen anecdote. As scholarly works go, the book is something of a page-turner.

Dealing in high value and often fragile imports such as tea, spices, textiles, and porcelain, the Company strove to stabilize a reliable and loyal workforce. This contrasted with other dock companies, which relied heavily on casual labor. The East India Company retained workers through the familiar combination of carrot and stick in a time when coercion—the stick—ostensibly constituted the prevailing strategy among large employers such as Northern industrialists. The Company recruited thousands of male warehousemen via personal patronage and kin networks, as well as female housekeepers and charwomen, not to mention cats to control vermin. Relative to London's handful of other large employers such as the Royal Dockyards, the East India Company offered short hours with extra pay for overtime; steady employment in clean, secure, and safe surroundings; generous wages paid on time and in cash; and pensions. It found light duties for disabled or infirm employees and retired Company sailors, and provided ad hoc assistance for distressed widows, debtors, and the like. An elaborate management hierarchy offered opportunities for advancement. In addition, the Company offered almost unheard-of benefits through a subscription scheme that covered unemployment, disability, and sick pay; medical care by surgeons who treated ill employees and their families; medical leaves; maternity and death benefits; fire insurance; family allowances for men in debtors' prison; and a savings bank, all of which the company subsidized when subscriptions fell short of need. Unlike the piecemeal provision of other large employers such as the Bank of England, workers could expect these benefits as "a right of employment" (198). All of this rendered a job with the East India Company desirable, enabling it to select the cream of London's labor force as measured by literacy rates, prior occupation, and other metrics. In turn, many workers remained with the Company for decades, partaking, as their numerous petitions reveal, in the Company's familial rhetoric within which workers were styled servants or children.

In return, the company demanded substantial control over employees off the job and extraordinary control at work. Workers were expected to reside where Company surgeons could pay house calls both to treat them and verify that they were genuinely ill. Company benefit schemes deliberately precluded men from joining friendly (mutual benefit) societies with their subversively democratic methods. Warehouse laborers were subject to body searches or "rubbing down" to check endemic pilferage (99). Make-peace cites amusing examples of this, such as a man who insisted a large quantity of tea found in his shoes had fallen there during unpacking. Such invasive but by no means unusually harsh terms of employment, however, were compounded from 1797 to 1814 and again from 1820 to 1834 by the requirement that all workers be fit and willing to participate as Royal East India Volunteers. These military regiments, formed to protect Company warehouses in the first instance...

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