The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class

This book, based in part on a continuing survey of hundreds of households, charts the progressive disenfranchisement of textile workers in the Indian city of Ahmedabad through the 1980s and 1990s elaborating dimensions of poverty often neglected by statistics alone. It also examines the religious fault lines of the community, which exploded into riots in spring 2002. The crises of Ahmedabad can also be found in Asia at large, where a lack of social provisions can allow entire communities to sink below the poverty line. Breman's book—along with its companion volume, Working in the Mill No More—give us as accurate and penetrating a portrait of this process as we could wish for.