Jan Breman is Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, and Emeritus Professor at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. He is the author of many publications, including Footloose Labour: Working in India's Informal Economy (1996), for which he was awarded the Edgar Graham Book prize by School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

• Part I. Labour as Codified in Annals of the State: 1. The country liberated; 2. An end to servitude?; Part II. Constrained in Decrepitude: 3. The commodification of agricultural labour; 4. The class struggle launched and suppressed; 5. The Gandhian road to inclusion; Part III. The Political Economy of Boundless Dispossession: 6. The Agrarian Question posed as the social question; 7. Labour migration: going off and coming back; 8. Indebtedness as labour attachment; Part IV. Conclusion: 9. Capitalism, labour bondage and the social question.

'From Jan Breman's lifetime of research with labour in Gujarat have come original concepts of patronage and exploitation, circular migration, footloose labour, neo-bondage, exclusion and expulsion from social rights and habitat - all now essential to our understanding of India's labour-force. In this tour-de-force, Breman synthesises the history of coercive debt, bondage and servitude, tracing its persistence from colonial roots to the present where tied and contingent labour underpins capitalism with Indian characteristics. Shabash.' Barbara Harriss-White, Emeritus Professor, University of Oxford