Communities of skill in the age of capitalism: Handloom weavers in twentieth-century United Provinces, India

Abstract

The role of skills has been eclipsed in the transition from an agrarian-craft economy rooted in hand-labour in small households to a modern political economy where productive work takes place outside the household, in offices and factories. Yet the ideological erasure of skilled work should not be confused with its actual disappearance. Precisely because such work was typically construed as private and unimportant, the embedded hierarchies and skills that shaped the handloom weaving industry in the North Indian province of United Provinces under colonial rule could escape systematic conversion to capitalist structures. Skill as human capital constituted the capitalist labour processes in the modern handloom industry, not as an abstract act, but as a historical experience. Handloom workers were reproduced, generationally, socially, and hierarchically, through the passing on of skilled labour within the unorganized informal sector of handloom weaving. Thus the stuff of community skills should move beyond its projection as either 'endangered' or 'regressive' to explore its access to capitalist structures and the exploitative networks that contain, transmit, and enable the production of skills.