Work and Social Change in Asia

From the beginning of his academic career the Dutch sociologist Jan Breman (1936) has pursued a consistent but wide range of thematic and geographical research interests. This is reflected in his many publications. Most of them deal with labour relations in India and in Indonesia, both historical and contemporary, urban and rural, and with issues related to development cooperation. Breman's writings play an important role in the national and international debates on these themes among...
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From the beginning of his academic career the Dutch sociologist Jan Breman (1936) has pursued a consistent but wide range of thematic and geographical research interests. This is reflected in his many publications. Most of them deal with labour relations in India and in Indonesia, both historical and contemporary, urban and rural, and with issues related to development cooperation. Breman's writings play an important role in the national and international debates on these themes among researchers and policy makers. His writings are often cited and his arguments regularly discussed. The present collection of essays reflects Breman's wide ranging interests. Asian and European scholars and friends discuss aspects of changing labour relations in South and South-East Asia. Topics include small farmers in Gujarat (Chris Baks); IT specialists and Hindu nationalism (Peter van der Veer); the local impact of the 1947 Partition on working people's livelihood (Willem van Schendel) the multi-layered nature of Labour and Capital in contemporary Asia (K.P. Kannan and Mario Rutten), the political meanings of the rape and murder of Marsinah, an Indonesian woman worker activist in the early 1990s (Ratna Saptari); landlord credit in Philippine rice cultivation during the 1920s and 1930s (Willem Wolters); and the bloody repression of an Indian workers' festival in Trinidad in 1884 (Prabhu Mohapatra). In addition there are essays on Breman's personality and scholarship (by Sediono M.P. Tjondronegoro and Marcel van der Linden) and a bibliography of his writings.