Description
This paper examines the entangled history of International Labour Politics (ILP), understood here as the modern, nation-state-led model of labour governance. Existing scholarship has largely narrated the history of ILP through the institutional and intellectual evolution of the International Labour Organization (ILO), framing it as an extension of European social reforms, working-class movements, or the Wilsonian diplomatic order. More recent studies have traced its genealogy to various epistemic communities such as European trade unionists, social democrats, and reformist intellectuals. While these accounts are historically significant, this paper proposes an alternative, trans-imperial perspective on the emergence of ILP. It argues that a distinct regime of colonial labour governance developed through diplomatic and administrative interactions among Britain, France, and the Netherlands, from early anti–slave trade negotiations (1815 onward) to the regulation of Indian indentured labour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (in this case, colony states such as colonial India, Reunion, Guadeloupe, Suriname, Mauritius etc are also involved). Drawing on primary diplomatic correspondences from the Foreign Office records at the National Archives, London, and secondary historical sources, the paper conceptualizes this trans-imperial regime as a precursor to modern International Labour Politics. However, the study does not treat the regime as a reified entity. The paper also tries to read the changes in dominant ideologies from anti-slave trade politics to the indenture system, from that of a humanitarian-theological discourse to a more utilitarian one. Beyond reconstructing the genealogy of ILP’s form and content, the paper also interrogates the emergent grammar of the international system as revealed through this institutional history. Rather than replacing Western origins with non-Western ones, the analysis foregrounds the relational entanglement between them as the true object of study.
