19世紀インドにおける労働市場と商人 : アッサム・ティー・プランテーション労働市場を舞台にして

概要

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The present paper attempts to show how the Assam tea plantation labour market worked in the nineteenth-century. I selected this topic partly because the Assam plantation, which was established through British capital, is a good illustration of the effect of wetern capital on Indian labour, and partly because the number of Indian labourers employed by the plantation far surpassed the number employed in the other modern sectors of the Indian economy. When we discuss markets, we must take account of transaction costs. The fact that information has a price is the key to transaction casts, which consist of the cost of measuring the attributes of what is being exchanged, the cost of protecting rights and the cost of enforcing agreements. Only when the benefits of opening a market are larger than the transaction costs incurred in so doing, can a market be set up. In the case of the Assam labour market, it seems that the benefits of opening the market exceeded the costs, and the market was indeed set up. However, we should pay particular attention to the fact that two types of marchants, sardaras (bosses) and contractors, played important roles in cutting down the transaction costs. The former were able to cut transaction costs more efficiently than the latter. Therefore, the more sardars increased, the more rapidly the market extended.
社会経済史学会の論文
1999-05-25