This book has attempted to examine the social processes underlying the formation of the working classes in Bombay in the early twentieth century and their interaction with the strategies of capital: how the processes of social formation were shaped by the nature and forms of industrial capitalism and how they were constrained and conditioned by its pattern of development. The economy of Bombay's workers has been analysed in terms of a nexus of social connections, which operated across the boundaries of city and village, workplace and neighbourhood, the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sector. The extensive use of casual labour in the textile industry, and its preponderance outside, the operations of the jobber system and the pattern of industrial action, as the repression of combinations at work drove workers to organize in the street, integrated the spheres of workplace and neighbourhood. The social relations of the workplace cannot, therefore, be abstracted from the wider social context of the neighbour-hood. Moreover, the casual and uncertain conditions of employment forced most workers to maintain their links with their villages. It also shaped the social organization of the neighbourhood. Since jobs were easy to lose but difficult to obtain, most workers sought to develop connections with jobbers, who might keep them in employment.