My research centers on the intersecting histories of labour, childhood, and migration across the Indian Ocean World and the South Asian diaspora. A cornerstone of my scholarship is my doctoral research on child labour in the Bombay Presidency between 1850 and 1920, which traced how colonial factory legislation—especially the Indian Factory Act of 1881—produced new, contested definitions of the ‘industrial child’ through measures like age certification and physical inspection. Beyond Bombay’s mills, my research extends outward to the broader phenomenon of indentured labour migration, examining how Indian workers were recruited, transported, and resettled across British imperial plantation economies, and how these communities subsequently formed diasporic identities through cycles of ‘twice migration’.
Key Publications & Projects
- Alexander, Emma Catherine. Child Labour in the Bombay Presidency, 1850–1920. Doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2002.
- Alexander-Mudaliar, Emma. “The ‘Special Classes’ of Labour: Women and Children Doubly Marginalized.” In Labour Matters: Towards Global Histories, edited by Prabhu Mohapatra and Marcel van der Linden, 131–151. Delhi: Tulika Books, 2009.
- Alexander-Mudaliar, Emma. “Labour Regulation or Protection for the Factory Child: Bombay 1881–1920.” Paper presented at the Association of Indian Labour Historians (AILH) Conference, V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, New Delhi, 2004.
