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Mattie Armstrong-Price, "Respectability on the Line: Gender, Race, and Labor along British and Colonial Indian Railways" (U California Press, 2026)
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price about his book titled Respectability on the Gender, Race and Labour Along British and Colonial Indian Railways, published by the University of California Press in 2026. Now, this book title tells us that we have a whole bunch of things to discuss, right? There's intriguing things within the British Railways in the sor, you know, later second half of the 1800s, all the way up to the beginning of World War I. There's gender and race things to talk about there, there's labour, and then we've also got the Colonial Indian Railways where we can also talk about all those things. And this book does both, which means we can also do some comparison. So there's plenty of things for us to get into here. Maddie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to Tell us about it.
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
Thanks so much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
Sure. My name is Maddie Armstrong Price. I'm an assistant professor at Fordham University. I started to write the book, I suppose because I was interested in labor history at the time I was starting with the project in 2012 or so. I was doing some labor organizing as a graduate student worker and was interested in thinking historically about labor history.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Fair enough. That definitely makes sense as something to look into. Why this project then? Right. Why focus on railways and British and colonial Indian ones, given that interest in labor history?
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
Yeah, I guess I also was interested in thinking about the ways that the railways changed people's experiences of space and time in the 19th century. And this is sort of what emerged out of that combination of interests. I sort of happened to focus in on railway workers as one sector of workers. It seemed like a way to have a manageable project. And I was interested in thinking about not just what was happening in the Metropoles or in, in this case Britain, but also what was happening in colonial contexts and sort of thinking comparatively there in order to have a more comprehensive sense of what was happening with labor on a global scale in this period of time.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that obviously helps us already identify some of the key words in the title. Right. We've mentioned labour, we've talked about British and colonial India, we've talked about railways as kind of being why those are key components of this project. The first, of course though, of the title is respectability. So what did this mean to, for instance, railway executives in both of these countries?
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
Yeah, so I guess with. In terms of respectability, we can think about this in a few different ways. For one, it had to do with the way people's comportment. So railway workers were encouraged to be polite towards passengers, at least railway workers who were public facing, like guards, for example, to be polite towards passengers, to calm passengers nerves. They were forbidden from drinking on the job. So in some ways this is about politeness. You know, not being publicly drunk, not being rough as the. As the word would have been used at the time. Partly this had to do with domestic situation. So people having a high enough and stable enough income in order to afford a decent home. And there was definitely a kind of gender dimension to respectability where there was an idea that men should be breadwinners and women should as their primary activity be homemakers. They shouldn't be working extensively outside the home, that sort of thing. So respectability Kind of had to do with both of these sides of the coin, comportment and domestic situation. The company managers were interested in cultivating respectability among their all male workforces partly in order to sort of stabilize those workforces and have them be sort of stably employed, stably stable in terms of their domestic situation. They were also interested in sort of for public facing workers, having workers be agreeable to middle class passengers. So that was part of why the workers would be uniformed and why there were these sort of regulations in terms of how workers should interact with passengers.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that's a really clear kind of overarching ideology there that you've laid out with, as you've mentioned, implications for sort of behavior when one is at risk work. How did this play out in terms of the connection between kind of those big picture goals and like what this actually meant for workers? If we look not just at what workers are doing kind of on the job, but their living conditions and their leisure time.
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
So one of the places where employee or where managers really tried to cultivate workers respectability on the ground was in workshop towns. So the towns that grew up around locomotive repair workshops and usually those workshops were situated sort of in the middle of the line so that trains that were damaged could get to that place depend regardless of where they had been damaged on the line. And also because these tended to be sort of rural areas. So the companies could build out big workshop complexes and towns in those areas. And the towns had company housing in them. Although for example, the Great Western Railways company town of Swindon had six blocks of company housing. But then most workers ended up living in private housing sort of outside of that company housing in colonial India. I've looked at the railway town of Jamalpur, which was the main railway town of the East Indian Railway. So the companies created these towns essentially they provided a certain number of their workers with housing. And they also created various social institutions that were meant to allow workers to engage in what were thought of at the time as rational forms of recreation. So there were mechanics institutions with theaters, There were bath houses in order to allow people to, you know, take baths regularly. There were, in the mechanics institutions, there would be classes that were held, there was a library, they would have ways for people to buy food in the town. So basically it was possible to sort of live a life in the town. And they, the companies would also over time sponsor medical support, hospitals that sources, that sort of thing. So there were a range of different interventions that the companies made in these company towns to try and sort of cultivate a particular everyday life among their workforces.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And you mentioned earlier kind of what they imagined that everyday life would look like, right? You know, men nicely washed, going off, being guards, coming home to a woman who they were married to, who would sort of keep house. And that was kind of the goal of all of this. You, however, talk about in the book there were some unintended consequences to all of these things that they put in place. So can we talk about what that looked like?
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
Yeah. So one of the things that really struck me when I was doing research on the project was it really seemed like in these company towns there were strong bachelor subcultures. And there are different ways of getting at this. You can look at this in terms of census records showing domestic arrangements, and there were very commonly male boarders renting from either a railway family or a railway widow. A woman whose husband had been killed at work and who was allowed to retain the tenancy as long as she could pay the rent. So one way of thinking about this is it's very clear that there are a lot of bachelors. Just you can see that in the censuses. But also I found a scrapbook for a railway worker in colonial India. And in the scrapbook, it seems that the scrapbooker is kind of presenting his close friendships, even intimate friendships with his co workers through portraits and through the clippings that he pasted around the portraits of his co workers. So there's that example of sort of almost, you could say, family formation among bachelors. In one of these railway towns, there were in Swindon, bachelor balls that were held in private venues. There was a bachelor cricket team. So there are a number of different ways that you can see that there is essentially a bachelor subculture. And this kind of makes sense if you think about it. In India, the companies were recruiting a lot of single men from Britain. And so there was a gender imbalance in these railway towns. So in some ways it makes sense that the companies may have had as their aspiration these sort of nuclear families. But in practice, lived realities on the ground were a little bit more complex than that, a little bit more variegated. And that's something that I've tried to think through. And one of the things that really struck me was that in the 1840s there was a. Historians have talked about a paternalistic revival. Company managers started to adopt the notion that they should look out for the welfare of their employees in various ways, provide them with housing, with benefit funds, that sort of thing. And in some of that advice, writing for managers, there is A suggestion that managers should be somewhat permissive in terms of workers who live their lives in different ways than the managers live their lives. And so you can kind of read into this advice writing the suggestion that managers should permit a certain diversity in terms of family life or domestic life, family arrangements, and even that they should not be particularly repressive towards homosexuality specifically. And that's kind of, that was surprising to me because my sense from the literature was that paternalistic practices tended to be really moralizing. And in some ways you can see that. And in other ways I think there's, the story is a little bit more complex and there was degree of permissiveness that characterize these places.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So we are talking about in some of these bachelor cultures, homosexuality then, right? It's not just lots of young men together without families. Like there is an element to this that we think is about homosexual relationships, or at least in some instances, I
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
think so definitely the scrapbook gives that indication in various ways.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Do we have a sense of why the paternalists might have been more permissive about it? Was it just pragmatic like, hey, they're there and they're still getting their job done? Or do we have a sense of why that might have been the advice in those sorts of texts?
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
You know, there's a really interesting book by Margot Canada called Queer Career that looks at post war US corporate life. And she talks about how corporate managers, basically, this is in the US Corporate managers basically knew that they were hiring and employing homosexual men to a certain degree. And they were okay with that in part because they realized that those men would be loyal to the company if they were employed and that they would be able to work overtime if they didn't have children that they needed to take care of in the evenings and different things like that. So I've thought about this, I've thought about my story in light of Canaday's research. And I think that there is a way of understanding this that has to do with the idea or that, you know, has to do with the fact that the managers might have understood, you know, why workers who were non conforming in terms of sexuality, having an extra loyalty to the company if they were stably employed and if they weren't being hounded out of their jobs or something like that. So I think there are different ways to understand it. But it's clear that in the advice writing for managers there is a kind of subtle suggestion that they should have this kind of permissive stance. And it's clear that in the everyday life of Railway Workers, it's possible to maintain a life outside of marriage in these company towns.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's really helpful to understand those sort of more nuanced realities for people. If we're talking then about kind of these manager and worker things, I mean, obviously when we're talking about labor, hierarchy is kind of always a really key part of this. And we've been sort of discussing that throughout. Right. Expectations about kind of what you do on the job and where you live and how that all works. But I suppose to put a finer point on it, like, how hierarchical was this? Like, was it if you were, I don't know, a normal guard? Like you couldn't talk to your superior? Like, how sort of strict were these rules about kind of who could go where and who could do what? And is this a place where we see bigger differences between the company towns in the different countries?
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
Yeah. So I think the main thing to say in this regard is that in Jamalpur and in company towns, or what were called railway colonies in India, these were segregated places. So white British and multiracial Anglo Indian employees were able to have tenancies in the railway colonies, whereas Indian workers were excluded from these places. And to some extent, to a large extent, that lined up with workplace hierarchies. So there was essentially a racial bar to promotion that prevented Indian railway workers from becoming guards, for example, especially passenger guards. So that's a major hierarchy and then it's a. So in that regard, the railway colonies were segregated. It's worth saying though, that the domestic labor that was performed in the bungalows, the company bungalows, was performed by Indian domestic workers basically who had sort of housing within the railway colonies as well. So there's a racial hierarchy that is reproduced in the domestic or the residential sphere in India. In other ways, company towns were. There were. So in Britain, let's say the. There were also important hierarchies between sort of more workers who had been promoted over time and whose incomes were higher. For example, there's a memoir by someone who lived in Swindon talking about how the higher grade workers could afford to go to the bathhouse regularly, but younger entry level workers would go to a pond outside of the town to swim because they couldn't afford the bath house because their income wasn't high enough. So there are grade based hierarchies in Britain, but in India there is this kind of additional hierarchizing structure of race that you see in terms of the everyday life in the company towns, but also in terms of workplace relations.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
These divisions are really interesting. Obviously in terms of understanding what sort of everyday life was like, but also if we think about sort of labor history going forward. Right. You talk about, for example, the organizing of unions. How did that work with these environments of such embedded divisions?
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
Definitely, I look at the emergence of unionism in Britain in colonial India, and there were unions that were formed starting in the 1870s. And in India, the union, which is basically a sister union of the union established in Britain, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants. In India, the union is what historians have referred to as a white laborist project. Basically the union was advancing the interests of workers as workers, but also in a kind of racializing way. They were trying to prevent Indian railway workers from being promoted into these higher grade roles in order to secure a kind of two tier labor market and protect their privileged status in the labor market. So that was one of the aspirations of the white laborist union established in colonial India. And it's possible to see the connection between the way that the workforces were hierarchized and the way that the union organizes itself. Right. It's made up of people who had access to these company towns. Formally, membership was restricted on the basis of religion. So you had to be Christian in order to be part of the union. But that was sort of a way to have a racial bar to membership without making that explicit. In Britain, unions were formed early on by higher grade workers, especially guards, formed the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants. And then a few years later there was a union formed by drivers. So in Britain still to this day, there's a division in terms of railway unions that started out in this first decade of unionization. So you can see with that the union kind of reproduces the grade based hierarchies of the. Of the company.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really interesting to see. Are there any other things that the unions sort of reproduce from the kind of paternalistic politics of the employers that we've been discussing?
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
Yeah, definitely. One thing I haven't talked very much about yet in talking about company paternalism is the benefit funds that were established for workers around the middle of the 19th century in Britain and then in the 1860s in India. The benefit funds, there's a lot to say about them, but one of the things that goes on with the benefit funds is that the boards that manage them, which are made up of representatives of workers and of managers, but the workers kind of do the everyday work of processing benefit claims. One of the requirements for receiving benefits for railway widows was that they remain moral and unmarried, which is interesting. And the benefit Fund boards were responsible for surveilling railway widows to ensure that they were maintaining their morality and domestic standing, or something like that. So a lot of the regulations from the or bylaws from the company sponsored benefit funds were adopted by the unions in the 1870s when they established benefit funds for their members. So that's a very kind of practical way that the unions were drawing on the institutions that had been established by the companies. Then there's another layer of this which is kind of more cultural, having to do with issues of representation, and that is that workers adopted a familiar breadwinner politics. So they said we should earn enough to be able to support a family so that our wives don't have to work outside the home. That's a kind of line that you see from labor in Britain from the middle of the 19th century. What's different in the way that railway workers articulated a breadwinner politics was they also talked about their responsibility for looking after the safety of passengers and they talked about their responsibility for looking after vulnerable members of the community through these benefit funds, for example. And in that way they in some sense took over the paternalistic mantle from their managers. Managers cast themselves as benevolent figures who were looking after the welfare of the railway communities and also who cared about the well being of their passengers and that sort of thing. So you see what I call a kind of. Well, what I talk about in terms of the paternal railwaymen emerging within unionist rhetoric, but also in the wider culture in terms of how railway workers, especially public facing railway workers, were represented and understood.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, let's talk more about this public and represented aspect. Right. If we zoom out from the employers or the unions, how did this show up in sort of popular media depictions of railway employees?
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
There are many works, and I look especially in the book at novels that portray railway workers as caring father figures in their domestic life, but also in their working lives. They're looking out for the safety of passengers. And in some cases in the novels, the railway workers are taking care of children who are traveling on the trains in ways that echo the way that they would take care of their own children. So there's a way that in novels, so one of the novels I look at is Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford from the early 1850s, that railway workers are sort of seen as taking care of children. You see this on the job, you see this also in workers life writings. There's an amazing memoir by a station master who worked for the Great Western Railway that was edited by his daughter, actually. And in the Memoir, there are kind of tragedies at the station. His son is killed in an accident and also a passenger is killed in an accident. And both of those events are depicted by his daughter as events that kind of affected the, the emotional and domestic life of, of the, of the worker and his wife. And so in some sense it's as if he's tried to realize this paternal responsibility in his work life and in his domestic life, but he's been unable to do that successfully and he is living with the kind of emotional fallout of that failure. So there are many different, you know, works that represent railway workers as paternal figures in Britain. Now in colonial India, the story is different. The unions talk about themselves as they talk about workers as paternal figures. And I look at that. But starting in the late 19th century, the 1890s, the vernacular press in India, so kind of nationalist aligned publications that were written in vernacular languages, in some cases in English, in other cases really focus in on cases that were referred to at the time as railway outrages, where railway workers had harassed or sexually assaulted passengers. And through these, the coverage of these railway outrage cases, you start to see a different portrayal of public facing workers, not as caring and responsible and respectable men, but as dangerous, violent and rough figures. So in that sense, there's a kind of counter discourse of railway masculinity that take shape in colonial India.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to see the differences there. If we move then into the sort of 20th century, do we see sort of changes to, for example, membership of unions? Right. I mean, obviously the very end of the 1800s, going into the 1900s for labour, kind of across different sectors tends to be a really big moment. So what's happening with membership of unions and sort of internal politics and external public perception? If we look at kind of that key moment for these unions, yes, after
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
1889 or so in Britain, but this is also happening across the empire. And the politics of labor are linked between different sites within the empire. You see the rise of industrial and syndicalist unionism where unions are trying to represent all workers in a particular sector and including workers who are not as stably employed. And you see that in the railways, the existing craft unions or unions that are dominated by higher grade workers really make an effort to organize among workers who are not public facing, who are kind of entry level workers, people who work the line, people who are kind of entry level workers in these workshop complexes. And the membership of unions gradually broadens. And part of the explanation for this in, say in Britain, for example, is that There was less railway construction. So the rate of promotion really slowed down by the end of the 19th century. And I think that a lot of these workers who were stuck in entry level jobs realized that they weren't going to be able to get better conditions, better compensation just by getting promoted. They would need to organize collectively in order to improve their material conditions. So the unions become broader based in India. The Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants of India had been established in the 1870s. It fell apart by the end of the decade, but then re emerged in the late 19th century. In the last decade of that 19th century. At the same time, you see the organization of Indian signal operators in particular who go on strike in 1899 and who are supported by some nationalist editors of these vernacular papers. So in that sense, there's a broadening of the kind of base of organized workers in India. By 1906, you're starting to see in both Britain and India, broad based strike organizing. In India, that organizing is connected to the Swadeshi movement that emerges in part in response to the partition of Bengal in 1905. In Britain, you see the political organization of labor. There's a breakthrough for labor in the 1906 general election. And workers in the railway industry are part of these broader transformations of labor. So labor becomes broader based in Britain. It becomes more industrial in terms of its orientation. And what's interesting to me is that the representation of railway workers changes some in terms of how unions represent their workers to the public. But still this idea of the paternal railwaymen persists as unions start to organize a lot more with workers who are not public facing employees. So there's a kind of tension in terms of the organizing practices on the one hand and the depiction of workers on the other hand.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is interesting. Talking about organizing practices, can we talk about the kind of ones that draw the most attention? We see a lot of strikes of railway workers in these decades. Why?
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
Well, there are strikes in other sectors and railway workers. So for instance, the 1910, 1911, there's a wave of strikes in Britain. And those strikes start out in the mining sector in 1910. And then in 1911 you have dockworker strikes. And railway workers refuse to transport goods that are handled by non union or non workers. So the railway workers get kind of drawn into these dockworker strikes and 1911, and then there's a call for a broad national strike in 1911. So there are wider patterns in terms of unionization and in terms of strike organizing in the labor movement. And railway workers are sort of Part of those patterns, as I said, in colonial India, this has to do also with the rise of the national movement and a kind of cohort of nationalists who are very invested in organizing workers. And in 1906, there's a strike on the East Indian Railway. And some of these nationalist organizers go to the workshop towns, they go to JPUR and they try to hold mass meetings in Jamalpur. Some of the sergeants who oversee workers in the workshops actually fire on the workers who are trying to assemble. So there's greater violence against strikers in India, generally speaking, although In Britain in 1911, workers are also shot in Hanihi in South Wales. So this is part of a broader trend. And there are ways that the response that the state takes to strikes, I show, actually exacerbates or makes more common and in some ways more intense the strikes that take place leading up to World War I and then in the aftermath of World War I. So in India, essentially, the way that the state tries to prevent strikes from happening is by generalizing a retirement benefit. So for the first time, Indian railway workers, including entry level workshop employees, have access to a retirement benefit, but it's on the condition that they not strike. The irony of this benefit is that when workers actually do strike, the benefit goes away. So once you've struck, there's no incentive not to strike again. And the managers know this. And so they try to kind of, they will say to workers, well, if you stop your strike, we'll make sure that this benefit persists. So a lot of times what you see is strikes that run on until workers get a guarantee that they'll still retain their retirement benefits. So this mechanism of strike breaking basically doesn't work very well and also becomes a flashpoint in the strikes themselves. In Britain, the state establishes conciliation boards in 1907, which become a kind of place where workers and managers can negotiate over grievances. But these conciliation boards make the unions able to organize more effectively. And then the state establishes a National Insurance act, which goes into effect in 1911, and workers are, or unions are allowed to have insurance policies that they can advertise to their members. And that creates this immense bureaucratic burden on the unions, which is one of the reasons why the various unions amalgamate in 1913 and form the National Union of Railwaymen. So the advance of industrial unionism in Britain can be explained in part by the steps that the state takes to try to stabilize social relations after the strikes of the first years of the 20th century. So that's One of the kind of ironies that I look at in the last couple of chapters of the book.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a really interesting finding and definitely a takeaway from the book too. Are there any other key things you especially hope readers get from the book?
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
So I guess it depends on the audience. So for other historians, one of the things that I think I try to do in the book and that is hopefully helpful is kind of on a methodological level is that I work across different levels of historical experience, so kind of cultural history, social history, political history, economic history, and try to show how these histories are kind of woven together. And I also work across different scales. So I'm looking at micro histories of these railway towns, but I'm also looking at large scale transformations in terms of governance and managerial practices and trying to show how these different scales link up for people who are invested in labor movements. I think there's a lot here that shows what, how do I say this? Basically there's a lot that labor organizers can reckon with in terms of our histories, histories of racial exclusion, of gender hierarchization within labor movements. And this history really shows some of that. And so hopefully will be helpful for people in labor movements to. In thinking about legacies that have to be worked through for the movement. And then I think that one of the aspects of the book that is potentially most interesting for readers is sort of what we talked about at the very beginning, some of the ironic effects of rally paternalism where you have the emergence of bachelor subcultures in these towns. And I guess for me, getting into the details of everyday life is very interesting and it's very fun when that everyday life is surprising. Shows us something about how people lived in the past that we wouldn't necessarily have expected.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's always such a fun thing that we as historians get to do. So I'm curious what you might be investigating next that might have fun details like that, Anything currently on your desk, whether or not it's a book, whether or not it's related to what we've been talking about that you want to give us a sneak preview of.
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Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
Yeah, I'm really excited about the second project. I'm going to do a research trip this summer to get started on the project. Basically what I'm interested in looking at are various sectors of public facing workers in Britain from the 19th century up through the 1970s. So still railway workers, but also nurses, for example, food service workers, trying to think about the ways that public facing workers were managed at different times and how they were depicted in popular media and how that changes over time with the nationalization of some of these industries, for example, after World War II. And so the project will take me further into the 20th century and will sort of broaden the frame to allow me to look at other sectors of workers than just railway workers.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds interesting. And, of course, while you're doing that, listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled Respectability on the Gender, Race and Labour Along British and Colonial India Railways, published by the University of California Press in 2026. Maddie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [41:42]
Dr. Mattie Armstrong Price
Thank you so much for having me. This has been very.