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In-Between. Intermediaries and Intermediate Places in Global Labour Past & Present

Winter School, 17-20 February 2025, Habitat Centre, New Delhi

Convenors:

Sebastian Schwecke (MWF Delhi)
Christian G. De Vito (University of Vienna, Austria)
Michaela Dimmers (MWF Delhi)
Paulo Cruz Terra (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Paola Revilla Orías (Universidad Católica Boliviana, La Paz, Bolivia)
Hanne Østhus (University of Oslo, Norway)
Silvia Grinberg (National University of General San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Report by Lilli Trebs

In the search for new conceptual understandings of labour history and labour studies, the conceptual outlook of intermediaries and intermediation shows new ways of understanding processes of labour coercion and migration. Putting overseers, prison guards, recruiters, slave traders, pirates and ships, slave markets, prisons, among others, into the spotlight challenges conventional dichotomies of colonizer-colonized and coercer-coerced, and opens a space for understanding complex configurations of power and interstices of agency.

The Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies in New Delhi dedicated the Winter School ‘In-Between – Intermediaries and Intermediate Places in Global Labour Past & Present’ to this endeavour, with papers ranging from the 17th to the 21st century. Following on from the two previous events in Bonn and Nitéroi, Rio de Janeiro, the innovative format brought together an international cohort of PhD students in the fields of history and anthropology with experienced academics. While the Winter School portrayed a unique opportunity for PhD students to benefit from the expertise of established scholars, the shared intellectual space of the program shook up traditional understandings of student-teacher relations, enabling rhizomatic knowledge flows.

Inaugurated by the director of the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, Sebastian Schwecke, the Winter School commenced with a keynote by Crispin Bates (University of Edinburgh). Setting the tone for rethinking (Indian) labour history by investigating agencies and strategies of labourers and intermediaries in North Indian overseas migration during the colonial era, he highlighted the complicated nexus of loyalty, trust, personal relations, and power at play – aspects that would remain pertinent throughout the Winter School’s discussions. The first day also provided room for the session ‘Inspiring Texts – Texts that Inspire,’ offering PhD students the opportunity to present and reflect on incisive primary sources or academic texts shaping their curiosities and paving the ground for their PhD projects.

In the first four days of the program, the PhD students presented their papers in the framework of five panels, followed by feedback from Hanne Østhus (University of Oslo), Christian G. De Vito (University of Vienna), Paulo Cruz Terra (Universidade Federal Fluminense), and Paola Revilla Orías (Universidad Católica Boliviana), which spurred vivid debates on the theoretical, empirical, and methodological implications of the perspective of intermediation. In Panel 1 on Intermediation in the Labour of Circulation, Ivan Sicca Gonçalves (University of Campinas) discussed the role of the ‘pumbeiros’ in the caravans of 19th-century Central Angola. . Diego Schibelinski (Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies) contributed to the theme of the panel online with his analysis of African enslaved sailors on ships in the transatlantic slave trade. The second panel, discussing Actors of Intermediation, featured Marianna Kelly de Costa’s (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói) presentation on institutions of detention and correction for “vagrant” minors in Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the 20th century and Mauro Armando Adelino Manhanguele’s (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main) discussion of interpreters in colonial Mozambique. Panel 3, illuminating the Intermediation of Labour, proceeded with the anthropological works of Annemaria Laudini (European University Institute, Florence) on the intermediary role of temples in Italy for Punjabi migrants, and Christina Korkontzelou’s (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens) study of the intermediation of transnational labour mobility through call centers in Greece. In the fourth panel on the Intermediation of Labour, Maria Pomohaci (University of Göttingen) discussed power, authority, and corruption of overseers in the conservancy works in colonial Calcutta, and Samiksha Kanaujia (University of Hyderabad) elaborated on the role of the ‘mukadams’ in contemporary sugarcane harvest work in Maharashtra. The last panel on Intermediate Spaces – Coercion and the State concluded with Nabhojeet Sen’s (Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies) tracing of intermediate actors, institutions, and bodies in the context of India’s state formation in the early modern period and Turkana Allahverdiyeva’s (Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies) research on intermediate spaces and intermediaries of enslavement in the early modern Crimean Khanate.

In daily morning lectures, established scholars presented their own case studies of intermediation. Paola Revilla Orías elaborated on Bolivia’s ‘puritantes’ as communal intermediaries using culturally intricate normative knowledge in defense of land rights, challenging existing regimes of preservation and legal memory. Christian G. De Vito shed light on configurations of coercion and their transformations in the context of textile manufacturing in Peru, highlighting ambiguous relationships and contained agency. Michaela Dimmers presented on prison guards of colonial India and their intermediate roles, provoking questions on contested loyalties of coerced intermediaries toward fellow prisoners and prison administrations and introducing her new research project on intermediation in coerced systems in the Indian Ocean The PhD students further received inputs in five teaching blocks on theoretical and methodological themes through selected texts. These explored dimensions of cultural brokerage, reiterated the critique of the free/unfree divide in labour history, highlighted ethnographic perspectives on the material remaking of class in labour processes, and critically situated the archive and the power structures it embodies.

Paulo Cruz Terra introduced his newest documentary film, in collaboration with Nina Tedescao ‘Vagrants, Vagabonds, Immorals’. The short film reflects on the innovative potentials of artistic mediation and calls for “radical creativity” in rethinking means and forms of communication in academic complexities.

The final discussion was framed by the fundamental question of the conceptual understanding of intermediaries as transformers or translators (or both). The remaining questions of the relationship between intermediaries and intermediate places, processes and strategies of intermediation, as well as the identities of intermediaries, concluded that the field of “in-between” deserves further academic attention and inquiry.

While the first four days took place in the circle of PhD students and scholars, the last day opened to a wider audience at the Indian Ocean Symposium and the book launch of Ravi Ahuja’s ‘Shipping Lords and Coolie Stokers: Class, Race, and Maritime Capitalism in the Early Twentieth Century’. During the symposium, Crispin Bates introduced the research project “Below Decks,” which seeks to explore the genesis, lives, and afterlives of piracy and slavery in the early modern Indian Ocean World, focusing on the social dynamics and subaltern perspectives of and on pirate and merchant ships. The present members of the project, including Michaela Dimmers (MWF Delhi), Mahmood Kooria (University of Edinburgh), Noelle Richardson (Leiden University), Sebastian Schwecke (MWF Delhi), and Lakshmi Subramanian (BITS Pilani, Goa), narrated their objectives, perspectives, and contributions to the multi-disciplinary project, engaging with the audience’s questions and comments. The symposium concluded with Mahmood Kooria’s and Philippe Peycam’s (Leiden University) presentation on the Indian Ocean Platform, an initiative that aims to strengthen collaborative South-South-North knowledge production in Indian Ocean Studies by bringing together larger and smaller research institutes.

The book launch of Ravi Ahuja’s (Göttingen University) ‘Shipping Lords and Coolie Stokers’, including two elaborated discussions of the book by Neeladri Bhattacharya and Christian G. De Vito (University of Vienna), extended the scope of the Winter School program to the modern history of maritime capitalism and racist labour regimes. Narrating the intricacies of modern capitalism, technology, and a racially differentiated labour force through the instance of a shipwreck that resulted in a smear campaign against the ship’s Indian workers, his book establishes highly topical references on racist irrationalism in contemporary debates in politics and beyond. The well-attended book launch and the subsequent discussion focussed on how to conceptualize agency and its limitations beyond reductionist binaries.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
mwfdelhi (May 8, 2025). In-Between. Intermediaries and Intermediate Places in Global Labour Past & Present. Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF Delhi). Retrieved February 16, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13w47


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