Labour institutions, Japanese competition, and the crisis of cotton mills in interwar Mumbai

India and Japan were leading centres of the cotton textile mill industry in the interwar world, thanks to a significant wage advantage they shared over their Atlantic rivals. Mills in India found it hard to deal with competition from Japan until protective tariffs came to their rescue. Several contemporaries attributed the outcome to the industriousness of the workers, and one viewpoint held the mode of labour organisation in the Indian mills to be responsible for high labour turnover and neglect of training. The paper discusses this perspective and suggests that the theme of labour organisation has enduring relevance for the study of comparative industrialisation.