Criminal Capital explores the relationship between neoliberalism, criminality and the reshaping of class in modern India. It discusses how the political vocabularies of urban industrial workers reflect the processes by which power is distributed across the region. Based upon field research among a 'casualised' workforce in the industrial city of Jamshedpur, the book examines the links between the decline of employment security, and criminality in trade unions, corporations and the state.

The volume compares popular discourses of corruption against the ethnography of local labour politics, business enterprise and debt collection, and shows how corruption and criminality consolidate class power in industrial environments. Using an interdisciplinary ethnographic approach, this study interrogates the relationship between capitalism, corruption, violence and labour politics in contemporary Indian society.

An important intervention in the study of Indian political economy, this work will be of interest to scholars and researchers of Indian politics, social anthropology, economics, labour relations and criminology.

Andrew Sanchez is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent, UK. After completing his PhD in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2009, he was LSE Fellow from 2009 to 2012, and Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology from 2012 to 2014. His writings on class, labour and corruption have been published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Critique of Anthropology, Modern Asian Studies and a number of reports and edited volumes. He is currently conducting an ethnographic study of the Indian scrap metal trade.

Part I: Class & Capitalism 1. Criminal Capital 2. Dispossession and the Class Concept in Industrial India Part II: Power & Enterprise 3. The Political Economy of Criminal Enterprise 4. The Decline of Collective Action Part III: Division and Change 5. Ethnic Violence and the Daily Politics of Labour 6. Continuity and the Casualisation of Labour Conclusion