Explores industrial labour and labour relations in one of the biggest port towns of Asia and centres of global trade-Bombay focusing on the cotton textile industry.~Breaking away from conventional labour histories, it brings together legal and social history to locate Bombay's factories and industrial relations within larger global movements.~Raises a number of questions which have only rarely been thematized by labour historians - the ideologies of factory reform, the politics of factory commissions, the routines of factory inspection, and the earliest waves of strike action in the cotton textile industry.