The events of 18 July in the Manesar plant of Maruti Suzuki which ended with the murder of a company manager were not a sudden confl agration. Anger at the plant had been building up for months over the management's refusal to recognise an elected union; workers were increasingly frustrated over their inability to exercise their constitutional rights and the demand of equal pay for equal work was falling on deaf ears.

Landless dalits and adivasis have occupied parts of a corporate rubber plantation at Chengara in Kerala for five years. Despite being pressurised in various ways, they have held out, sticking to their demand of land for them to pursue livelihoods. None of the agreements so far reached with the state government has been satisfactorily implemented. Yet, the issues raised by the Chengara struggle have a social and economic significance that no government can afford to ignore.

Recent decades of globalisation provide a new starting point for the study of south Asia by highlighting critical human issues that force history into the present and generate new productive conversations between history and social science. One fundamental issue is the increasing inequality in wealth and control over human resources, globally and in south Asia. Economic policy regimes in the contemporary world resemble those of laissez-faire imperalism of a century ago more than national state planning regimes that prevailed from the 1950s into the 1980s.

In the light of the great divergence debate, the economic history of Asian countries has attracted increased attention in the past decade. This article brings early modern Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) into the discourse, providing new quantitative evidence on wages, prices, demography and occupations from the Dutch East India Company archives. It is shown that throughout the eighteenth century, Ceylonese living standards were around subsistence level, lower than in Europe, and, until 1760, China.