As climate change concerns have been rife, especially in Global South countries like India, the discourse around energy transitions promised a more equitable relationship with human and non-human natures. However, it perpetuates hegemonic capitalist accumulations by rendering the labour of the marginalized communities as cheap or unpaid. This dissertation aims to shed light on these inequities by drawing on ethnographic work conducted in the Eastern Indian village of Srikhanda and focuses on the toto (a three-wheeler electric vehicle that performs taxi services and has become omnipresent in rural India). The study explores the informal livelihoods and cheapened labour afforded by the toto, especially as the vulnerably positioned toto drivers must maintain status quo and reproduce existent social disparities of class and caste to continue their precarious livelihood. Additionally, it highlights the crucial role that forces of reproduction, most notably women’s labor, play in making this livelihood strategy a reality through various economic and social processes like financing the toto with microcredit loans and maintaining relations with state officials and customers. This research uses framings of ‘cheap labour’ and ‘forces of reproduction’ to challenge the hegemonic narratives in processes of energy transition that are imperative to make for a just transition.

Throughout the Long Eighteenth Century, British gun manufacturers produced millions of weapons for their military. In addition to military weapons, these same British manufactures produced millions of Trade Guns which were specifically designed for the Indigenous people of the American Southeast Colonies and the Gold Coast of Africa. The British forged relationships between themselves and Atlantic World clients through the gifting and trading of muskets, and the buyers exerted power upon the gun market by making demands on British manufacturers. Through the lens of the musket, we can see strands of influence rather than complete victimization of marginalized peoples. Using a comparative approach, I examine locations of exchange, arguing that the socio-economic and political structure of the British empire in these areas rested on the mediating skills of individual tradesmen. I maintain that the inducement of Indigenous and African headmen steered larger groups of people to ally with and fight for the British causes in both the Southeast American Colonies and the Gold Coast. I also explore the role of gender in the trade of gunpowder weapons. Muskets provide a pathway to understand the systems of marginalization while also illuminating the pushback against those systems by Indigenous and African peoples.