This remarkable study of nineteenth-century capitalist and colonial workplace paternalism combines diverse historiographies with a dizzying range of cross-disciplinary knowledges and approaches, including literary theory, studies of affect and emotions, science and technology studies, feminist theory, and Marxism (classical and contemporary). The result is a brilliantly executed analysis of the consequences of capitalist industrialization for particular gender regimes, patterns of social authority, modes of racialist understanding, and the rise of a liberal-imperial governing order. Mattie Armstrong-Price is that rarest of intellectuals: the historian's historian who is simultaneously a theory head. This book is compelling confirmation that the largest-scale problems can be meticulously brought down to imaginatively conceived, empirically focused, and concretely illuminated microhistorical ground.--Geoff Eley, author of History Made Conscious: Politics of Knowledge, Politics of the Past A rich, comparative history of how ideologies of labor and management shaped histories of gender and social reproduction across political and racial hierarchies. Respectability on the Line tells a compelling story about how paternalism, colonialism, and capitalism materialized in the intimate and domestic lives of railway workers to shape collective action and class formation in India and Britain.--Ritika Prasad, author of Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India This is a timely and welcome addition to the history of railway labor and capitalism. Intertwining histories of metropolitan Britain and colonial India, this empirically rich narrative uses respectability as a conceptual category to understand how labor relations were shaped across railway sites. Respectability on the Line uniquely converges otherwise analytically disparate terrains of colonial/imperial and British history as a 'unified, if uneven field of historical activity.' The focus on gender, race, and labor underlines the fault lines through which railway capitalism and labor relations were shaped at 'home' and in a colonial milieu. Rigorously researched, this book provides a unique lens for understanding complex and intertwined accounts of labor and capitalism.--Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, author of Imperial Technology and Native Agency: A Social History of Railways in Colonial India, 1850-1920 Armstrong-Price brilliantly reshapes labor history to show a gendered and racialized tradition of paternalism operating in imperial and metropolitan spaces of the Victorian state, where managers cultivated respectability, workers stretched the parameters of respectability in non-heteronormative ways, and local workers turned to Indian nationalist leaders to denounce the fictions of this respectable paternalism and expose discrimination.--Judith R. Walkowitz, author of Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London