Description
Book SynopsisThis book showcases the history of commodity production in the British Empire and its impact on the natural and human worlds. Focused on the tea plantation economy of east India, it highlights the ecological consequences, legal workings, and labor conditions of this early form of global capital and monopoly trade.
Trade ReviewAdvance praise: 'This book breaks new ground by interleaving the human history of tea plantation in colonial Assam with the natural history of the plant and its pathogens. The result is a fresh and original perspective that emphasizes the role of the nonhuman in the making of modern South Asia.' Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
Advance praise: 'Arnab Dey writes a new kind of history of tea plantations in Assam by focusing on the tea plant, its ecological environments, and their entanglements with science, policy, politics, and labor in British colonial tropics. The materiality of plantation ecology takes center stage here in the imperial drama of agrarian capitalism.' David Ludden, New York University
Advance praise: 'The plantation is a critical subject in imperial and world history, but only rarely have scholars provided such a thorough and nimble history of the entangled human and environmental complexities and instabilities of a specific plantation culture as Arnab Dey does in his important new book. Tea Environments and Plantation Culture is a masterful agro-ecological history.' Paul S. Sutter, University of Colorado, Boulder
'… Dey has produced an excellent, century-long, agroecological history of tea production in India's hilly northeast province of Assam.' Michael H. Fisher, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
'Arnab Dey's Tea Environments and Plantation Culture offers a compelling way to rethink the place of the peripheral figure of the indigene in tea's expansive career in Assam … an important contribution to the emerging body of environmental histories on South Asia.' Abhilash Medhi, Environmental History
'Arnab Dey's Tea Environments and Plantation Culture adds a new, empirically rich account to [the] global plantation studies conversation.' Sarah Besky, Agricultural History
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. Planting empires; 2. Agriculture or manufacture?; 3. Bugs in the garden; 4. Death in the fields; 5. Conservation or commerce?; 6. Plant and politics; Conclusion.
