Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India [Paperback]

Rethinks the tea plantation economy of colonial east India by highlighting its human and non-human networks and practices.This 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.This 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.Arnab Dey examines the intersecting role of law, ecology, and agronomy in shaping the history of tea and its plantations in British east India. He suggests that looking afresh at the legal, environmental, and agro-economic aspects of tea production illuminate covert, expedient, and often illegal administrative and commercial dealings that had an immediate and long-term human and environmental impact on the region. Critiquing this imperial commodity's advertised mandate of agrarian modernization in colonial India, Dey points to numerous tea pests, disease ecologies, felled forests, harsh working conditions, wage manipulation, and political resistance as examples of tea's unseemly legacy in the subcontinent. Dey draws together the plant and the plantation in highlighting the ironies of the tea economy and its consequences for the agrarian history of eastern India.Introduction; 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.'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 persplc)