Of Planters, Ecology, and Labor: Plantation Worlds, Human History and Nonhuman Actors in Eastern India (Assam), 1840--1910

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Of Planters, Ecology, and Labor: Plantation Worlds, Human History and Nonhuman Actors in Eastern India (Assam), 1840--1910 is written by Arnab Dey and published by . It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1267601493 (ISBN 10) and 9781267601490 (ISBN 13).

Overall, I suggest that neither the explanatory framework of 'progress' nor histories of labor struggle (though relevant) fully exhaust or illuminate the operational complexity of these estates especially in the nineteenth century. Discursive planning and attempts at structural order in matters of labor recruitment, wages and legislation had to go hand-in-hand with matters of practical cultivation that regularly encountered the unknown. The plantation world embodied human frailties, violence and resistance as much as crop variants, pest occurrence, damaging rain and price fluctuation. We need to account for them as two sides of the same coin and as equal participants in its historical destiny. My project is not a romantic apology of the difficulties involved in the establishment of the tea industry, nor is it historically blinkered to the social and bodily excesses it involved. But I do not use these plantations as a springboard to explain immanent Marxist theories of capitalism nor are they historical foundations to understand social processes of Assamese nationalism and ideas of ethnic homelands. I examine these plantations (and especially in what I call its first phase of expansion in the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth) qua plantations and the manifest human and nonhuman histories they spawned. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).