Tea Environments and Plantation Culture
Imperial Disarray in Eastern India

Rethinks the tea plantation economy of colonial east India by highlighting its human and non-human networks and practices.

Arnab Dey (Author)

9781108471305, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 December 2018

250 pages, 16 b/w illus. 2 maps 5 tables
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.6 cm, 0.54 kg

'Arnab Dey's Tea Environments and Plantation Culture adds a new, empirically rich account to [the] global plantation studies conversation.' Sarah Besky, Agricultural History

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.

Subject Areas: The environment [RN], Economic history [KCZ], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], Asian history [HBJF]