Book ID: CBB430797716

Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India (2019)

unapi

Dey, Arnab (Author)


Cambridge University Press


Publication Date: 2019
Physical Details: 250
Language: English

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 agroeconomic aspects of tea production illuminates 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.

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Reviewed By

Review Abhilash Medhi (October 2019) Review of "Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India". Environmental History (pp. 821-823). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB430797716/

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Authors & Contributors
Besky, Sarah
Sharma, Jayeeta
Joanna W. C. Lee
Namrata Borkotoky
Osgood, Robert V.
Jones, C. Allan
Concepts
Agriculture
Plantations
Labor and laborers
Great Britain, colonies
Colonialism
Tea and tea industry
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century, early
20th century
21st century
20th century, late
Places
India
Atlantic world
Southeast Asia
Malaya
Calcutta (India)
Western states (U.S.)
Institutions
Dutch East India Company
British East India Company
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