Tea Environments and Plantation Culture

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.

Advance 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

Arnab Dey is Assistant Professor of Modern Indian History at the State University of New York at Binghamton. His research interests span the fields of labor, political economy, law, and environmental history. He has held fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Nicholson Center for British Studies at the University of Chicago, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich.