Four new books on plantation histories of Asia offer a sophisticated analysis of the configurations of liberal imperialism, colonial capitalism, and the construction of post-colonial nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These are Rana Behal's A hundred years of servitude (2014); Jayeeta Sharma's Empire's garden (2011); Ulbe Bosma's The sugar plantation in India and Indonesia (2013); and Kumari Jayawardena and Rachel Kurian's Class, patriarchy and ethnicity on Sri Lankan plantations (2015). While the study of South Asian and Southeast Asian plantations has focused largely and productively on questions of labour control, indentureship, and the spread of ‘coolie’ labour, these new histories combine the established concerns of social history with new insights from critical legal studies, the study of gender and sexuality, science and technology studies, the study of human ecologies, as well as cultural and intellectual history.Footnote ¹ Together, the works shed light on the dynamics of colonial capitalism and on anti-colonial and post-colonial cultural politics. They permit us to ask new questions about the emergence, and the ongoing predicaments, of the global South beyond the historiographic framing of the nation-state. Furthermore, a new comparative and connective study of plantation economies highlights the importance of techniques of labour confinement and coercion that travelled across the world, illustrating the essential nature of the plantation as a site of incarceration.

Representing the cutting edge of a turn to a new materialism in interregional histories of Asia, these works use the specific sites of plantations in Assam, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia as locales in which land, labour, credit, and science were bound together for new agro-industrial enterprise. Plantations, dating back to the 1400s, were some of the first factories of modern capitalism.Footnote ² These works explore political economy, discourses of colonial rule and culture, land settlement regimes, labour markets, and commodity chains, as well as local customs, cultures of knowledge, ecological transformations, scientific networks, women's history, and legal institutions. Tapping into the deep root of plantation scholarship anchored in the experience of the Caribbean and American South, this new wave of Asian plantation scholarship also troubles the waters of historiography by providing both a comparative perspective on the global history of plantations and exploring a variety of ways in which Indian Ocean history both relates to and diverges from the history of the transatlantic. Here we have clues for a site-specific and comparative study of the emergence of the global South.

This new materialist history of the eastern Indian Ocean unsettles the idealist divide between ‘state’ and ‘economy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘bondage’; between ‘market rationality’ and ‘plunder’; and between ‘scientific improvement’ and ‘ecological domination’. They sketch out the contradictions inherent in the liberal imperialism of the nineteenth century, as human and ecological life were both freed by forms of contract, but also more intensively exploited through the machinations of law, monitoring, and the market. Discourses of gender, ethnicity, and race, these works show, mobilized and immobilized agrarian workers in a variety of ways.Footnote ³

An efflorescence of works in the past two decades has envisioned plantations as especially important sites from which to study colonial capitalism. An impressive wave of plantation labour histories has emerged by scholars, including Ann Laura Stoler (1985); Jan Breman (1989); E. Valentine Daniel, Henry Bernstein and Tom Brass (1992); Ranajit Das Gupta (1994); and Patrick Peebles (2001).Footnote ⁴ These studies focused especially on questions of labour control and exploitation, and drew inspiration from classic works on plantation labour in the Caribbean and American South, especially those of Lloyd Best and Kari Polanyi-Levitt (2009), George Beckford (1972), and Orlando Patterson (1967), as well as Richard Dunn (1973), Sydney Mintz (1985), Stuart Schwartz (1985), and Rhoda Reddock (1994).Footnote ⁵ Classic scholarship on the West Indian plantation explored the configurations of the transatlantic slave trade, incarcerated labour, ‘enclave’ capitalism, and law and credit networks, as the essential features of industrial agriculture and world capitalism. The plantation emerged in these studies as a peripheral site with a privileged view of global processes—a site from which the inter-workings of diverse scales of mercantile and imperial power are materialized for historical study. For example, on plantations, we see the entangling of global networks and markets of credit and labour (such as indentureship and metropolitan banking) with the very local formations of trust and discipline (such as kangany labour recruitment networks or the customary and culturally specific bonds between planters, workers, or financial intermediaries).

As elementary to capitalist expansion as the factory and the firm, the plantation, dating back to the 1500s, served as an archetypal site of modern industry.Footnote ⁶ The production of cash crops such as tobacco, cacao, cotton, sugar, coffee, rubber, and tea from the ‘peripheries’ of the world order actually drove factory production and capitalist accumulation in the centres of European industrialization.Footnote ⁷ As Karl Marx observed in 1847, ‘without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry’.Footnote ⁸ Plantations thus connected and entwined economic and political interests across distant world regions, just as they were destinations for forced labour migrations, ripping enslaved peoples away from their families and native lands, and generating new creolized legacies.

But these are dynamics associated primarily with the Atlantic world—and the plantation has come to serve as a master symbol in the history of the slave trade to the Americas.Footnote ⁹ At the heart of a new social history of global capitalism is not the plantation in its expected locations across the circum-Caribbean region, stretching from the South and North American seaboards to the banks of the Mississippi. Rather, the plantation across the rimland and interior highlands of the Indian Ocean world offers a new frontier for study.

The focus on the plantation in Asia plays an important historiographic role in a number of ways. The four works reviewed here add to the critique of the nation-state as the privileged receptacle for South and Southeast Asian history writing by going to frontier spaces and focusing attention on socially marginalized subjects, including migrant workers and indigenous peoples. The study of plantations also helps us to excavate the agrarian formations that emerged on the periphery of the agricultural peasant-farming heartlands of Asia, so often identified with the authentic core of national culture.Footnote ¹⁰ The plantation illuminates questions about industrial agriculture, long-distance production chains, and state power in ways that turn our attention away from the traditional scholarly fascinations with the peasant heartlands of the Deccan and Bengal, where the histories of the ‘national-popular’ are often spun.

These new histories, too, present a fascinating and fruitful means of complementing the largely urban focus of much recent South Asian history writing, which has highlighted city-based middle classes and trajectories of anti-colonial nationalism. The search for the nation, or its microcosmic replica in the linguistic region, has a long, bedevilled scholarship. With these new plantation histories, we see the resurgence of interest in agrarian hinterlands and non-urban spaces in ways that disrupt and destabilize notions of national or regional closure. We do not find the history of the nation, or that of the region, nestled amid the soil, grasses, bushes, and trees of Asian plantations. Rather, we find the histories of disruption, displacement, dispossession, and what Kalyan Sanyal calls the emergence of a ‘need economy’ under global capitalism.Footnote ¹¹

A hundred years of servitude by Rana Behal,Footnote ¹² the renowned historian of plantation life and ‘coolie’ labour, considers the emergence of the plantation labour regime in Assam from the early nineteenth century to the 1940s. At the core of his project is the question: how was it possible that a repressive system of labour control persisted and expanded at the very time when the improvement discourse of liberalism had reached its peak under the British empire? Behal ingeniously places emphasis on the role of the judiciary, and on the bureaucratic reformations of legal code, in historically producing the ‘coolie’ in Assam as an increasingly exploitable indentured labourer.

Behal shows how the proliferating laws of the imperial state, ostensibly aimed at labourers, actually exacerbated an already exploitative labour regime. The proliferation of laws, special inspectors, and bureaucratic reports only served to legalize certain abuses and to create a carapace of perfunctory oversight under which new forms of abuse and degradation could be innovated by planters. If planters and creditors in Assam were the grim reapers of labour power, the colonial judiciary and bureaucracy provided the scythe.

Behal explores how the very language of improvement and imperial trusteeship, especially from the 1870s onwards, functionally served to legitimate and shroud the multiple ways in which labour exploitation was rendered easier over time. This core insight sits at the centre of Behal's impressive work: the elaboration of legal code helped to extend the use of extra-legal force in late nineteenth-century Assam, just as the rise of economic rationality through international markets also called for intensifying extra-economic, coercive force. The rise of state and civic rationality actually summoned and mobilized the techniques of primitive accumulation. The growth of large-scale agricultural capitalism in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was based on these contradictions, Behal argues.

Behal's work resonates with the findings of Jan Breman's famous study of the 1889 Coolie Ordinance in Sumatra, and the role of the colonial government in solving the problem of worker shortages.Footnote ¹³ Behal shows that the perpetual fear of insufficient cheap labour bedevilled plantation owners in Assam. Planters and the colonial government forged an alliance to ensure continuous flows of cheap, obedient, disciplined labour: ‘The government was a support of planters and in fact created legitimacy for the use of extra-legal authority.’Footnote ¹⁴ The ensuing system linked together European planters, indigenous moneylending communities, migrant indentured labourers, bureaucrats, and judges. Planters mobilized workers from communities across Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, and the United Provinces. These regions became the labour reservoirs for the plantations of Assam, just as they served more distant climes across the Indian Ocean and the West Indies. Behal reminds us that 98 per cent of South Asians who travelled the seas in the nineteenth century were labourers. By the time that the labour regime came into its fullest form by the 1860s, women and children constituted up to 50 per cent of labour migrants.Footnote ¹⁵

What distinguished the Assam plantation economy in the nineteenth century was an indentured labour system that used native recruitment professionals (arakati). This differed from the kangany and maistry systems of colonial Ceylonese and Malayan agribusiness. In Assam, under the indentured labour regime, the colonial state and individual European planters were directly involved in the labour market as arbiters and brokers. Behal's work, which is remarkable for its scope and depth as well as for its valuable numeracy, tells the detailed story of how some 3,000,000 migrant workers were brought to Assam between the 1860s and 1947.Footnote ¹⁶

If the mobilization of labour was important, so too was the ability to immobilize labour upon its arrival on the plantations. This interplay between mobilization and immobilization defined the Assam indentured labour system as it matured over time. And, again, the key to immobilization was law. The discursive invention of migrant ‘coolies’ as intrinsically absconding, unlawful, violent, indolent, or untrustworthy also confirmed the need to promulgate new laws to tame and discipline them. Legal code was developed to pre-emptively punish this supposedly unlawful and unruly migrant labour force in Assam. The key moment occurs in 1865, with the promulgation of Act VI to regulate plantation labour. Here, Behal shows, we have the inauguration of the ‘punitive contract’, a powerful instrument of control within the indentured labour system.

Behal traces the ways in which the ‘extra-economic’ or ‘extra-legal’ forms of compulsion accumulated on the tea plantation. For example, the strategic payment of a sub-subsistence wage required that workers, in order to meet their basic needs for survival, had to go into debt. The debt incurred by plantation labourers in order to make up income to sustain daily subsistence meant that they entered into debt bondage. Local moneylenders played an important role in the exploitative plantation system, rendering the labouring population all the more vulnerable to physical, sexual, and cultural exploitation by the owners.

This refined and detailed description of labouring processes on plantations in Behal's work includes insightful passing observations. The arrival of the garden clock, for example, was set one hour ahead of the rest of the Indian subcontinent so as to maximize the amount of daylight, and the amount of work, that could be completed. This was the beginning, Behal notes, of ‘garden time’.Footnote ¹⁷

Two companies inaugurated the Assamese tea industry in the late 1830s: the Assamese Tea Company and the Jorhaut Tea Company. Although Dwarkanath Tagore was involved in establishing the Jorhaut Company, the majority of capital was in European hands. This became exclusively the case by the 1860s when all the business centres of tea-manufacturing companies were situated in London. At this time, Assamese plantations came to operate within a long chain of globe-spanning capitalist interest, producing for an international market.

The 1830s saw the rampant primitive accumulation of land in Assam by the colonial state. Corresponding to the period of ‘Indian removals’ in Jacksonian America, the East India Company embarked on the widespread enclosure of ‘wastelands’ and ‘jungle’, and the forcible expulsion and sequestration of indigenous peoples from their lands. Large swathes of terrain in Upper Assam thus came be converted into plantation acreage and was sold for a song. The colonial government insisted on creating large plots of planation land, setting the minimum enclosure at 100 acres.Footnote ¹⁸

Laws developed by the East India Company in the 1830s and 1840s created an Assamese land market, just as colonial law also instituted a migrant labour market. The ‘coolie’ trade, which reached maturity by the 1860s, set out to match labour demand on newly enclosed plantations with labour supplied from the hill tracks and tribal areas of Bihar, Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh. By 1878, Chotanagpur and Santhal parganas alone were the sending regions for 50 per cent of men and 48 per cent of women to Assam's plantations. The number of workers coming from these areas remained high up until the 1930s.

Mobilizing people required local intelligence and local credit networks. European planters came to depend on indigenous intermediary groups, such as the old ‘portfolio capitalists’ that had thrived under late Mughal rule. Marwari credit networks, for example, greased the wheels of the migrant labour system, just as local Indian groups served as labour contractors and brokers. The logic of the industry—obtaining the most migrant labour for the lowest possible price—quickly led to the reduplication of slave conditions for labourers procured on the market. Behal points out that forms of bonded labour had long existed in South Asia, yet, the logic of the new labour market, especially its drive to continuously drive down the price of labour, actually exacerbated bondage under liberal free trade.

One of the book’s most valuable contributions is its detailed discussion of iterative labour acts upon which the Assamese indentured labour regime was based. In 1865, Act VI introduced various forms of penalization to compel labour to work on plantations, including time in prison for breach of contact. Penal contracts were set for a three-year term (later increased to five), during which time workers were compelled to remain on the estate and not to ‘wander’. This 1865 Act was amended in 1870 and 1873, with the express purpose of protecting workers’ interests, but planters continued to contract labour under the provisions of Act VI, since ‘time-expired’ ‘coolies’ and local ‘coolies’ could be reindentured under the earlier Act.Footnote ¹⁹ Even into the 1910s, time-expired and locally recruited labourers ‘continued to be engaged under Act XIII of 1859 [Workman's Breach of Contract Act XIII]’ which, to all intents and purposes, imprisoned workers on plantations.Footnote ²⁰

Law provided for an embarrassment of loopholes. Thanks to ‘liberal’ improvements to law and bureaucracy, and the significant inflation of both in the later nineteenth century, new gaps and lacunae in administration were effectively exploited by planters on the ground. They were able to interpret the law in ways that were conducive to their own interests, and it gave them an exceptional degree of autonomy to handle labourers in the way they wished to. As opposed to being held accountable by the law, they could now hide behind it. For example, although Act VI of 1865 required that labourers be paid a minimum rate, signalling the emergence of a waged agrarian proletariat, planters actually paid piece-rates to workers. And the schedule of piece-rate payments was determined by the planters at their whim. This kind of wage setting, based on the completion of tasks (in which the definition of the task was often arbitrarily stipulated by the planter and his managers), became a feature of ‘waged’, forced labour regimes on plantations across the globe. Workers continued to be subject to the extra-economic and extra-legal (that is, coercive) domination of the planter or his agents, despite the extension of economic rationality and legal codes. The Act of 1882 reaffirmed this practice of ‘making the payment of the wage subject to the completion of daily work’. Behal shows how iterations of reform, and professed efforts at bureaucratic improvement on plantations, actually served to exacerbate conditions of bondage under the veil of good governance.

In Assam, the 1860s marked a period of great expansion, both in terms of the amount of imported labour required and the acreage taken under cultivation. But the 1870s also saw a large process of rationalization, as managing houses came to coordinate production, displacing individual European planters. Continuing his important thesis, Behal shows that the corporatization of the plantation and the rationalization of the firm did not lead to the mitigation of labour exploitation, but to its exacerbation.

Labour contracts were expanded to five years. Forms of exploitation were aggravated just as new ameliorative protocols were put in place. Plantation managers were enfranchised to work labourers harder, to pay them less, to creatively skirt ‘inspection’, and to punish workers more intensively for ‘infractions’.

Even at the turn of the century, many workers were still describing plantations as pathak, or jails. Complaints accumulated about poor working conditions, grossly insufficient wages, the non-allowance of sick leave, the pervasive use of fines to punish and coerce, and the flogging of women and men as a preferred disciplinary technique.

This exacerbation of labour exploitation in the midst of government programmes to improve conditions is confirmed by Behal's discussion of the high death rate of ‘coolie’ labour in Assam at the end of the nineteenth century. One contemporary official noted that 57,000 people, more than one-eighth of the whole garden population, died in 1892, a rate of 10 per cent per annum.Footnote ²¹ At the turn of the century, abortion became endemic among labouring families because working conditions were so poor.Footnote ²² And since life was so short and mean on the plantations, there was ever the need for fresh recruitment.

In 1901, the arakati system of professional native recruiters operating under British colonial supervision in districts of eastern IndiaFootnote ²³ was constrained. In 1908, the power of private arrest was taken away from plantation owners in the Assam valley. But it was really the widespread rebellions which began on plantations in 1921–22 that finally spelled the end of the indenture system.

Behal valuably resists a teleological narrative that would see the agrarian struggles of the nineteenth century as ‘jacqueries’ and isolated revolts, or as the pre-political prelude to the supposedly mature, urban-based, nationalist, anti-colonial politics of the twentieth century. The general strikes and mass mobilization of the 1920s were not, in the main, evidence of a teleological evolution of proletarian consciousness, nor of Indian nationalist consciousness, Behal points out. Rather, he catalogues a variety of modes of resistance that persisted over time, straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which returned in new forms, like variations on a theme. These included the mockery of the capitalist classes in folk songs, modes of conviviality and social succour among exploited labourers, desertions, shirking, abortion, general strikes, and mass exodus. The choreographies of latter-day resistance continuously hark back to earlier forms. What Behal calls here an ‘integral part of capitalism’—the plantation complex—had one of its clearest expressions in Assam. In this case study, he provides a symptomatic inquiry into the global system of colonial capitalism in the nineteenth century.

Jayeeta Sharma's Empire's garden Footnote ²⁴ explores the history of food systems, social history, the cultural history of Assam, and how the conceptual dimensions of the Assamese region have been continuously contested through and against the space of the plantation. One of the main insights of her work is that the Assamese elite constructed themselves in opposition to an internal ‘other’ represented by the ‘metaphorical space’ of the plantation and the discursive figure of the ‘migrant coolie’. Ahomiya national identity required an internal other for its self-constitution, both spatially and inter-subjectively, and this was provided by the site of the plantation.

The paradoxical place of the plantations as both peripheral and integral to Assamese national construction is brilliantly conceived in Sharma's work. She shows how between the 1820s and 1850s, the rice fields of the Assamese peasantry began to be ‘surrounded by large tea estates’, held exclusively by European planters. Resonating with Behal's study of the emerging legal regime, Sharma periodizes the emergence of plantations in relation to the British transition from military fiscalism to bureaucratic state in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁵

She points out that the coming of the plantation marked the widespread monetization of the Assamese economy, as the East Indian Company empowered mauzadars to collect land tax.Footnote ²⁶ Initially, the British envisioned the Assamese peasantry working on plantations, but they found it difficult to control them. Colonial administrators and entrepreneurs then turned their attention to sourcing labour from indigenous and tribal communities from neighbouring regions. Concurring with Behal's periodization, Sharma shows that the 1860s saw the first large turn towards migrant labour in Assam. Local Assam peasants came to be portrayed as indolent and lazy, while indentured labourers were depicted as potentially industrious, but requiring strict control. East India Company officials began to speculate that it was the innate indolence of ‘Assam's people, a climatic or racial trait, that made work so unpopular’.Footnote ²⁷ On the recruitment market, indigenous communities came to be seen as the most prized and valued labourers because of their ‘resilience, labouring ability, and resistance to disease’. Plantation owners sought cheap and readily replenishable labour that could be easily exploited.

The bureaucratic state became heavily involved in the primitive accumulation of land and the dispossession of local communities, a theme that resonates with Behal's work. In the earliest period, in the 1830s, Chinese planters were recruited to Assam to help set up the industry and the colonial state used the contract mechanism to attract European capital investment. The East India Company offered attractive terms to tea growers by providing them with wasteland at cut-throat prices, especially with the introduction of the 1838 law.

Sharma's work uncovers archival traces of brutal forms of labour control found in the reports of labour compulsion through floggings and beatings, the sexual exploitation of women workers, and the killing of ‘coolies’.Footnote ²⁸ In this context of the imposition of industrial and agricultural capital, one unique side note of Sharma's account is the importance of the Marwari network, especially the Kaya traders who provided credit to the expanding plantation industry. Marwari capital financed a large portion of the expansion of plantations across Assam. British agricultural capitalists came to be closely associated with and linked to Marwari moneylenders and trading firms. This differs significantly from the way in which plantation complexes developed in the English-speaking Caribbean, where credit was exclusively controlled by absentee European foreigners.Footnote ²⁹ Here, similar to the pattern of colonial penetration into coastal and inland eastern Africa, an entrenched stratum of intermediary capitalists was recruited into the machinations of British imperial capital.

The book deftly shifts gears to look at cultural and intellectual history, exploring how Assam's ‘commodity gardens’ not only served as models of political and economic progress, but became ‘significant metaphorical spaces’, as Sharma describes them. She also considers the language politics of the Assamese elite, as well as their politics of history writing. These cultural practices and politics were inscribed in the structures of political economy, strung across this divide between a disenfranchised migrant labouring force and an indigenous Assamese elite that sought to legitimate itself in the eyes of the new colonial regime. In a brilliant, kaleidoscopic account of how Assam came to be constituted as a coherent conceptual and discursive space, Sharma focuses on the politics of Ahomiya elites writing grammar books, compendia, self-ethnographies, and Indological accounts. They established themselves as what Tithi Bhattacharya calls ‘sentinels of culture’.Footnote ³⁰ This was also the period during which Hindu missionization programmes swept across the Golpara and Naga Hill districts, promulgating caste mythologies and a standardized Ahomiya dialect. The Aryan myth became particularly important in this context as Ahom Indologists asserted their supposed ancient Sanskritic and Aryan racial purity vis-à-vis the imagined barbarity of the local indigenous ‘Turanian’ tribes.Footnote ³¹ Here we have a fascinating account of how the political economy of plantation labour is overwritten by a cartography of cultural practices and politics that serves the interests of the elites.

In the last, captivating section of her book, Sharma explores how these assertions of racial, ethnic, linguistic, and caste superiority on the part of Ahomiya elites came to be contested by lower caste tribal and marginalized groups. Sharma looks especially at the emergence of a kachari literary public, as Bodo communities sought to restore what they claimed to be their own lost racial glory, often in ways that asserted Aryan authenticity. This further marginalized and stigmatized labouring communities on plantations, with their migrant backgrounds. Other social groups such as the Dom and Kaibarta followed a similar strategy.Footnote ³² It was against the symbol of inauthentic, uncultured, lower caste, or tribal plantation labourers that rising social groups invented their new-fangled national identity. We see, again and again, how insurgent kin groups in the domain of bourgeois cultural politics asserted ethnic purity, literary and linguistic exceptionalism, and historical authenticity. These were claims for political recognition within the increasingly racialized, and ‘multicultural’, British Raj. Sharma observes practices of ‘print, enumeration and representation . . . aimed to accumulate cultural capital’ which was measured in terms of cultural distance from the planation. If Assam's political constitution depended heavily on the rise of the plantation economy, then its cultural constitution, paradoxically, resulted from ongoing disavowal of the centrality of the plantation economy by rising segments of elites. In Sharma's astute account, the lineages of migrant workers in Assam were the collateral damage of the transition from the colonial to the post-colonial eras.

Sharma's work leaves us with the concept of Assam as a contested region, one formed out of the impress and unstable overlay of political economic exploitation, migrant labour flows, cultural politics, and modes of resistance. She ends with a discussion of the contemporary situation, addressing how Assam, in the popular imagination of globalization, represents a locale of the finest teas and an economy peopled by ‘joyful’ tea-plucking women workers with deft and fine fingers. Her book provides a striking contribution to the history of food systems, picking up on the themes in Piya Chatterjee's foundational and imaginative ethnography, A time for tea.Footnote ³³ Behind the contemporary myths circulating within the globalized consumerist imaginary, Jayeeta Sharma's new materialist account of tea cultivation focuses on modes of production and labour control that determined the emergence of Assam, even as they are obscured in the construction of regional, national, and globally branded identities.

The work of Ulbe Bosma, a major figure in the vibrant school of Dutch social history writing, takes an approach to the study of plantations that complements the interests of both Behal and Sharma. In The sugar plantation in India and Indonesia,Footnote ³⁴ the study of science and technology serves as an aperture into the investigation of colonial capitalism. A central contribution of this work is the study of the technologies and botanical specimens that were transferred from the West Indies to the East Indies and which facilitated the eastward spread of the plantation complex. This is partly the story of the travel of seeds, techniques, and machinery, such as the ‘Jamaica train’ or the vacuum pan. By tracing this kind of circulation, Bosma inventively supplements the traditional focus on the displacement and circulations of migrant workers in the study of plantation history.Footnote ³⁵ He also makes tantalizing suggestions about the migration of West Indian planters to Asia, such as those recruited by the East India Company to work in Bengal in the 1790s, and the transfer of capital between the two regions over the course of the nineteenth century. Gaudin Dutail, for example, sailed to Java in 1801 in the midst of the Haitian Revolution and sought to start sugar cultivation there.Footnote ³⁶ Sugar planters from places such as Haiti and Jamaica made their way to South Asia and to Java as early as the early nineteenth century, against the backdrop of the Haitian Revolution, even as the majority of these planter refugees sought safe harbour in places such as Charleston and Louisville.Footnote ³⁷ While there were a variety of small migrations—what Bosma calls a ‘trickle of planters’—it was only in the 1830s that sustained flows of industrial methods and technology commenced in earnest.Footnote ³⁸

Bosma focuses on the history of industrial sugar production in British India and Dutch Java. He periodizes it in South and Southeast Asia as starting in the late eighteenth century and progressing into the twentieth century. Even today, Mauritius and Indonesia remain the two largest sugar producers in the world.

In their classic ‘plantation economy model’ (1968), Caribbean economists Lloyd Best and Kari Polanyi Levitt postulate that plantations are ‘total institutions’, like prisons or asylums. They exist where there is land available for enclosure and natural boundaries that permit surveillance and policing. Thus, islands, but also hilly and mountainous areas—as opposed to the vast sprawl of flatlands—often become the foci of high-intensity monocropping. Plantations, the classic model asserts, also require vast outlays of credit as they are debt-soaked institutions. This was certainly the case in the Caribbean where production was dependent on huge lines of metropolitan credit from firms in Europe. Sometimes, plantation owners even had to mortgage their plots in order to stay afloat. Financial services, especially the key figure of the merchant creditor, were central to the functioning of the plantation complex.

Bosma's work raises questions about how the plantation complex changed as it came to Asia. He asserts that the attempt to bring industrial sugar production to India and Java was a wager, and its success, not a foregone conclusion. The roots and branches of the plantation complex, as it grew in Asia, could not be simply translated from old stock in the Caribbean. As West Indian technologies and science began to travel eastwards, new problems of land settlement, credit relations, labour recruitment and control, and ecological management emerged.

Bosma shows that large-scale plantations took root in those locations where colonial power was able to significantly disrupt the existing bazaar economy or where the bazaar economy was weak.Footnote ³⁹ For Bosma, it was not primarily the land settlement regimes, but rather the existing credit instruments that determined the degree to which the plantation complex could entrench itself across the Bay of Bengal.

In Java, the Culturstelsel, or the ‘enforcement planting’ system, was developed by Dutch colonial officials in the mid-nineteenth century and remained in place until the 1870s. Its main architect Johannes van den Bosch had been a colonial administrator in Dutch Guyana.Footnote ⁴⁰ And the Caribbean, Bosma shows, was a constant point of reference for colonial administrators and men of business in India and Java. Meanwhile, Bengal became a major site of experimentation in sugar production during this time. But despite attempts to replicate West Indian sugar production processes there, the planters and the colonial government confronted a well-established bazaar market for unrefined sugar or gur. It was so large as to exhaust supply before international markets could be served.

In Java, on the other hand, the government played a much more interventionist role in, first, accumulating land at the cheapest rates, forcibly transforming that land into plantations, and then creating the conditions necessary for the colonial state to act as the direct organizer and supervisor of production.Footnote ⁴¹ In the mid-nineteenth century, the colonial government in Java played the role of a monopoly buyer. The monopsony of the ‘cultivation system’ allowed the government to control sugar output, to define the kind of sugar produced (refined sugar, not gur), and to determine the amount of land that would be converted to cane. Recalling the interventionist role of the colonial state described by Sharma and Behal in Assam, the Dutch colonial government, too, intervened in the places where it found least resistance. If Bengal and the Bombay Deccan were under the firm sway of the bazaar economy as well as being the seats of well-established sedentary peasantries, then in locations such as Assam, or Java, or central Ceylon, as we shall see later, colonial governments found frontiers—what David Ludden calls the ‘unsettling spaces’—for plantation expansion.Footnote ⁴² Using forced labour on forcibly cultivated land, by the early 1880s Java had come to compete with the slave economies of Cuba and Brazil in sugar production.

Finally, we turn to the work of Kumari Jayawardena and Rachel KurianFootnote ⁴³ who studied the plantations in Sri Lanka from their early origins in the nineteenth century up to the contemporary period. This broad-minded and insightful work is divided into two parts and employs two voices. One is that of the historian focused on the emergence of the plantation economy, and the other is of the social scientist interested in configurations of political activism in the twentieth century up to the present. These two voices intertwine in remarkable ways.

Although we gain insight into the social and political activism of workers on the plantations, Jayawardena and Kurian place emphasis on the role of ‘outsiders’—activists and intellectuals outside the confines of the plantation enclave, some from South Asia and others from Europe—who played a significant role in the history of Sri Lankan labour resistance. Labour exploitation was exacerbated by the adoption of the kangany system of labour recruitment, whereby planters and the British colonial state effectively farmed out labour control to local bosses and headmen, with little oversight. In the framework of the total institution of the plantation ruled by the arbitrary authority of kanganies, the emergence of effective modes of political resistance depended upon the intervention of outsiders, the authors assert. Jayawardena and Kurian argue that NGOs, today's ‘outsiders’, continue to play a significant role in labour mobilization, bringing a ‘rights-based approach’ to basic entitlements on Sri Lanka's plantations.

They utilize a number of critical approaches to the study of plantation labour, especially the feminist analysis of gender and sexuality, and the study of caste. Their work provides a fascinating survey of key arguments in Caribbean historiography, especially Eric Williams’ thesis that slavery prepared the groundwork for market-based capitalism. Drawing inspiration from Williams’ thesis, Jayawardena and Kurian, in ways that resonate with Behal and Sharma and Bosma, expose the paths through which bondage, coercion, and innovative forms of enslavement actually expanded with the emergence of colonial capitalist modernity across the Bay of Bengal.Footnote ⁴⁴

Yet, while Behal sees the ‘punitive contract’ as the veiled kernel of the liberal imperial economy, Jayawardena and Kurian seek to emphasize the contestations and contractions within liberal governance. They suggest that the bone fide administrative improvements pursued by the colonial state were often thwarted by the private economic interests of planters. If bureaucratization serves to cunningly shroud colonial violence in Behal's account, Jayawardena and Kurian argue that colonial bureaucrats often struggled to mitigate the violence of the plantation economy, but to little effect. At the turn of the nineteenth century, for example, we see the government's increasing concern to protect the lives of its colonial subjects, which included the slow development of educational policies and schools. The authors point out that, despite the meagre and belated provision of education to children on the plantations, these schools created an important segment of ‘organic intellectuals’ among plantation workers in the twentieth century.

Plantations first developed in the central highlands of the island, in the Kandyan kingdom, which up to 1815 had been under the rule of the raja and chieftains. In Sri Lanka, the plantation labour pool was derived from the Tamil-speaking districts of Madras Presidency in neighbouring South India. It was in the interest of the colonial government to turn on the valves of labour migration in the easiest possible way by drawing coercible migrant labour from neighbouring Tamil Nadu. The result was the kangany system.

Under this system, gender violence was rife as plantation owners and the kanganies (or labour captains) exercised patriarchal domination over migrant labour. The kanganies travelled with ‘their’ workers and oversaw their dealings; they provided the workers with credit and were their first connection to food and supplies, as the kanganies ran the estate shops that sold goods needed for everyday life. Kanganies therefore had tremendous control over the workers’ social and economic existence. They recruited women workers from Madras Presidency in large numbers, as women were considered to be more easily compelled to contribute informal work within the home and family, while also working on the fields. With kanganies laying out advances to cover transportation costs, clothing, and food, workers thus arrived on the Ceylonese plantations as debt peons. The kangany system increased the capacity for exploitation, according to the authors, even as it exonerated the colonial state from direct involvement. Under this system in Ceylon, which was similar to the maistry arrangement in other areas of the Bay of Bengal such as Malaya, the British colonial state contracted out the exploitation of labour to local strongmen.

Plantations emerged in central Ceylon under the supervision of Scottish agro-industrial entrepreneurs. Pre-existing modes of bonded labour for local chieftains (such as rajkaria) came to be adapted to the new needs of plantations that produced coffee, then tea and rubber, for the international market. It was in the interests of Sri Lankan plantation entrepreneurs to break the back of indigenous small-hold farming. This involved introducing what, in 1843, one colonial officer called the ‘West Indies method of cultivation’ to Ceylon.Footnote ⁴⁵

Workers on plantations laboured in ways that recalled the West Indian slave plantation. As Bosma also suggests, a direct transfer of knowledge and techniques occurred, linking the West Indies past to the East Indies future. This included the use of flogging and physical punishment, the organization of workers into gangs to work under overseers, the creation of task-based labour control, and the incarceration of labourers on the estates. The similarities were so strong that ‘coolie barracks’ were even introduced to Ceylon, modelled on the slave barracks in places such as Jamaica and Barbados.

Jayawardena and Kurian's work provides a most impressive survey of the cultures of resistance on the plantations. They show how folk songs, folk drama, and also petition writing had become important forms of response and resilience among plantation workers by the twentieth century. The last portion of their book is a more sociological discussion of the politics of representation and trade unionism from the 1920s through to our own time. As mentioned earlier, the authors place special emphasis on the role of ‘the outsider’ in mobilizing political movements on behalf of plantation workers. For example, the Indian activist Manilal Manganlal Doctor came to Ceylon in the 1920s as a Gandhian and played an important role in developing worker movements. Similarly, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Self-Respect Movement led by Periyar in Tamil Nadu and the Dravid Khazigam Movement provided an important galvanizing force for workers’ politics in the plantation enclaves of Ceylon. Natesa Aiyer, a Tamil Brahman, developed the first All-Ceylon Labour Federation, and Kamaladevi Chattapadhyaya, the widely travelled Indian social reformer, also involved herself in the Ceylonese labour movement in the 1930s.

Activists from abroad included the British suffragette Millicent Garrett Fawcett of the National Union of Suffragette Societies, who worked on behalf of women workers. Meanwhile, Mark Anthony Bracegirdle, originally an Australian communist, spent time in Ceylon and worked for the Lanka Sama Samaj Party (LSSP) before he hurriedly left the island with British intelligence force hot on his heels.

The result of this outsider activism was concrete, argue Jayawardena and Kurian: under the Donoughmore Constitution (promulgated in 1931), plantation workers won the franchise. During the 1930s, they finally became visible as a political block, recognized by the state and represented by political parties and trade unions.

But if this political success was contingent on the activity of outsiders and on the recognition of the colonial state, it also proved fragile and ephemeral when the post-colonial nation-state came into existence. From 1948 through to the 1970s there followed a long phase of disenfranchisement and marginalization of the plantation Tamils, under pressure from Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism and bourgeois Tamil assimilationism. Jayawardena and Kurian contrast what they see as the promising moment of uplift within the context of the late British empire with the bleak aftermath that followed in the Sri Lankan post-colonial nation-state.

The rise of Sinhala-only nationalism, especially after 1954, put paid to the early political successes of Tamil plantation workers, including the Indian Ceylonese agreements and the 1952 Satyagraha. Land in the countryside was increasingly granted to Sinhalese peasants, the supposedly ‘authentic’ group within the state. Plantation workers came to lag even further behind in terms of standards of education and public health. And the rise in the 1960s of the discourse of the ‘Malayaha Tamil’ (upcountry Tamils), as distinguished from the plantation Tamils, indicates the ways in which some Sri Lankan Tamil communities sought to differentiate themselves from the national ‘other’—the migrant Tamil workers on plantations—many of whom had actually been denizens of Sri Lanka for generations. The nation consolidated itself through a ritual sacrifice of its own homo sacer, the plantation Tamil.

Jayawardena and Kurian's account insightfully highlights the ways in which Sri Lanka's plantation history differed from the Caribbean experience. If the figure of the plantation worker became the popular symbol—and a master trope—of authenticity in the anti-colonial nationalism of the Caribbean, the plantation worker in Sri Lanka remained a spurned and demeaned ‘other’, the forever-foreign figure of the ‘national popular’. On this point, all four works under review speak to each other. They each expose the way in which South Asian nationalisms have mined the imaginary of the agrarian hinterlands and of the small-hold peasantry, which became the repositories of cultural authenticity, but in ways that also required the racialization of internal others—especially migrant plantation workers—as backwards, permanently foreign, and culturally deficient. These works suggest that, when taken together, the South Asian ‘national popular’ turned towards its villages while spurning its plantation frontiers (along with its hill tracks and tribal belts), and that this constitutes a kind of South Asian particularity when compared to the plantation histories of the Caribbean region.

The ways in which the plantation worker became a permanent outsider, a perpetual migrant in Sri Lanka, as in Assam or Malaya, decodes the logic of post-colonial nationalism as it establishes the metonymic centre of authenticity and authority in the kinship romance between peasant and bourgeois elites. As discourses of national belonging were interwoven with claims of linguistic, ethnic, and historical plenitude, the migrant plantation worker became a metonym of negation and a symbol of cultural and national lack.

Jayawardena and Kurian, Sharma, Behal, and Bosma all explore conjoint histories of the emergence of colonial capitalism and post-colonial nationalist formation. They picture the site of the plantation as the centre of those intersecting itineraries that have come to define the global South.

Plantation workers, therefore, occupy a place of double expropriation according to these accounts. First displaced and exploited by colonial regimes, they are doubly marginalized and othered by the post-colonial successors. Whereas nationalist historiography associates the identity of the nation with the agrarian heartlands, a new historiography of the global South focuses on the mobilities, immobilities, transfers, circulations, and forms of contestation taking place on frontiers, in borderlands, and across waters. This provides fresh explanatory purchase for the emergence of the post-colonial predicament beyond the formation of the nation-state.

By focusing their excellent book-length accounts of the plantation frontiers of South and Southeast Asia, we gain a better understanding of the function of colonial capitalism, as well as the machinations of native elites to disavow their own role in sustaining the afterlife of colonialism—whether it be in the Assamese plantation tracks, the highlands of Chhattisgarh and Nagaland, the hinterlands of Indonesia, or the upcountry of Sri Lanka.

All of these works use the enclave site of the plantation in different ways to destabilize nationalist regional and state histories of post-colonial South and Southeast Asia. These works are very timely because they shed light on the processes of agro-ecological change that shape our own time, as they relate to the transformation of global food systems, the history of migration, and the ‘new slaveries’ that mobilize labour across the global South. This leads us to a broader reflection on the diverse groups that inhabit the vast ‘need economy’ of disposable life, as described by Kalyan Sanyal:Footnote ⁴⁶ the groups of migrant, bonded, and coerced labour who are the ongoing sacrificial others of present-day globalization and of the post-colonial nation-state.