Empire's Garden

Empire's Garden PDF Author: Jayeeta Sharma
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822350491
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
A history of the colonial tea plantation regime in Assam, which brought more than one million migrants to the region in northeast India, irrevocably changing the social landscape.

Empire's Garden

Empire's Garden PDF Author: Jayeeta Sharma
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822350491
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
A history of the colonial tea plantation regime in Assam, which brought more than one million migrants to the region in northeast India, irrevocably changing the social landscape.

Coolies of Capitalism

Coolies of Capitalism PDF Author: Nitin Varma
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110461285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
“Coolie” is a generic category for the “unskilled” manual labour. The offering of services for hire had various pre-colonial lineages. In the nineteenth century there was an attempt to recast the term in discursive constructions and material practices for “mobilized-immobilized” labour. Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). It was portrayed as a stage in a promised transition. The tea plantations of Assam, like many other tropical plantations in South Asia, were inaugurated and formalized during this period. They were initially worked by the locals. In the late 1850s, the locals were replaced by labourers imported from outside the province who were unquestioningly designated “coolies” in the historical literature. Qualifying this framework of transition (local to coolie labour) and introduction (of coolie labour), this study makes a case for the “production” of coolie labour in the history of the colonial-capitalist plantations in Assam. The intention of the research is not to suggest an unfettered agency of colonial-capitalism in defining and “producing” coolies, with an emphasis on the attendant contingencies, negotiations, contestations and crises. The study intervenes in the narratives of an abrupt appearance of the archetypical coolie of the tea gardens (i.e., imported and indentured) and situates this archetype’s emergence, sustenance and shifts in the context of material and discursive processes.

One Hundred Years of Servitude

One Hundred Years of Servitude PDF Author: Rana Partap Behal
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789382381433
Category : British
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
This book presents a hundred-year history of tea plantations in the Assam (Brahmaputra) Valley during British colonial rule in India. It explores a world where more than two million migrant laborers worked under conditions of indentured servitude in the plantations, producing tea for an increasingly profitable global market. Behal traces the genesis and early development of the tea industry; the links between the colonial state and private British capital in fostering plantations in Assam; the nature of the 'tea mania,' and its consequences, which led to the emergence of the indenture labor system in Assam's tea gardens. The book describes process of labor mobilization and the nature of labor relations in the tea plantations. It deals with the operational aspects of labor recruitment, which involved the transportation and employment of migrant laborers, from the 1860s until the the indenture system was formally dismantled. It focuses on the power structure that ruled over the organization of production and labor relations within the plantations. This power structure operated at two levels: around the Indian Tea Association, the apex body of the tea industry, and the tea planters' coercive authority. The book examines the role of the colonial state and provides statistics on production, while also telling the story of everyday labor life in the tea gardens, and of the resistance to the oppressive regime by 'coolie' laborers who had been coerced into generational servitude. It analyses the forms of their protests, and raises the question whether the transformation of these migrant agrarian communities working in conditions of unfree labor was proletarian in nature.

Tea in Assam

Tea in Assam PDF Author: Samuel Baildon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 78

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Book Description


Unfolding Crisis in Assam's Tea Plantations

Unfolding Crisis in Assam's Tea Plantations PDF Author: Deepak K. Mishra
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317809335
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
As the Indian economy integrates into global circuits of production, exchange and accumulation, the burdens of adjustment are shared unequally by different sectors, classes and regions. This study unravels the livelihood strategies and living conditions of labour in the tea gardens of Assam. The tea sector has been undergoing a crisis since the 1990s, with stagnant production, decline in exports, and closures of many tea gardens leading to large-scale retrenchments in the labour force. Based on a detailed analysis of secondary data and primary field research, the study examines the extent, types and implications of inter-generational occupational mobility (or immobility) among tea garden labourers in Assam. In the process, it reflects on how even a sector that had brought capital and labour from outside and contributed significantly to the country’s export earnings failed to create dynamic growth linkages within the local economy. The experience of the labour force in the Assam tea sector, the authors argue, is important for making sense not only of the development dynamics of the region, but of the contradictory ways in which forces of globalisation and neo-liberal reforms have been reshaping the worlds of labourers in the margins. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of labour studies, development studies, management studies, and studies of north-east India, as well as to policy-makers and those in the tea industry.

A Tea Planter's Life in Assam

A Tea Planter's Life in Assam PDF Author: George M. Barker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Assam (India)
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description


The Tea Industry in India

The Tea Industry in India PDF Author: Samuel Baildon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description


The Tea Industry of Assam

The Tea Industry of Assam PDF Author: Pradīpa Baruwā
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Tea trade
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Covers the period, 1823-2006.

Tea Environments and Plantation Culture

Tea Environments and Plantation Culture PDF Author: Arnab Dey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108471307
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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

Tea, Love and War

Tea, Love and War PDF Author: Consultant Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon Honorary Consultant and Senior Clinical Lecturer David Mitchell
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1780880898
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
The range of the book: from wartime England to colonial Assam; from sapper training in India to jungle warfare in Malaya – Tea, Love and War tells the unique true story of the child of an exploited village woman gaining recognition and acceptance in suburban England. It is split into three parts: Stuart and Mary’s story, David’s story, and Ann’s story.Stuart, working on a tea estate in the jungles of Assam, fathers a child by a teenage native woman. Stuart’s letters to his family in pre-war England vividly describe his life as a planter in colonial India but conceal his secret love life. When war breaks out, Stuart joins the Indian army, trains as a sapper and is posted to Malaya, blowing bridges in the desperate rearguard action against the Japanese invasion. Back in wartime England, his sister Mary marries Stuart’s best friend, Arthur, who decides to train as an army officer. Mary, now a young mother pregnant with her second child, tells of the year’s delay in hearing news of her brother’s death at the fall of Singapore. Before the child is born, she learns that Arthur has been killed in action in Italy. The story switches to a jungle village in Assam where a small Anglo-Indian child named Ann fights her way through poverty and discrimination, always seeking the identity of her father and his family.Tea, Love and War is a gripping true story, narrated by Mary through her son David. “Much of the text is taken from the many exercise books that she filled with her memories, and whilst my investigations have expanded and updated her story, the history of the relevant elements of the Second World War, the Blitz and public perception of the Malayan campaign leading to the fall of Singapore are more eloquently seen from her individual viewpoint.” The book will appeal to fans of autobiographies, history and social history – Anglo-Indian culture and exploitation of women in India are key themes in the text – and has been inspired by Wild Swans.