While its definition has varied over time and geography, a plantation is typically a large-scale, hierarchically-organised unit of agricultural production employing a sizable and mainly resident workforce for the cultivation of specialised crops for export, under – at least during the colonial period – foreign ownership, supervision and management.1 It has been historically distinct from peasant production, which relied mainly on local and family labour for the production of food and associated crops.2 By contrast, plantation production brought together and combined land, labour and capital across oceans and continents for the cultivation of commercial crops. The earliest plantations were developed by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, who were stimulated to produce sugar on a large scale, as its price had increased in Europe with the expulsion of Muslim traders who had commanded its sale.3 The climatic conditions for sugar were favourable in the Portuguese colonies bordering the Atlantic Ocean. An essential requisite for such production, however, was the sufficient supply of labour, which was not available in these regions. The Portuguese were familiar with the institution of slavery in the Iberian Peninsula, and, from the ninth century, the number of enslaved people in the region
This “model” of production, which included the use of slavery, was adopted and adapted by the Spanish, Dutch and the British in their colonial plantations in the Caribbean and South America for the large-scale production of sugar as well as other tropical crops.7 From its inception, the labour regime on plantations was permeated with class and racial hierarchies, as well as force and compulsion. The destructive and oppressive nature of the early slave plantations has been well recorded, with the planters and overseers resorting to “sadistic ferocity” and “exemplary cruelty” in their treatment of slaves, with handbooks of plantation management stressing that punishment should be meted out in a methodical and predictable way.8 Durant has analysed the slave plantation as a social organisation in which entrenched class and race hierarchies resulted in “two distinct classes based on color and status,” and in which racial prejudice and discrimination informed “distinct patterns of race relations and social inequality.”9 Similarly, Giovannetti has emphasised the significance of the slave plantation as a “race-making institution” where Africans and blacks “occupied a subordinate racial slot in the minds of European colonizers, their masters, and the general white population.”10 Within the plantations, they were placed in “a racially stratified division of labour and a racial status
The spread of plantations gave rise to what Curtin has termed the “plantation complex,” which was characterised by a set of relationships that were politically mainly controlled in Europe, made use of slave labour from Africa, and were embedded in commercial networks in Europe and North America.15 While the specific geographical, economic, cultural and political contexts gave rise to distinct characteristics, some common features of labour control on plantations, such as the use of race, class and organisational hierarchies in production and management were retained.16 By the seventeenth century,
More recently, in a discussion on the concept of the Anthropocene that took place in Aarhus in 2014, Donna Haraway introduced the term “plantationocene” as being more appropriate to understand the nature of plantations, through highlighting “historical relocations of the substances of living and dying around the Earth as a necessary prerequisite to their extraction.”22 According to her, it was “more efficient in the logic of the plantation system to exterminate the local labour and bring in labour from elsewhere.”23 While such a framework highlights the importance of forced labour in the spread of European power, Davis has cautioned against a “colour-blind” conception of the plantationocene, which could underestimate the significance of slave labour and “minimize the ways in which racial politics structure plantation
This chapter focuses on key features of the plantation labour regime that developed on South Asian plantations under British colonialism after the formal end of slavery in 1833. It considers the influences of the industrial and transport “revolutions” and focuses more directly on the increasing dominance of finance capital in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century and how this influenced the ownership, management and labour relations on plantations. It pays attention to the increased demand for plantation products, the possibilities for the expansion of plantations in the peasant hinterland and
The argument is developed along the following lines. The key features of the slave plantation “model” are discussed, including its structure and hierarchies, and the costs of the compulsion and maintenance of the workforce. Subsequently, the role of the industrial and transport revolutions and the increasing dominance of finance capital in the nineteenth century in South Asia under British colonialism is considered, with attention being paid to the pressures placed on reducing labour costs on plantations. The chapter focuses on three characteristics of the plantation labour regime that emerged, drawing on examples from India, Ceylon and Malaya. The first is the use of migrant wage workers – either as indentured labour or contracted directly by a recruiter – which lowered the costs of maintenance and compulsion. The second is the “management style” of expatriate planters, who were mainly interested in generating short-term profits that increased their income and bonuses and had no compunction about using harsh methods of labour control to increase levels of production and productivity. The third is the increasingly interventionist role of the state in the development of the plantations through subsidies, infrastructural support and favourable laws for finance capital while not providing adequate protection for workers. In effect, the colonial state, while upholding “laissez-faire” capitalism, enabled the incorporation of bonded “unfree” labour production into plantation capitalism. In these ways, the plantationocene shows its power to sustain its dynamics in favour of capital and at the cost of labour.
1
There have been many studies that have dealt with the economics of the slave plantations.27 Among other issues, they highlight three kinds of costs associated with the slave plantations. First, there was the cost of recruitment and transport, which included the coercion required to control the slaves on the ships, which had to be assumed by the planter.28 These costs were also likely to have been incorporated in the profits of merchant capital from Africa, Asia and Europe, all of whom participated in slave trading in the Western Indian Ocean during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – a practice that was banned by Britain in 1807, and France in 1818, which led to illegal trading.29 Second, there was the expenditure associated with providing the slaves with food and lodging, as well as taking care of medical and insurance costs, even when they were not working on production, including when they were ill or had become old.30 Third, there were the costs of controlling the workers: the cost of compulsion. According to the Dutch ethnologist Nieboer, plantations were “open” resource contexts, with more land available for agricultural production than the labour necessary to cultivate it, and slavery, an extreme form of compulsion, was used to meet the labour requirements of production.31 There were costs associated with the use of violence to control and contain the workforce, including preventing slaves from running away from the plantation.
2 The Industrial and Transport “Revolutions” and the Dominance of Finance Capital
From the middle of the eighteenth century, Britain experienced the First Industrial Revolution, which was most notably associated with the increased growth of large-scale manufacturing and international trade.36 By the nineteenth century, rapid technological progress was occurring in Britain, along
From the second half of the nineteenth century, there was an increased dominance of finance capital in Britain through the formation of companies that were keen to invest in the colonies if the returns were sufficiently lucrative. These developments gave rise to what Courtenay has labelled the “industrial plantation,” the chief distinguishing feature of which was the high involvement of risk capital. Plantations had to compete for resources with alternative forms of investment and were successful only if investors could expect a sufficiently high return after the costs of clearing the land and buying the necessary labour and capital were taken into account.40 There was a spread of company formation and the expansion of finance capital concerning the ownership, management, trade, production and associated services of plantation products. Under British colonialism, the industrial plantation in Asia was promoted by “sterling” companies which raised capital on the London market. As the companies developed, they often turned to agency houses to “manage” their plantations on a commission basis rather than handle their affairs from a distance.
The agency houses not only “managed” the plantations but often took care of the brokering and shipping of the commodities. These companies were also
The necessary investment for these companies, which operated in a competitive economic environment, was available only if plantations were sufficiently profitable on a yearly basis. This also meant that finance capital had an important influence on the organisation of production. The dominance of finance capital also meant that the owner-planter was replaced by expatriate management, the consequences of which will be discussed later. The pressure to promote profitability in the short-term mitigated against capital investment which could yield returns only in the long-term. Under these circumstances, as discussed below, the other factor of production – namely, labour – became even more significant, and the focus was increasingly on obtaining sufficient labour supply at the lowest cost possible.
3
The immediate shortage of labour after the abolition of slavery was met by hiring workers from China, Java and the Indian sub-continent on a system of indenture in order to meet the needs of plantation production.45 The abuses of this system of labour recruitment have been well documented by Hugh Tinker who argued that the “world of slavery still survived; the plantation was a world apart, on its own, subject to the laws – or whims – of those in charge: the overseers and the manager or the proprietor.”46 The role of Indian indentured labour, however, needs to be embedded within the wider process of migration within and from India, to avoid what Richard Allen has termed “chronological apartheid.” Instead, as Allen argues, we need to place such movements of labour within “broader historical contexts and to explore the connections between pre- and post-emancipation labour systems more fully.”47 In the nineteenth century, industrial development in British India had already given rise to a circulation of labour, and the migration of workers from rural areas for this purpose was not viewed as “a permanent exodus” but rather as “a temporary transfer” with the intention to return.48 Similarly, indenture was largely viewed by workers as temporary migration, and their expectations did not normally extend beyond high wages and an eventual return to India.49
In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, indenture gave way to “free” wage labour directly recruited by an intermediary – the jobber – who dealt with the plantation manager on behalf of his “gang.” From the planters, the contractor – often referred to as the kangany or maistry – received interest-free loans to advance to workers from their villages who were willing to work on the estates.50 This system of obtaining labour for plantation work had several advantages for plantation management with regard to getting an adequate supply of labour and reducing the cost of labour. First, while in both systems the
By the 1880s, while recruitment for the Assam plantations was done through the official government agents in Calcutta as well as through a labour contractor, a sirdar, the latter system was the preferred and cheaper option for planters.51 Using this method, the estates were able to get labour from Bihar, Orissa, the Central Provinces and Madras52 and even from some Telugu districts.53 The kangany system was used to recruit workers to British Malaya, where there was an increased demand for labour for the sugar, coffee and rubber plantations. Labour from India was initially brought across on an indentured basis but was replaced by the kangany system. An employer seeking labour would send a recruiter, the kangany, to India advancing him the expenses for the journey. The latter would return in due course and repay the money owed to the planters, while getting a payment on the number of workers he had managed to bring across. Initial attempts were made to secure indentured labour for the coffee plantations in Ceylon, but this was soon replaced by the kangany system of recruitment for the tea and rubber plantations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to Allen, around 1.5 million workers migrated to work on plantations in Ceylon and Malaya between the 1840s and the early twentieth century, usually on “short-term, often verbal, contracts,” while 700,000 to 750,000 labourers migrated to work on plantations in Assam between 1870 and 1900.54
While the kangany system was important in increasing the number of workers, the planters used it also to bind the worker to the plantations through ties of indebtedness to ensure the needs of production. As advances were provided for their travel costs and these were deducted from their wages, plantation workers began their lives in debt.55 The workers owed the passage money to
These features of direct recruitment (that is, bypassing official authorities) meant that while these migrant workers were viewed as “free” labour, they were, in effect, bonded labour, tied through debts to the labour contractor, who remained the intermediary between the recruited workers and the management.61 The kangany system also transferred part of the “responsibility of containing and controlling the labour force from the planter to an intermediary,” with the workers effectively being “chattel labour,” like under slavery.62 Overall, it was clear that the processes involved in recruiting and controlling labour were important in securing sufficient labour when needed, as the contractor was able to recruit workers from his village, while involving the contractor in the supervision of workers meant a reduction or transference of some of the management and labour control cost.63
4 Expatriate Management
By the late nineteenth century, Asian plantations were mainly run by expatriate managers. According to a Royal Commission in 1931, about 90 per cent of plantations in North India and nearly all those in Madras and Burma were managed by Europeans. Plantations managed by Indians were few and generally far smaller in size.68 Expatriate managers were, by and large, interested in making their fortunes during their stay on the plantation and returning home as wealthy as possible, and as soon as possible. The typical remuneration package combined a relatively modest basic monthly salary with a potentially
Planters often imposed slave-like forms of coercion in order to maximise their control over labour. Many planters familiar with slave labour moved from the sugar plantations they had set up in the West Indies in the 1830s and the 1840s to Asian colonies, including Ceylon, Malaya and Assam in the 1870s to 1880s.72 Some of the cruelty employed on the Assam plantations was highlighted in the Chief Commissioner’s Annual Report on Labour Immigration into Assam in 1900. Amongst other things, this report, by Commissioner Henry Cotton, showed an increase in the mortality levels in Assam, payment of wages below the legal minimum, numerous instances of non-payment of wages, failure to provide rice at the statutory price, and failure to pay the required subsistence allowance to sick labourers. The report also mentioned instances in which rigorous punishment was meted out to labourers by magistrates, often for very minor offences. Meanwhile, European planters and managers could be acquitted even in cases that involved the murder of a plantation worker.73 The Superintendent of Police in Kandy (Ceylon) reported that plantation workers were treated in ways that were “exceeding arbitrary and cruel,” claiming conditions were even worse than “Negro slavery.”74 Thus, plantation management methods reminiscent of an earlier era had evidently survived.
5 The Interventionist State
In spite of upholding the “laissez-faire” philosophy of capitalism, the colonial state intervened with subsidies, favourable legislation and other forms of support to promote industrial plantation capitalism, while providing poor protection and welfare for the workers. It supported the Assam plantations by providing, among other things, experimental plantations and the services of experts as well as rent-free concessions to the companies.77 The colonial government tried to make labour available by increasing land revenue on peasant holdings so that the peasants would seek employment on the plantations. The colonial government also passed legislation supportive of plantation agriculture, such as Act vi (Bengal Council) of 1865 which granted planters the right to arrest, without warrant, workers who ran away from estates. This same Act also included measures to protect plantation workers, but these protective
In his 1900 Annual Report on Labour Immigration into Assam, Henry Cotton, the Chief Commissioner of Assam, reported that unfair treatment meted out to plantation workers was well known by many at the highest levels of the colonial government. The colonial state seemed to view these forms of exploitation as necessary evils that supported the profitability of European-owned and -controlled plantation enterprises. As noted in 1900 by the Chief Secretary to the Government of India, J.B. Fuller, in relation to the conditions of workers in Assam tea gardens: “The truth is of course that serious abuses must occur under a labour system which is something of the nature of slavery, for an employee who can be arrested and forcibly detained by his master is more of a slave than a servant and that these abuses are the price which has to be paid for the great advantages which has resulted from the establishment and growth of the tea industry in Assam.”79
Even the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, accepted that labour had to suffer in order to promote plantation agriculture. According to him, “It is an arbitrary system, an abnormal system …. But it has been devised not in the main in our interests but in the interests of an enterprise with which the Government of India could but sympathise, namely, the effort to open up by capital and industry the resources of a distant and backward province.”80
Under pressure from London to generate revenues to cover the military and other costs of ruling the colony, the local colonial government in nineteenth-century Ceylon supported plantations through the development of railways and other necessary infrastructure, as well as through subsidies, incentives, tax benefits and supplying cheap land.81 The colonial state also intervened in Malaya through the creation of commissions that helped recruit indentured and cheap labour. As early as 1890, the European planters requested an official commission to inquire into the state of labour in Malaya and to come up with suggestions for encouraging immigration. This commission was dominated by planters whose intent was “less to improve indentured labour conditions than
Such policies and interventions indicated “that the colonial state was not a ‘night watchman’ laissez-faire state even though its own ideology usually stressed that it was neutral and unconcerned to interfere in such ‘commercial transactions’ as labour migration.”88 It was keen to maintain the supply of labour for the industrial plantations (which were, in any case, linked to the interests of the colonial powers in terms of ownership) and wished to supply cheap inputs for the Industrial Revolution in Europe with the minimum costs possible. It passed legislation that was favourable to the planting industry, set up a large number of labour inquiry commissions, and took an even more direct role in the recruitment process of labourers with the evolution of the labour-contracting system. Bureaucrats were involved in overseeing the
6 Unfree Labour and Colonial Capitalism: Revisiting the Plantationocene
In line with the dynamics of capitalist development in the West, and, more particularly, the increasing dominance of finance capital, the nineteenth-century British colonial plantations innovated their labour regime to include “free” waged workers after slavery had been abolished in 1833. The planter-owner was replaced by expatriate management employed by companies, and the need to generate high short-term profits to get access to investment in the global market mitigated against long-term investment and focused, rather, on trying to lower labour costs as much as possible. This was done through the employment of “free” migrant labour, initially on indenture, and subsequently recruited by contractors. Some of the costs of recruitment, labour control and supervision, which were substantial during the slave era, were transferred to the contractors and workers themselves, the latter effectively bonded through ties of indebtedness to work on the plantations. The hierarchies of the slave era, such as those based on race and class, and the use of force and compulsion, were integrated into the new order, as these had proved effective in controlling the workforce. These were supplemented by local forms of labour controls, such as those based on caste and religion. Plantation patriarchy, which had its origins in the slave era, also assumed new forms and dynamics in the industrial plantations, with women being paid less, working longer hours, doing the unpaid care work in the household and generally being placed under male supervision. Finally, in contrast to its expected role as the promoter of laissez-faire capitalism, the colonial state consciously supported the industrial
While the concept of the plantationocene is linked to the dislocations and relocations of life and nature across the world for plantation production, this chapter has argued that the term can be enriched by taking into account the global and local dynamics that inform and shape its characteristics in specific contexts. It has shown that power relations and processes at different levels gave rise to specific forms of labour control in ways that benefitted finance capital under British colonialism in the nineteenth century. The labour regime that developed as a consequence reflected its historical legacy of force and compulsion which had proven effective in controlling workers in the slave era. It combined these with the prevailing hierarchies and legal coercion to serve the interests of colonial capitalism. While such changes can perhaps be viewed as part of the innovative and adaptive nature of the plantationocene to external and internal opportunities, there is little doubt these involved extreme exploitation and multiple forms of oppression of workers.
B. W. Higman, “Plantations and Typological Problems in Geography: A Review Article,” Australian Geographer 11, no. 2 (1969): 192; Colin Kirk, “People in Plantations: A Review of the Literature and Annotated Bibliography” (Research Report No. 18, Sussex, Institute of Development Studies, 1987); Frederic L. Pryor, “The Plantation Economy as an Economic System,” Journal of Comparative Economics 6, no. 3 (1982): 288–317.
As noted by the labour historians Hobsbawm and Rudé in their study on the nineteenth-century English countryside, peasant production was usually located in or near villages and associated with “families owning or occupying their own small plot of land, cultivating it substantially with the labour of their members”: Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (London: Verso Trade, 2014), 23.
Sidney M. Greenfield, “Slavery and the Plantation in the New World: The Development and Diffusion of a Social Form,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 11, no. 1 (1969): 44–57; Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
A. J. R. Russell-Wood, “Iberian Expansion and The Issue Of Black Slavery: Changing Portuguese Attitudes, 1440–1770,” The American Historical Review 83, no. 1 (1978): 16.
A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Greenfield, “Slavery,” 45–47.
Curtin, Rise and Fall, 23–24; Greenfield, “Slavery”; George L. Beckford, Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1983).
Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1998).
Thomas J. Durant, “The Slave Plantation Revisited: A Sociological Perspective,” in Plantation Society and Race Relations: The Origins of Inequality, ed. Thomas J. Durant and J. David Knottnerus (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999).
Jorge L. Giovannetti, “Grounds of Race: Slavery, Racism and the Plantation in the Caribbean,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2006): 5–36.
Giovannetti, “Grounds of Race,” 15.
Hugh A. Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830–1920 (London, New York and Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1974).
Justin Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Jan Breman, Labour Migration and Rural Transformation in Colonial Asia. (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1990), 69.
The Dutch, British and the French adapted the Portuguese “model” to generate their own “plantation complexes” in the Caribbean: Curtin, Rise and Fall, 58, and Curtin, Rise and Fall, xi.
Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Orlando Patterson, “Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins” (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1967); Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment.
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (London: Penguin, 1986); Robin Blackburn, Making; Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Catherine Hall, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Catherine Hall and Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, “The Legacies of British Slave Ownership: Catherine Hall talks to Ruth.” Soundings 77 (2020): 23–36.
Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
Kris Manjapra, “Plantation Dispossessions: The Global Travel of Agricultural Racial Capitalism,” in American Capitalism: New Histories, ed. Sven Beckert and Christine Desan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 361–88.
Beckert and Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism, 3.
Beckert and Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism, 5.
Donna Haraway et al., “Anthropologists are Talking – about the Anthropocene,” Ethnos 81, no. 3 (2016): 535–64.
Haraway et al., “Anthropologists,” 557.
Janae Davis et al., “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene? A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises,” Geography Compass 13, no. 5 (2019).
Michael Warren Murphy and Caitlin Schroering, “Refiguring the Plantationocene,” Journal of World-Systems 26, no. 2 (2020): 407–8.
Wendy Wolford, “The Plantationocene: A Lusotropical Contribution to the Theory,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111, no. 6 (2021): 1622–39.
Jacob Metzer, “Rational Management, Modern Business Practices, and Economies of Scale in the Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations,” Explorations in Economic History 12, no. 2 (1975): 123; Eugene D. Genovese, “The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South” (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014); Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; Lewis C. Gray, “Economic Efficiency and Competitive Advantages of Slavery under the Plantation System,” Agricultural History 4, no. 2 (1930): 31–47; Thomas P. Govan, “Was Plantation Slavery Profitable?” The Journal of Southern History 8, no. 4 (1942): 513–35.
Stephen D. Behrendt, David Eltis, and David Richardson, “The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre-Modern Atlantic World,” Economic History Review (2001): 454–76.
Richard B. Allen, “The Atlantic and Africa: The Second Slavery and Beyond,” in Merchant Capital and Slave Trading in the Western Indian Ocean, 1770–1830, ed. Dale Tomich and Paul E. Lovejoy (Albany, NY: suny Press, 2021).
Eugene D. Genovese, “The Medical and Insurance Costs of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt,” The Journal of Negro History 45, no. 3 (1960): 141–55.
Herman Jeremias Nieboer, “Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches” (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1900). She used Nieboer’s notion of closed and open resources to analyse the need for “forced labour” in post-slave situations and concluded that “compulsory” or “forced” labour existed in a situation of “open resources” even after the abolition of slavery: Willemina Kloosterboer, Involuntary Labour since the Abolition of Slavery: A Survey of Compulsory Labour throughout the World (Brill Archive, 1960).
John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, “Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Such a viewpoint is also consistent with the notion that plantations were essentially enclave units, with the New World Group of Caribbean scholars, such as Best, Beckford, Girvan, Thomas, Brewster and Jefferson, arguing that plantations inhibited local economic development in terms of a viable domestic agriculture and also production for a regional market. In addition, the structural links between the metropole and the colonies in the eighteenth century created underdevelopment in the region. For a review of their theories, see Denis M. Benn, “The Theory of Plantation Economy and Society: A Methodological Critique,” Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 12, no. 3 (1974): 249–60, who puts forward ideas similar to those put forward in Eric Williams’ classic study of capitalism and slavery (1944).
Eric R. Wolf, “Specific Aspects of Plantation Systems in the New World: Community Sub-Cultures and Social Classes,” Plantation Systems of the New World (1959).
Thomas Durant, “The Slave Plantation Revisited: A Sociological Perspective,” in Plantation Society and Race Relations: The Origins of Inequality, ed. Thomas J. Durant and J. David Knottnerus (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999), 17–28.
Durant, “The Slave Plantation Revisited,” 25.
Phyllis M. Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Joel Mokyr, The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective (London: Routledge, 2018).
Robert C. Allen, Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Dan Bogart, “The Transport Revolution in Industrialising Britain,” The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain 1 (2014): 368.
P. P. Courtenay, Plantation Agriculture. 2nd ed. (London: Bell and Hyman, 1980).
Geoffrey Jones, Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Rana Behal, One Hundred Years of Servitude: Political Economy of Tea Plantations in Colonial Assam (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2014).
Rana Behal. “Coolies, Recruiters and Planters: Migration of Indian Labour to Southeast Asian and Assam Plantations during Colonial Rule” (Working Paper Series, Crossroads Asia, 2013), 3.
Behal “Coolies, Recruiters and Planters,” 3.
P. C. Campbell, “Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire: Studies in Economics and Political Science,” London School of Economics and Political Science, no. 72 (London: P. S. King and Son, 1923); Douglas E. Horton, Haciendas and Cooperatives: A Study of Estate Organization, Land Reform and New Reform Enterprises in Peru, vol. 67 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1976); Tinker, New System of Slavery.
Tinker, New System of Slavery, 177.
Richard B. Allen “Re-Conceptualizing the ‘New System of Slavery,’” Man in India 92, no. 2 (2012): 228.
J. H. Whitley, Report of the Royal Commission on Labour (rcl). (London, 1931).
K. L. Gillion, Fiji’s Indian Migrants: A History to the End of Indenture in 1920 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1962).
Whitley, Report, 354.
George M. Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1884).
Courtenay, Plantation Agriculture, 65.
Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South Asia: Agricultural Labour in the Madras Presidency during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).
Richard B. Allen, “Slaves, Convicts, Abolitionism and the Global Origins of the Post-Emancipation Indentured Labor System,” Slavery and Abolition 35, no. 2 (2014): 329.
Whitley, Report, 355.
Ravindra K. Jain, South Indians on the Plantation Frontier in Malaya (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
Roland Wenzlhuemer, From Coffee to Tea Cultivation in Ceylon, 1880–1900: An Economic and Social History (Leiden: Brill, 2008).
Kumari Jayawardena and Rachel Kurian, Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity on Sri Lankan Plantations: Two Centuries of Power and Protest (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2015).
Rachel Kurian, “State, Capital and Labour in the Plantation Industry in Sri Lanka 1834–1984” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 1989).
Kurian, “State, Capital and Labour,” 93.
Gail Omvedt, “Migration in Colonial India: The Articulation of Feudalism and Capitalism by the Colonial State,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 7, no. 2 (1980): 185–212.
Jayawardena and Kurian, Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity, 33.
Omvedt, “Migration in Colonial India,” 193.
Rachel Kurian and Kumari Jayawardena, “Plantation Patriarchy and Structural Violence: Women Workers in Sri Lanka,” in Social and Cultural Dimensions of Indian Indentured Labour and its Diaspora: Past and Present, ed. Maurits S. Hassankhan, Lomarsh Ropnarine, and Radica Mahase (Delhi: Manohar; New York: Abingdon, 2017) 25–49.
Kurian and Jayawardena, “Plantation Patriarchy,” 32.
Kurian and Jayawardena, “Plantation Patriarchy.”
Kurian and Jayawardena, “Plantation Patriarchy,” 35–36.
Whitley, Report, 349.
Lalith Jayawardena, “The Supply of Sinhalese Labour to the Tea Industry in Ceylon” (research study, made available by the author, Cambridge University, 1960).
The practice of linking the manager’s bonuses to the profits was also undertaken by finance capital in Southeast Asia; for instance, in the Dutch colony of Sumatra. The European staff, in particular the manager and his assistants, had “maximal interest in increasing production and lower costs”: Jan Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 79.
Graham Edgar and Ingrid Floering, The Modern Plantation in the Third World (Sydney, Australia: Croom Helm, 1984).
Tinker, New System of Slavery, 177.
Rana Behal, “Some Aspects of the Growth of Plantation Labour Force and Labour Movements in Assam Valley Districts, 1900–1947” (PhD diss., Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 1984).
Jayawardena and Kurian, Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity, 33.
Jayawardena and Kurian, Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity, 41.
S. B. D. De Silva, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2012).
Behal “Some Aspects,” 88–131.
Rana Behal “The Emergence of a Plantation Economy: Assam Tea Industry in the Nineteenth Century” (New Delhi: Occasional Papers on History and Society, 1985).
Behal “Some Aspects,” 94.
Behal “Some Aspects,” 95.
Jayawardena and Kurian, Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity, 23–26, 35.
Norman J. Parmer, Colonial Labour Policy and Administration: A History of Labour in the Rubber Plantation Industry in Malaya, c. 1910–1941 (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1960).
Parmer, Colonial Labour Policy, 39.
Jain, South Indians, 200.
Parmer, Colonial Labour Policy, 42.
Parmer, Colonial Labour Policy, 44.
K.S. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of their Immigration and Settlement (1786–1957) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969); Parmer, Colonial Labour Policy, 51–52.
Omvedt, “Migration in Colonial India,” 204.
Omvedt, “Migration in Colonial India,” 206.
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