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Asian Plantation Histories at the Frontiers of Nation and Globalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2018

KRIS MANJAPRA
KRIS MANJAPRA*
Affiliation:
Tufts University Email: kris.manjapra@tufts.edu
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Abstract

This is a review article of four new books on plantation histories of Asia which 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. The works discussed here 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).

Type
Review Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 6 , November 2018 , pp. 2137 - 2158
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

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7 This ‘world-systems’ perspective is associated with the work of Wallerstein, Immanuel, The modern world-system (New York: Academic Press, 1974), pp. 148–68Google Scholar. But Joseph Inikori's scholarship clarified the driving role of so-called ‘peripheries’, and of the labour of diasporic African peoples in generating profits for the so-called European ‘core’ of the world economy. See Inikori, Joseph, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 362–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 Sanyal, Kalyan, Rethinking capitalist development: primitive accumulation, governmentality and postcolonial capitalism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar.

12 Behal, Rana, A hundred years of servitude (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

13 Breman, Taming the coolie beast, p. 45.

14 Behal, A hundred years of servitude, p. 3.

15 Ibid., p. 188.

16 Ibid., p. 70.

17 Ibid., p. 65.

18 Ibid., p. 35.

19 Ibid., p. 70.

20 Ibid., p. 287.

21 Ibid., p. 80.

22 Ibid., p. 83.

23 Ibid., p. 88.

24 Sharma, Jayeeta, Empire's garden (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Ibid., p. 26.

26 Ibid., p. 33.

27 Ibid., p. 61.

28 Ibid., p. 76.

29 Ibid., p. 87.

30 Bhattacharya, Tithi, Sentinels of culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

31 Sharma, Empire's garden, p. 209.

32 Ibid., p. 216.

33 Chatterjee's imaginative approach combines personal reflection, scholarly inquiry, and artistic voice in the study of gendered labour practices on Assam tea plantations. See Chatterjee, A time for tea.

34 Bosma, Ulbe, The sugar plantation in India and Indonesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also these important new works on circulations of technique, biota, and science: Kumar, Prakash, Indigo plantations and science in colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Curry-Machado, Jonathan, Global histories, imperial commodities, local interactions (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Curry-Machado, Jonathan, Global histories, imperial commodities, local interactions (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Bosma, The sugar plantation, p. 16.

37 Margaret Gillikin, ‘Saint Dominguan refugees in Charleston, South Carolina, 1791–1822: assimilation and accommodation in a slave society’, PhD thesis, University of South Carolina, 2014.

38 Bosma, The sugar plantation, p. 21.

39 Ibid., p. 40.

40 Ibid., p. 90.

41 Ibid.

42 Ludden, David, ‘Spatial inequity and national territory: remapping 1905 in Bengal and Assam’, Modern Asian Studies 45 (2011), pp. 1–43Google Scholar.

43 Jayawardena, Kumari and Kurian, Rachel, Class, patriarchy and ethnicity on Sri Lankan plantations (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2015)Google Scholar.

44 Williams, Eric, Slavery and capitalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944)Google Scholar.

45 Ibid., p. 69.

46 Sanyal, Rethinking capitalist development, pp. 254–62.