In the Shadow of Tea: Agrarian Relations in Duars, 1870–1940

Studies of tea plantations generally tend to start at a point when the gardens have already come into being. So dominant becomes the presence of miles after miles of garden acreage in a region, say in the Duars or Assam, that at times we quite ahistorically assume that they have always been a part of the landscape. The region itself becomes synonymous with the gardens. But of course, tea gardens emerged at a particular historical moment. With the formal abolition of slavery in the west, it was neatly replaced with the rise of plantation empires in the colonial peripheries of India, Ceylon, Malaysia, Sumatra and so on. Entire plantation societies or plantocracies mushroomed in these areas, all more or less in the same period; spanning the latter half of the nineteenth century and becoming an inseparable part of colonial economies by the turn of the century.