British science, Chinese skill and Assam tea
Making empire's garden
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8961390 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jayeeta Sharma (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 429-455 |
| Publication date | 2006-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Indian Economic & Social History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0019-4646 • E-ISSN: 0973-0893 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/001946460604300402 |
| OpenAlex | W2084472435 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 14 |
| References cited | 21 |
This article traces the workings of science, ideology and economy which integrated Assam into imperial and global commodity networks as a tea ‘garden’. It discusses how imperial botanists and their colonial subordinates conceived of botanic gardens as a conduit for transplanting plants such as tea into British-ruled territories. While this clearly served British economic interests, they stressed its vital scientific and strategic implications. The East India Company was willing to finance the Indian tea enterprise when its profitable China monopoly ended. Although the tea plant was found growing wild in Assam, importing Chinese plants and skilled growers was a priority. Nineteenth-century ideas about race science had an important impact, denigrating Assam's plants and people as wild and uncultured, as compared to the civilised lineage of the Chinese. However, as the British acquired greater knowledge about tea cultivation, planters began to prefer bringing cheap, unskilled labourers from other parts of India as indentured coolies to work on harsh terms. For Assam's local people, their high hopes of the tea garden were belied. Their participation in the colonial tea enterprise was mostly limited to subsidiary roles as the region became a dependent outpost of global extractive capitalism
Agriculture · Archaeology · Capitalism · China · Chinese tea · Colonialism · Commodity · Cultivation System · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Geography · Ideology · Market economy · Monopoly · Political science · Politics · Tea garden · Work (physics · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Engineering · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
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The tree of bixad (suffering)
Shifting Narratives of Soil in Scientific Discourses of Colonial Assam Tea Plantations
Antiblackness of the Social and the Human
The Colonial Runaways and Contemporary Student Movement
Tea and mobility
Space and Place precarity in the Global South
Cocoa at Work
Witches, lagari and activism
State, peasants and land reclamation
On the discursive and material context of the first handwritten Lushai newspaper ‘Mizo Chanchin Laishuih’, 1898
The Birth of a Noble Tea Country
Forests and the environmental history of modern India
The problem of nature
Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India
Private Investment in India 1900–1939
Sweetness and power
Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870-1979
Partner in Empire
Mapping an Empire
Colonial desire
On Visiting the 'Moving Metropolis
Colonial Desire
Scientific Empire and Imperial Science
Private Investment in India, 1900-1939
Three Years' Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China
Science and Colonial Expansion
| Unique citing works | 14 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,78 |
| Citation span | 2008 - 2026 (19) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 14 |