What Is Agrarian Labour? Contrasting Indigo Production in Colonial India and Indonesia
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9969769 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Willem Van Schendel (0000-0001-7641-4056, International Institute of Social History, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 60 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 73-95 |
| Publication date | 2015-02-10 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Review of Social History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-8590 • E-ISSN: 1469-512X |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0020859015000012 |
| OpenAlex | W2289465754 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 22 |
In scholarly writings, the term “agrarian labour” is used variously. It can refer to a very specific set of productive activities – the cultivation of crops and animal husbandry – but it can also have the much broader connotation of rural or non-urban labour. These different uses can be confusing, especially in comparative research. This paper starts from the French comparative agriculture school and its conceptualization of three nested scales of analysis – the “cropping system”, the “activity system”, and the “agrarian system”. It tests these ideas in a comparison of labour employed in the production of indigo dye in two colonial systems (British India and the Dutch East Indies). The article concludes that this approach helps counteract monocausal explanations of labour relations in terms of agro-environmental determinants, the force of colonial capitalism, or local work cultures. It also promotes agriculture-sensitive readings of social transformations by comparing social orders that comprise both agricultural and non-agricultural labour relations
Agrarian society · Agrarian system · Agriculture · Archaeology · Capitalism · Colonialism · Conceptualization · Connotation · Economics · Economy · Geography · Labor relations · Labour economics · Political science · Production (economics · Relations of production · Social science · Sociology · Agriculture and Rural Development Research · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact
Indigo Commodity Chains in the Spanish and British Empires, 1560–1860
Green Plants into Blue Cakes
Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital
Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India
Art. XXV.—Extracts from a Report on Chota Nagpore
The Richest East India Merchant
Blue and Brown
Plantation science
Slaves and Freedmen in Colonial Central America
Agriculture comparée et développement agricole
El añil en la Venezuela ilustrada. Una historia inconclusa
Human geography without scale
The systeme agraire concept in francophone peasant studies
Features of British Indigo in India
Pour un atlas des terroirs africains
European Agency Houses in Bengal
The Blue Mutiny
Forced Labor in the Guatemalan Indigo Works
Constructing Locality
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |