Coolies of capitalism : Assam tea and the making of Coolie labour / Nitin Varma.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Varma, Nitin, author.

Series:

Work in global and historical perspective ; v. 2.

Work in global and historical perspective ; volume 2

Language:

English

German

Subjects (All):

Contract labor--History--19th century.

Contract labor.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (250 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin : De Gruyter, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

Biography/History:

Nitin Varma, Department of Asian and African Studies an der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

Summary:

"Coolie" is a generic category for the "unskilled" manual labour. The offering of services for hire had various pre-colonial lineages. In the nineteenth century there was an attempt to recast the term in discursive constructions and material practices for "mobilized-immobilized" labour. Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). It was portrayed as a stage in a promised transition. The tea plantations of Assam, like many other tropical plantations in South Asia, were inaugurated and formalized during this period. They were initially worked by the locals. In the late 1850s, the locals were replaced by labourers imported from outside the province who were unquestioningly designated "coolies" in the historical literature. Qualifying this framework of transition (local to coolie labour) and introduction (of coolie labour), this study makes a case for the "production" of coolie labour in the history of the colonial-capitalist plantations in Assam. The intention of the research is not to suggest an unfettered agency of colonial-capitalism in defining and "producing" coolies, with an emphasis on the attendant contingencies, negotiations, contestations and crises. The study intervenes in the narratives of an abrupt appearance of the archetypical coolie of the tea gardens (i.e., imported and indentured) and situates this archetype's emergence, sustenance and shifts in the context of material and discursive processes.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Content

List of Tables and Graphs

List of Figures

Introduction

1. Tea in the Colony

2. Contracts, Contractors and Coolies

3. Unpopular Assam

4. Drink and Work

5. Dustoor of Plantations

6. Gandhi baba ka Hookum

7. Epilogue

Bibliography

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/open-access-policy

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed February 20, 2017).

ISBN:

9783110461282

3110461285

9783110463170

3110463172

OCLC:

979589966

Access Restriction:

Open access Unrestricted online access