Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India by Arnab Dey (review)

Drawing from the disciplines of labor, law, environmental history, and political economy, Dey has produced an excellent, century-long, agroecological history of tea production in India's hilly northeast province of Assam. Throughout his well-researched, insightful, and clearly written chapters, he analyzes the self-serving discourses and ideologies of British land speculators and tea-plantation owners and of British colonial officials. Dey consistently argues that "imperial disarray" resulted from, and characterized, the eco-social-legal system of tea plantations: "The analytics of 'disarray' or unkemptness in this book . . . is used as a heuristic framework to highlight ideological, material, and discursive inconsistencies, consequences, and contradictions of this plantation form and its purported mandate of agrarian development in the region" (19). His study integrates extensive archival research with strong control over the relevant scholarly theories.

Dey provides the historical context and sequence of events from the English East India Company's annexation of Assam's Brahmaputra River region in 1826 to the last decade of the British Raj (1858–1947). However, his central chapters are thematic. He sequentially analyzes the contentious argumentation produced by the colonial government of India, which sought to raise revenues by classifying the tea industry as "manufacturing," and by the planters, who asserted both that they should be lower-taxed "agriculturalists" and that they were modernizing improvers using the latest production technology. Dey next demonstrates how competing European scientific and medical theories and policies about the health of the tea plants and of the poorly paid and badly treated "coolie" laborers often led to adverse results, since the "plant capitalism" of the tea industry was (and is) inherently exploitive of the environment and its labor (22).

Indeed, due to high mortality rates from endemic diseases and debilitating working conditions, tea plantations depended on a massive and constant supply of millions of imported laborers from the impoverished regions of central India. Hence, government policies and regulations, Dey shows, often only made conditions for people and plants worse. Planters convinced the government to allocate land at minimal prices and then cleared away the forests and eliminated the indigenous tea trees, sometimes by hybridizing them with Chinese varieties—a strategy that pitted them against the government's emerging Forest Department and its conservation policies. Finally, the plantation labor walkouts of 1920/1, Dey asserts, resulted not primarily from the Mohandas Gandhi–led independence movement but rather more from the "peculiar culture of commerce in the Assam plantations—centered on law, crop agronomics, and work structure" (178).

In Dey's analysis of the "illegal and unseen market logics that ran the Assam plantation industry" (166), he had to depend primarily on official government records and reports, English-language newspapers, and documentation produced by the British planters. The voices of the workers themselves remain obscured. Dey also remains closely focused on Assam's tea industry. Early in the book, he discusses the origins of tea culture in China, but he largely refrains from explicit comparative analysis of Assam's plantation systems with those elsewhere in the world.

Dey engages with the relevant theories produced by Marxists; cultural critics (including actor-network theorists); and historians of the environment, science, medicine, labor, and the British Empire. He provides sufficient background and context for readers less familiar with the history of British colonial India. Throughout his book and especially in his introduction and conclusion, he suggests how some of the many consequences of the Assam tea industry's inherent contradictions, conflicts, and exploitations of the environment and people still echo in that restive region of a now-independent India.