Development Regimes' In Colonial India : A Commodity Critique

About the Speaker

Arnab Dey is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton, and a visiting scholar at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University. He has worked at the intersection of labor, environmental, and legal histories, and has held fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Nicholson Center for British Studies, University of Chicago, and at the Rachel Carson Center, LMU Munich. He most recently published Tea Environments and Plantation Culture with Cambridge University Press in 2018.

Abstract

This talk provides a critical reflection on 'development regimes' in colonial India. It does so by focusing on the operational logic, ideological inconsistencies, and material fallout of the tea plantation economy of colonial Assam: a large-scale commercial enterprise that induced transformative changes to the region's biosocial landscape for a century and more. Unlike existing works on the subject, however, this talk focuses on agro-economy— the relationship of crop character to its existing and built environment—to highlight tea's purported role (and legacies) as agrarian 'modernizer' in British east India.