Coolies of Capitalism: Assam Tea and the Making of Coolie Labour

Nitin Varma

Open Access Published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2016

Coolies of Capitalism

Assam Tea and the Making of Coolie Labour

Nitin Varma

Volume 2 in the series Work in Global and Historical Perspective

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110463170

Overview
Contents

About this book

“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.

Author / Editor information

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

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Content Publicly Available Download PDF	v
List of Tables and Graphs Open Access Download PDF	vii
List of Figures Open Access Download PDF	vii
Introduction Open Access Download PDF	1
1. Tea in the Colony Open Access Download PDF	15
2. Contracts, Contractors and Coolies Open Access Download PDF	43
3. Unpopular Assam Open Access Download PDF	105
4. Drink and Work Open Access Download PDF	127
5. Dustoor of Plantations Open Access Download PDF	149
6. Gandhi baba ka Hookum Open Access Download PDF	205
7. Epilogue Open Access Download PDF	225
Bibliography Open Access Download PDF	231

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
Pages
- Front matter: 8
- Main content: 242

eBook

Published: December 5, 2016
ISBN: 9783110463170

Hardcover

Published: December 5, 2016
ISBN: 9783110461152