Plantations Peasants And Proletarians In Colonial Asia

This volume originated in a conference on 'Capitalist Plantations in Colonial Asia', held at the Centre for Asian Studies of the University of Amsterdam and Free University of Amsterdam in September 1990. The contributions to this collection focus on the production of rubber, sugar, tea, and several less strategic plantation crops, in colonial Indochina, Java, Malaya, the Philippines, India, Ceylon, Mauritius and Fiji (although geographically anomalous, both the latter are included because of the centrality to their sugar plantations of indentured labour from India).

In this original work James Duncan explores the transformation of Ceylon during the mid-nineteenth century into one of the most important coffee growing regions of the world and investigates the consequent ecological disaster which erased coffee from the island. Using this fascinating case study by way of illustration, In the Shadows of the Tropics reveals the spatial unevenness and fragmentation of modernity through a focus on modern governmentality and biopower. It argues that the practices of colonial power, and the differences that race and tropical climates were thought to make, were central to the working out of modern governmental rationalities. In this context, the usefulness of Foucault's notions of biopower, discipline and governmentality are examined. The work contributes an important rural focus to current work on studies of governmentality in geography and offers a welcome non-state dimension by considering the role of the plantation economy and individual capitalists in the lives and deaths of labourers, the destabilization of subsistence farming and the aggressive re-territorialization of populations from India to Ceylon.

This book uses a socio-historical approach with feminist insight to examine the work of Chinese women in colonial Malaya, specifically those who worked as prostitutes, mui tsai, domestic servants, tin and rubber workers, hawkers and construction workers. The study questions the view that all women in traditional society were subordinated.

This book provides a detailed examination of the impact of globalisation on plantation labour, dominated by women labour, in India. The studies presented here highlight the perpetuation of low wages, inferior social status and low human development of workers in this sector and point out the movement of labour away from this sector and the resultant labour shortage. It also highlights the perils involved in doing away with the Plantation Labour Act 1951 and provides a plausible way forward for improving the conditions of plantation workers. Rich in empirical analysis, this volume will prove essential for scholars and researchers of labour economics, development studies, gender studies and sociology.

As the Indian economy integrates into global circuits of production, exchange and accumulation, the burdens of adjustment are shared unequally by different sectors, classes and regions. This study unravels the livelihood strategies and living conditions of labour in the tea gardens of Assam. The tea sector has been undergoing a crisis since the 1990s, with stagnant production, decline in exports, and closures of many tea gardens leading to large-scale retrenchments in the labour force. Based on a detailed analysis of secondary data and primary field research, the study examines the extent, types and implications of inter-generational occupational mobility (or immobility) among tea garden labourers in Assam. In the process, it reflects on how even a sector that had brought capital and labour from outside and contributed significantly to the country’s export earnings failed to create dynamic growth linkages within the local economy. The experience of the labour force in the Assam tea sector, the authors argue, is important for making sense not only of the development dynamics of the region, but of the contradictory ways in which forces of globalisation and neo-liberal reforms have been reshaping the worlds of labourers in the margins. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of labour studies, development studies, management studies, and studies of north-east India, as well as to policy-makers and those in the tea industry.

Between working men and women (which may include “free” wage earners, chattel slaves, indentured labourers, sharecroppers, domestic servants, and many others) and those employing them, there has always been a constant – mostly silent but sometimes overt – struggle concerning employers’ discretionary power and over the interpretation of formal and informal rules. There is a constantly shifting frontier of control, that is, an ongoing struggle for control in the workplace, with managers and supervisors trying to increase their power over their subordinates, and their subordinates, in reaction, trying to maintain and increase their relative autonomy. The detailed case studies in this volume span three centuries and cover different parts of the world. Still, they speak to each other in many ways, highlighting the fact that power at work, whether on the shopfloor or beyond, results from a wide range of complex interrelations. Between technological innovations and the ways in which they are actually implemented. Between the division of labour at the site of production or service provision and changing standards of social segmentation beyond the premises of the company, which can be reinforced – or weakened – by management strategies of utilizing labour power as well as workers’ reaction to these strategies. And finally, between politics in production, which shape the relations between capital and labour on the shopfloor, and state politics of production, which cannot be understood without reference to broader developments in economy and society.