Reproducing the Plantation

Abstract

This article draws from long-term research on Indian tea plantations. It argues that if the plantation is to be at all useful analytically, then enslaved people, indentured laborers, and workers who find themselves otherwise stuck on those land tenure formations called plantations need to come to the analytical forefront. One means of centering labor in these discussions is to attend to acts and processes of social reproduction. Certainly, the plantation is a space of production, but the plantation would not persist as such a space without acts of childrearing, feeding, eating, care, and maintenance. Attention to these acts centers workers’ perceptions of time, space, accumulation, and the plantation itself. Even in the context of monocultural expansion, plantation workers live not just in service to single crops but through diverse forms of provisioning. Social reproduction and nonmarket exchange, then, are not a redemptive outside to plantation production, but integral to it.