British Planters Research Articles

British Planters and the Origins of Wildlife Conservation in Colonial Sri Lanka

AbstractThis article argues that the interests of coffee and tea planters in colonial Sri Lanka shaped the foundations of wildlife conservation policies, in which the state only played a secondary role. By destroying the forests of the highlands, they were the principal architects of ecological change on the island in the nineteenth century. Their principal mode of recreation, hunting, also shaped their engagement with natural history. Some were naturalists in their own right; others funneled specimens and observational data to other students of natural history. They lobbied for the first game laws, not through remorse for their own role in the destruction of wildlife (the “penitent butchers” thesis) but to keep the peasantry from competing for the species that they sought, which had been decimated by the actions of both groups. The way planters engaged with nature, through hunting and the pursuit of natural history, motivated them to preserve what was left of the island's wild fauna.

A journey beyond colonial history: coolies in the making of an ‘adivasi identity’ in Assam

ABSTRACT The ‘tea tribes’ in Assam have a unique socio-cultural history. They were the prime labour force of tea plantations in colonial Assam. Originally, they were migrants brought in by British tea planters in different phases during the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries from different parts of India. Colonial engagements with these labourers in tea gardens were akin to slavery. Construction of the ‘coolies’ community in colonial India had broader implications for the community in post-colonial India. Constitutional provisions and state mechanisms to uplift the community from the margins have never borne fruits on the ground. This underdevelopment, coupled with the colonial legacy of an ‘outsider within’, catalysed the larger ‘Adivasi consciousness’ among the tea tribes in Assam. In this article, we argue that attributing every problem faced by tea tribes to the colonial system is an elitist attempt to undermine the role of the post-colonial state and society in excluding and reproducing these community as the ‘other’ in the wider social structure. Seven decades of post-colonial experience have not changed the sociabilities of these tea tribes who still live in the margins of Assam’s social landscape, causing them to unify within the ‘Adivasi’ consciousness.

Governance, value-added and rents in plantation slavery-based value-chains

ABSTRACT This article studies how the governance of a colonial value-chain impacted upon the value-added created. The article focuses on the value-chain of colonial sugar produced in the slave plantation complex in the Americas. Previous research has suggested that British planters in the Caribbean were able to reap high profits because of a protected market for sugar in Britain. In this paper, it is argued that it was mainly British refiners that were able to profit from these protectionist policies. Wholesale prices of muscovado sugar are shown to have been more or less on a par with those prevalent under free-market conditions, whereas the price of refined sugar was considerably higher in Britain than it presumably would have been in a free-market. Limited competition and active collusion between refiners seem to have increased the mark-up on the refined sugar relative to the price of muscovado in Britain. Focusing only on the profitability on certain links in value-chains associated with the slave plantation complex in the Americas (most importantly the slave trade) might detract attention from how the governance structure of the value-chains allowed profits to be reaped elsewhere in the same value-chains.

Slopes of struggle: Coffee on Baba Budan hills

The history of Mysore coffee is inextricably linked to the mountainous inam lands of Baba Budan dargah situated atop eponymous hills. In the Malnad region of the Nagar Division in the seventeenth century grew probably the earliest coffee gardens of India. This paper examines the significance of the Baba Budan inam lands coffee in the development of the coffee economy of Mysore. The trajectory of coffee, a peasant and a plantation crop, was shaped by regulation and domination by the British administration and European planters and embedded resistance to this control. Native cultivators and the Baba Budan inamdars, as indigenous coffee growers, clashed with European planters over land and labour issues. Coffee was a profitable and popular cash crop, and natives dominated land and production in the colonial period. Competition, collusion and contestation laid the foundation of the two components of the coffee industry in Mysore—native and European.

Small Tea Plantation and Its Impact on the Rural Landscape of Contemporary Assam

The tea plantations in the Northeast Indian state of Assam, launched by the British colonial regime in the mid-nineteenth century, had considerably transformed the socio-economic profile of the state. Its impact on the state’s peasant economy, however, was enervating. Controlled by the British companies, the plantation sector saw few local planters, although a section of the Assamese peasants traditionally engaged in tea cultivation in their homestead on a small scale. After India’s independence, many Indian entrepreneurs entered the plantation sector largely because of the departure of the British planters. The Assamese entrepreneurs found it difficult to emulate this due to lack of capital. Since the 1970s, however, a significant section of the local small and middle peasants, as a part of a conscious drive, took to small tea plantation (STP). The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic growth in the number of such small planters, which has brought about a major change in the rural social landscape of Assam.

Tea Plantations and Socio-Cultural Transformation: The Case of Assam (India)

The tea plantations of Assam, which constitute the country’s 53.97 per cent tea area, 49 per cent tea worker population, and 52.04 per cent tea production, occupy an important place in the economy, culture and polity of the state. The onset of tea plantations during British colonial rule has not only changed the landscape of the upper Brahmaputra valley through green tea bushes being nourished by tea tribes from east-central India, but also evolved a distinct tea culture. Although formation of small tea growers has added a new dimension to the growth of tea industry of Assam in recent times, the culture that emerged due to the long continued interaction of British planters, tea worker tribes and indigenous Assamese is well reflected in the language, way of life, work culture, food habits and many other socio-cultural practices in most of the large tea estates in the state. In fact, the impact of tea culture is so penetrative that it has been able to bring about development in the form of tea festival, tea tourism, tea folk songs and dances, etc. in the state. An attempt is made in this paper to explore the role of tea plantation and the people associated with it to the socio-cultural transformation of Assam based on both secondary data and primary data through field study. The primary data have been collected from selected tea estates, tea garden worker colonies, tea-tribe villages and urban dwellers.

Revisiting the Carib Story

in this essay, I am presenting some preliminary thoughts on revisiting the Carib story. I have used the word Carib deliberately since my focus is going to be on historical sources, and I am mindful of the apparent confusion in determining precisely who the Kalinago and Garifuna peoples were. I note here, for example, that the citation which read at the ceremony on 14 March 2002 conferring the honour of national hero on Joseph Chatoyer refers to him as the Paramount Chief of the Kalinago people, although in the historical literature he is identified as being of Black Carib extract.1There were three factors that prompted this desire to revisit the story. First a conversation that I had with a woman of Carib ancestry who decrying the fact that they still taught students in school that the Caribs were cannibals. She told me that her young daughter distraught by this, and that she concerned about the perpetuation of myths in the school texts and popular literature on the Caribs. The second factor had to do with my research on Chatoyer in an effort to add support to the claim that he is worthy of national hero status. This involved having to try to piece together a picture of the man from documents largely written by his detractors who have significantly shaped and influenced our information about him and about the Carib peoples. The available literature primarily from British sources. The third factor the need to take the Carib story in St Vincent and the Grenadines beyond the 1797 date when the indigenous peoples were sent into exile. The impression is given that the Carib story in St Vincent ended then, and that the only important story left to be told about the Garifuna in Central America.I am now beginning to re-examine the historical documentation, and of course each era influences the kinds of questions one takes to an examination of the documents. I am aware, among other things, of the divisions within the Carib community and of the uncertainty in the literature about the roles of the Yellow Carib (Kalinago) and Black Carib (Garifuna) peoples in what is regarded as the Second Carib War, and also even in determining in St Vincent and the Grenadines today who are Yellow, or Red, as they are sometimes referred to in the historical literature, and who are Black among the Carib descendants. My task, therefore, to look at the problematics that exist in the story that has traditionally been told and continues to be told.These observations are obviously not new, because different scholars have over the years identified some of them, but although many have contributed to the debate, there has been no comprehensive retelling of the total story. In an article published in 1973, Bernard Marshall stated:Indeed, an article of this nature is very timely and necessary since to date or 200 years after the event, the popular work on this subject is still that of Sir William Young who published his History in the year 1795 ... To date, this work which has completely distorted the picture has remained virtually unchallenged .. . but no one has yet attempted to refute Youngs arguments by a thorough re-examination of the available data.2Peter Hulme, twenty-two years later, in 200 5, to go back to the same issue. In reference to the removal of the Caribs from St Vincent, he wrote, Once that removal had taken place, the only voices who wanted to tell the story, their story of suffering and eventual triumph, were the British planters and their allies. He noted that the planters' version had entered the literature as historical truth and has never seriously been challenged.3 Marshall had also drawn upon Elsa Goveia's study on the historiography of the British West Indies published in 1956, where she drew attention to the fact that Young's book dedicated to Drewey Ottley, the colony's agent in England, who was trying to secure the deportation of the Black Caribs from St Vincent. …

Business, Ethnicity, Politics, and Imperial Interests: The United Planters' Association of Southern India, 1893–1950

The United Planters' Association of South India (UPASI), formed in 1893 at the zenith of British colonial rule in India, was an organization dedicated to the interests of British planters, mainly tea planters, of South India. In the first half century of its history, UPASI enjoyed an unusual degree of effectiveness and control. Its authority and reach owed to the fact that, unlike many other planters' organizations of the time, such as the Ceylon Planters' Association and the Planters' Association of Malay, UPASI was an “association of associations,” a cartel of cartels, its members being district associations. But its power also derived from the homogeneous ethnic composition of the firms that constituted and managed this body, making it an exclusive association of Europeans in an Indian world. In this article, I show how this combination of ethnicity and cooperation, dynamics that manifested across the entire range of modern businesses started in colonial India, proved to be both a source of strength and a point of weakness.

Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750-1807

This book examines the daily details of slave work routines and plantation agriculture in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, focusing on case studies of large plantations in Barbados, Jamaica and Virginia. Work was the most important factor in the slaves' experience of the institution. Slaves' day-to-day work routines were shaped by plantation management strategies that drew on broader pan-Atlantic intellectual and cultural principles. Although scholars often associate the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment with the rise of notions of liberty and human rights and the dismantling of slavery, this book explores the dark side of the Enlightenment for plantation slaves. Many planters increased their slaves' workloads and employed supervisory technologies to increase labor discipline in ways that were consistent with the process of industrialization in Europe. British planters offered alternative visions of progress by embracing restrictions on freedom and seeing increasing labor discipline as central to the project of moral and economic improvement.

Powerless Masters: The Curious Decline of Jamaican Sugar Planters in the Foundational Period of British Abolitionism

This essay focuses on the competing identities that came to be associated with British West Indians during the foundational period of British abolitionism. The essay evaluates the competing images of the West Indian planter class, paying particular attention to how place and time influenced political, cultural and racial perceptions of British planters in the Caribbean. The article addresses the impact that a rising tide of abolitionism in Britain had on perceptions of West Indian planters, and contends that planters became relatively powerless to define their own image in the face of growing abolitionist attacks on slavery.

Climate Change and the Rising Importance of the Indigo Economy

The ‘indigo economy’ represents economic activities which primarily use dirty and polluting production process. The climate change issue has divided the global economy into two broad categories- namely ‘green’ and ‘indigo’ economies. The developed economies of the North, which are increasingly using cleaner technology to minimize pollution and are relocating dirty industries to less developed countries, would become ‘green’ at the expense of the developing economies of the South, which would gradually turn ‘indigo’ by absorbing increasing amount of industrial pollutants (including nuclear radiation). According to Hindu mythology, to save mankind, lord Siva, the creator of the Universe, had absorbed all poison of the Earth at his neck and became ‘Nilkantha’ –‘indigo-necked’. Like lord Siva, the inhabitants of these developing economies would also turn ‘indigo’ by absorbing all poison of the Earth. In India the ‘indigo economy’ has a colonial root which dates back to 18th century when indigo plantation was started in Bengal in 1777 by the British planters as demand for indigo, as a dye, was rising very fast in Europe. This paper tries to analyze the rising importance of the ‘indigo economy’ in the context of present climate change debate.

Coolie Drivers Or Benevolent Paternalists? British Tea Planters in Assam and the Indenture Labour System

AbstractThis paper traces the evolution of the indenture labour system in the tea plantations of Assam and, simultaneously, the shaping of the attitudes of British planters towards the labour force. Also explored are: the significant fact that only a small number of British managerial personnel were in charge of a huge migrant labour force; how the need to step up tea production for the competitive world market while keeping down costs—i.e. labour costs, being the main production cost—fostered an exploitative labour system, with planters taking frequent recourse to physical and economic coercion; and the ensuing extra-legal measures needed to keep the labour force under control. The paper also demonstrates that the colonial state was in full cognizance of the injustices of the labour system. Legislation by the government had laid the foundations of the indenture system and, while there were provisions for protecting the interests of labour force, these were on the whole ignored, with the state turning a blind eye to the planters’ use of physical and other extra-legal measures. One instance involved Chief Commissioner Henry Cotton, who attacked the injustices of the system. This attack was silenced swiftly, and the stance taken by Viceroy Curzon as the incident played out is a clear pointer to the government's willingness, to side with tea-industry interests at all costs.

GLADSTONE AND SLAVERY

ABSTRACTWilliam Gladstone's views on slavery and the slave trade have received little attention from historians, although he spent much of his early years in parliament dealing with issues related to that subject. His stance on slavery echoed that of his father, who was one of the largest slave owners in the British West Indies, and on whom he was dependent for financial support. Gladstone opposed the slave trade but he wanted to improve the condition of the slaves before they were liberated. In 1833, he accepted emancipation because it was accompanied by a period of apprenticeship for the ex-slaves and by financial compensation for the planters. In the 1840s, his defence of the economic interests of the British planters was again evident in his opposition to the foreign slave trade and slave-grown sugar. By the 1850s, however, he believed that the best way to end the slave trade was by persuasion, rather than by force, and that conviction influenced his attitude to the American Civil War and to British colonial policy. As leader of the Liberal party, Gladstone, unlike many of his supporters, showed no enthusiasm for an anti-slavery crusade in Africa. His passionate commitment to liberty for oppressed peoples was seldom evident in his attitude to slavery.

‘Lazy’ Natives, Coolie Labour, and the Assam Tea Industry

AbstractThis paper considers the creation of a ‘coolie’ work-force for the Assam tea industry and the local dimensions of tea plantation enterprise. While the industry has flourished through its use of migrant labour and export markets for tea, it has retained important connections with the locality. The Assam tea industry was a predominantly colonial enterprise manned by white British planters. It allowed participation, albeit in subordinate and dependent roles, by local peasants and gentry, though mainly based on the labour of migrant ‘coolies’ recruited on indentured contracts. The prominence of ‘imported’ coolie workers has obscured the significance of various local groups as well as the tea industry's importance in the local ‘imagination’. Despite the gradual development of nationalist antagonism towards the white ‘Planters' Raj’, tea enterprise retained a hallowed place for the Assamese middle classes, as tea workers continued as a racialized labouring class.

Colonialism and coffee plantations: Decline of environment and tribals in Madras Presidency during the nineteenth century

This article attempts to analyse how the colonial project of establishing coffee plantations disturbed the self-subsistent traditional tribal system, damaged the ecology, and resulted in environmental decline in the Shervaroy hills of Madras Presidency during the nineteenth century. The thrust of the argument is that the colonial administration was least concerned about the tribal peopleÌs customary rights over forest resources, and their traditional administrative and judicial systems. The British administration, which disregarded the tribal system, not only encouraged the British planters but even condoned their patently illegal activities. In other words, the means adopted to set up coffee plantations in the hills/forests to favour the British planters led to the disintegration of the age old tribal socio-cultural system and their forest-oriented economy. It concludes that in the process of commercialisation, the colonial policy refused to accord due importance to ecology and environment as well as to the sustainable livelihood of the tribal communities. Instead, its only concern was with the British planters establishing coffee estates during the nineteenth century.

The World of Alexander Campbell: An Eighteenth-Century Grenadian Planter

In 1763 few Europeans doubted the enormous importance of their Caribbean possessions, a fact indicated by the ready willingness of the French to cede Canada in order to regain British-occupied Martinique. The British were no different, and in the West Indies they were in the process of establishing a New World aristocracy whose riches were based upon African slavery and the production of tropical crops. The British prized their Caribbean territories, especially since the sugar revolution that had begun during the mid-seventeenth century first in Barbados where the crop had become dominant by 1660 and then in Jamaica. British planters continued their success in the Leeward Island settlements of Antigua, St. Christopher, Nevis, and Montserrat, where entrepreneurs converted their lands to sugar cane by the early 1700s. West Indian planters became influential within the British Empire, and exercised profound social, political, and economic importance in the metropolis. By the eighteenth century they were the richest colonists within the empire; they were landed aristocrats who could have vied in wealth and prestige with their counterparts in Britain.

The World of Alexander Campbell: An Eighteenth-Century Grenadian Planter

In 1763 few Europeans doubted the enormous importance of their Caribbean possessions, a fact indicated by the ready willingness of the French to cede Canada in order to regain British-occupied Martinique. The British were no different, and in the West Indies they were in the process of establishing a New World aristocracy whose riches were based upon African slavery and the production of tropical crops. The British prized their Caribbean territories, especially since the sugar revolution that had begun during the mid-seventeenth century first in Barbados where the crop had become dominant by 1660 and then in Jamaica. British planters continued their success in the Leeward Island settlements of Antigua, St. Christopher, Nevis, and Montserrat, where entrepreneurs converted their lands to sugar cane by the early 1700s. West Indian planters became influential within the British Empire, and exercised profound social, political, and economic importance in the metropolis. By the eighteenth century they were the richest colonists within the empire; they were landed aristocrats who could have vied in wealth and prestige with their counterparts in Britain.

Embodying colonialism? Domination and resistence in nineteenth-century Ceylonese coffee plantations

This paper examines plantations as laboratories of modernity in the colonial tropics during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Plantations can be conceived of as modern technologies for the reconfiguration of space, tools, scientific instruments and other material resources, bringing together culturally heterogeneous populations, stripping them of their former social attachments and reconstituting them as workers through the use of space-time strategies of monitoring and control. I argue that coffee plantations in Ceylon were intended to be sites of what Henri Lefebvre has termed abstract space: the commodification and bureaucratisation of everyday life. As an ideal, abstract space requires the construction of ‘abstract bodies’ to conform to it. This ideal remained largely unattained, however. In the first part of the paper, the strategies and technologies adopted by British planters as they attempted to produce and regulate abstract space and bodies are examined. Disciplinarity as internalised control, was rarely achieved and consequently direct surveillance and the threat of physical force was applied. The second section explores the way in which the Tamil plantation workers countered the planters technologies of control by engaging in tactics of resistance. In the final section, the strategies planters adopted in order to oppose the workers' tactics and the middle space of Tamil overseers are examined.

Beyond the Great Debates: Gender and Race in Early America

Several debates animated the early American history I studied as a graduate student in the mid-1980s. Two of these captured my imagination, eventually drawing me from nineteenthand twentieth-century women's history to the study of gender and race in the colonial period. The first focused on the status of women, by historians usually meant white women. Turning on the acceptance or rejection of the so-called golden age theory, posited that early American women enjoyed a brief period of high status relative to both their English sisters and their nineteenth-century counterparts, this debate pitted scholars who believed women's lives had deteriorated after 1800 against those who thought women's lives had been equally dismal before 1800. Nothing less than the assignment of blame for women's subordination was at stake. Were the root causes of that subordination already in place when the English settled North America? Or could a significant portion of the blame be laid at the door of industrial capitalism?1 The second debate that brought colonial history to life for me was an older debate about the emergence of racial slavery in the southern colonies. Often put as simply as which came first, racism or slavery, this debate assessed the reasons for the turn to slave labor and the consequences that followed from it. Was chattel slavery the inevitable result of the deep-rooted racial prejudice of seventeenth-century British planters? Or did racial prejudice arise only after planters had embraced slavery as their new labor system? Like the debate over women's status, this known to many as the debate, was as much about origins as causes, compelling historians to offer a chronology of when racial inequality began.2 Although these debates had much in common, key differences distinguished them. Whereas the debate over women's status revolved around implicit comparisons of colonial women to their antebellum counterparts, thus inviting comment from specialists in both time periods, the origins debate had been first and foremost a discussion among colonial historians about slavery in early America, an agenda that set them apart from scholars of antebellum slavery. Second, in contrast to the newness of the debate over women's status and the continued interest of scholars in it throughout the

The Origins of the Scottish Plantations in Ulster to 1625: A Reinterpretation

There is no question that the plantation of Ulster during the reign of James I had a profound effect on the course of British history. However, the nature of that plantation has been either misrepresented or misunderstood. In order to overcome this problem, we must address two provocative questions: (1) Were the Scots-Irish, the largest group of settlers, predominantly Celtic or non-Celtic ethnically and culturally? and (2) If they were mainly Celtic, why were they better able than non-Celts to establish viable settlements in Ulster, a predominantly Celtic area? A reexamination of the origins of the pre-1625 Scottish settlers and their methods of settlement indeed casts the problem of the Ulster Plantation in a new light.For the last two decades, historians have begun to question the portrayal of the Scots-Irish, or Ulster Scots, as frugal, hardworking, anglicized Presbyterian Lowlanders who brought the light of civilization to a benighted Celtic backwater. For example, Nicholas Canny correctly dismisses the “myth” of Ulster's material transformation by pointing out that the province, unlike Leinster and Munster, was settled by British planters from less economically advanced areas of the archipelago. But, again, he does not adequately examine the cultural and ethnic background of the dominant Scots-Irish. Traditionally, they have been classed as “Lowland,” non-Celts rather than as “Highland,” Celtic Scots. These designations are misleading because they oversimplify Scotland's historical and cultural divisions that had been in place as early as the Norman invasion.