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Research Paper | History | Volume 14 Issue 8, August 2025 | Pages: 1746 - 1751 | India
Tea Plantations as Technologies of Empire: Colonial Capitalism, Labour Regimes, and the Remaking of North-East India, 1826-1947
Abstract: The majority of current narratives regarding the Assam tea estates predominantly focus on workforce recruitment, migratory patterns, or large-scale economic exploitation. This essential literature, however crucial for historical analysis, frequently perceives the plantation as a localised economic venture instead of a systemic driver of imperial dominance. This article presents a theoretical framework that views the tea plantations of colonial Assam as interrelated mechanisms of imperial administration. This tangible and organisational framework facilitated the functioning of the British colonial regime, encompassing accumulation through dispossession, the governance of labour and human movement, the establishment of racialised colonial epistemology, and significant socio-ecological transformations. The plantation functioned as both a commercial enterprise and a comprehensive spatial apparatus that redefined land ownership, coerced human labour, commoditised non-human nature, and reconstructed regional identities within the broader capitalist framework. This paper critically examines the theoretical frameworks of David Harvey, Michel Foucault, Ann Laura Stoler, and Jason W. Moore, positioning Assam within ongoing discussions of global plantation capitalism and contending that the colonial plantations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries must be recognised as a complex infrastructure whose social, spatial, and environmental legacies persist in shaping the structural realities of modern North-East India.
Keywords: Assam, Tea Plantations, Technologies of Empire, Accumulation by Dispossession, Govern-mentality, Racial Capitalism, World-Ecology, Indenture
How to Cite?: Partha Banerjee, "Tea Plantations as Technologies of Empire: Colonial Capitalism, Labour Regimes, and the Remaking of North-East India, 1826-1947", Volume 14 Issue 8, August 2025, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Pages: 1746-1751, https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR25823201339, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21275/SR25823201339