Explores the relations of power and production that structured the course of plantation agriculture and the lives of those drawn into its field of force

"To my knowledge, there simply is no one else writing on questions of colonialism, gender, race, and intimacy who brings this depth and reach of historical and anthropological illumination to bear."—Nancy F. Cott, author of Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation "This new book brings our collective agenda forward with a degree of maturity and flexibility that makes narrow academic preferences both unnecessary and misleading."—Doris Sommer, author of Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas

First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Southeast Asia has been portrayed as a key site in the global land grab. Featuring leading scholars in the field, this collection critically examines the nature and extent of land grabbing in Southeast Asia, and seeks to locate this phenomena in broader agrarian and environmental transitions (AET). The individual contributions suggest that there is little evidence of a global land grab in Southeast Asia, but that over the last ten years the surge of plantations and processes of land grabbing has been a key feature in the region. The collection considers how broader AET processes may be brought more clearly into focus by decentring land grabbing, including consideration of its absence as well presence. The diversity of cases in this collection coalesces around the productive tension in land grab studies between global capitalist processes on the one hand, and context-specificity and contingent motivations fuelling the expansion of large-scale plantations for oil palm, rubber, cassava and other cash crops, on the other hand. The contributors further broaden the entry points to consider cross-sectoral AET processes such as enclosures for mining, conservation and hydropower and explore the contingencies that help to maintain smallholder production. The chapters originally published as a special issue in The Journal of Peasant Studies.