Coolies of Capitalism

Coolies of Capitalism
Title Coolies of Capitalism PDF eBook
Author Nitin Varma
Publisher Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Pages 384
Release 2018-05-07
Genre History
ISBN 3110461285

Download Coolies of Capitalism Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

“Coolie” is a generic category for the “unskilled” manual labour. The offering of services for hire had various pre-colonial lineages. In the nineteenth century there was an attempt to recast the term in discursive constructions and material practices for “mobilized-immobilized” labour. Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). It was portrayed as a stage in a promised transition. The tea plantations of Assam, like many other tropical plantations in South Asia, were inaugurated and formalized during this period. They were initially worked by the locals. In the late 1850s, the locals were replaced by labourers imported from outside the province who were unquestioningly designated “coolies” in the historical literature. Qualifying this framework of transition (local to coolie labour) and introduction (of coolie labour), this study makes a case for the “production” of coolie labour in the history of the colonial-capitalist plantations in Assam. The intention of the research is not to suggest an unfettered agency of colonial-capitalism in defining and “producing” coolies, with an emphasis on the attendant contingencies, negotiations, contestations and crises. The study intervenes in the narratives of an abrupt appearance of the archetypical coolie of the tea gardens (i.e., imported and indentured) and situates this archetype’s emergence, sustenance and shifts in the context of material and discursive processes.

Coolies and Cane

Coolies and Cane
Title Coolies and Cane PDF eBook
Author Moon-Ho Jung
Publisher JHU Press
Pages 300
Release 2006-04
Genre Business & Economics
ISBN 9780801882814

Download Coolies and Cane Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Publisher Description

Contesting Malaysia’s Integration into the World Economy

Contesting Malaysia’s Integration into the World Economy
Title Contesting Malaysia’s Integration into the World Economy PDF eBook
Author Rajah Rasiah
Publisher Springer Nature
Pages 281
Release 2021-05-15
Genre Business & Economics
ISBN 9811606501

Download Contesting Malaysia’s Integration into the World Economy Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This book brings together a set of incisive essays that interrogate Malaysian history and social relations which began during pre-colonial times, and extended to colonial and post-colonial Malaysia. It addresses economic misinterpretations of the role of markets in the way colonial industrialisation evolved, the nature of exploitation of workers, and the participation of local actors in shaping a wide range of socioeconomic and political processes. In doing so, it takes the lead from the innovative historian, Shaharil Talib Robert who argued that the recrafting of history should go beyond the use of conventional methodologies and analytic techniques. It is in that tradition that the chapters offer a semblance of causality, contingency, contradictions, and connections. With that, the analysis in each chapter utilises approaches appropriate for the topics chosen, which include history, anthropology, sociology, economics, politics, and international relations. The collection of chapters also offer novel interpretations to contest and fill gaps that have not been addressed in past works. The book is essential reading for history students, and those interested in Malaysian history in particular.

Tea War

Tea War
Title Tea War PDF eBook
Author Andrew B. Liu
Publisher Yale University Press
Pages 359
Release 2020-04-14
Genre History
ISBN 0300252331

Download Tea War Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

A history of capitalism in nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century China and India that explores the competition between their tea industries “Tea War is not only a detailed comparative history of the transformation of tea production in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it also intervenes in larger debates about the nature of capitalism, global modernity, and global history.”— Alexander F. Day, Occidental College Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.

Coolies, Capital and Colonialism

Coolies, Capital and Colonialism
Title Coolies, Capital and Colonialism PDF eBook
Author Rana P. Behal
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Pages 300
Release 2006
Genre Business & Economics
ISBN 9780521699747

Download Coolies, Capital and Colonialism Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Endogamy, the custom forbidding marriage outside one's social class, is central to social history. This study considers the factors determining who married whom, whether partner selection changed over the past three hundred years and regional differences between Europe and South America.

Capitalism and Slavery

Capitalism and Slavery
Title Capitalism and Slavery PDF eBook
Author Eric Williams
Publisher UNC Press Books
Pages 308
Release 2014-06-30
Genre History
ISBN 1469619490

Download Capitalism and Slavery Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies. In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.

Empire's Garden

Empire's Garden
Title Empire's Garden PDF eBook
Author Jayeeta Sharma
Publisher Duke University Press
Pages 345
Release 2011-08
Genre Business & Economics
ISBN 0822350491

Download Empire's Garden Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

A history of the colonial tea plantation regime in Assam, which brought more than one million migrants to the region in northeast India, irrevocably changing the social landscape.