[CANCELED] Global History of Labour seminar, with Rana Partap Behal, about the recruitment and transportation of Indian labourers for the plantations.

Indian Migrant Labourers in South-east Asian and Assam Plantations under the British Imperial System

Rana Partap Behal (University of Delhi)

Modern industrial capitalism and the consequent colonisation by the British of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and other parts of the world triggered the massive mobilisation of Indian agrarian communities across these diverse geographical localities. The growing demand for raw materials and other tropical agricultural products in the West opened up large-scale and sparse geographical spaces by the European capital for the production of such commodities for export. Modern plantations growing crops such as coffee, tea and rubber were set up in South-east Asian colonies of Malaya and Ceylon, and Assam on the Indian sub-continent, during the 19th and early 20th centuries. This paper studies the pattern of recruitment and transportation of a very diverse range of Indian agrarian communities from different geographical locations to work as labourers in these settings. The study will focus on two important areas of this labour mobilisation and transportation: (a) the agencies of recruitment, i.e. European recruiting agents, indigenous kanganies, sirdars and arkatis and (b) the nature and the process of transforming immigrant Indian agrarian communities working on the plantations.

Sobre o orador:
Rana Partap Behal — Taught history at Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi. Also held teaching assignments at Cornell University, Syracuse University and Oberlin College, USA. Was a Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; South Asia Centre, Cambridge University, Re:Work, Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History, Humboldt University, Berlin; Centre for Development Studies, Free University, Berlin and Fellow at Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies Erfurt University, Germany. India coordinator Labour Module of M.S. Merian-R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (ICAS: MP). Author of One Hundred Years of Servitude: Political Economy of Tea Plantations in Colonial Assam (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2014). Founder member and Treasurer of Association of Indian Labour Historians.

Imagem: Nine scenes showing tea cultivation and preparation on an Indian plantation. Engraving by T. Brown, c. 1850, after J. L. Williams.
Crédito: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)