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E-book Plantation Crisis : Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian tea belt

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Penilaian

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Many people have grown up, lived, worked and died on Indian tea plantations. Although a small number have left in search of a better life elsewhere, they have often been replaced by their relatives. However, most workers have not experienced a life outside the plantations, which have cocooned their families for generations. Therefore, when long-standing owners began to shut down plantation production as the tea industry entered a period of crisis in the late 1990s, it represented a moment of unprecedented social and economic disruption for the workers. In the Peermade (P?rum?du) tea belt in the southern Indian state of Kerala,1 as in the other tea belts of India, the workers, who descended from the indentured workforce of the colonial period, were the victims of economic and political forces beyond their control. In Kerala, these workers were predominantly Tamil-speaking Dalits (ex-‘untouchables’), the poorest and the most oppressed community within India’s caste hierarchy. What was worse than being socially reproduced within the plantations was being forced into a liminal juncture when the plantations were abruptly shut down.The tea industry in India boomed in the first three decades of the postcolonial period, roughly between 1950 and 1980. By the late 1980s, India was second only to China in the production of tea globally, responsible for nearly 25 per cent of global tea production and employing 1.26 million people on tea plantations and another two million indirectly. However, the collapse of the price of tea in the international market in the early 1990s led to a major crisis in the Indian tea industry. Arguably, this was due to neoliberal structural transformations in the international tea trade. Trade agreements between countries conditioned the tea trade between 1950 and 1990, but this changed by the early 1990s as a few major corporate firms that controlled the industry began to intervene much more in determining the price of tea (Neilson and Pritchard 2009). The transition of the tea market from a state-regulated to a free market was part of larger transformations in the international political economy of trade. Similar changes occurred in other major agricultural commodities such as coffee and cocoa. Accordingly, the decline of the agrarian economy in the global South is directly linked to the globalisation of neoliberal capitalism.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

330.112 RAJ p

Penerbit

London : UCL Press., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

230 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781800082274

Klasifikasi

330.112

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Capitalism Economics

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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