Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India
Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India

Author: Prakash Kumar

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-27

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1139576968

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Prakash Kumar documents the history of agricultural indigo, exploring the effects of nineteenth-century globalisation on this colonial industry. Charting the indigo culture from the early modern period to the twentieth century, Kumar discusses how knowledge of indigo culture thrived among peasant traditions on the Indian subcontinent in the early modern period and was then developed by Caribbean planters and French naturalists who codified this knowledge into widely disseminated texts. European planters who settled in Bengal with the establishment of British rule in the late eighteenth century drew on this information. From the nineteenth century, indigo culture became more modern, science-based and expert driven, and with the advent of a cheaper, purer synthetic indigo in 1897, indigo science crossed paths with the colonial state's effort to develop a science for agricultural development. Only at the end of the First World War, when the industrial use of synthetic indigo for textile dyeing and printing became almost universal, did the indigo industry's optimism fade away.

Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India
Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India

Author: Prakash Kumar

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-27

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1107023254

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Prakash Kumar documents the history of agricultural indigo, exploring the effects of nineteenth-century globalization on a colonial industry in South Asia. Kumar discusses how the knowledge of indigo culture thrived among peasant traditions on the Indian subcontinent in the early modern period. Caribbean planters and French naturalists then developed and codified this knowledge into widely disseminated texts. European planters who began to settle in Bengal with the establishment of British rule in the third quarter of the eighteenth century drew on this network of information. Through the nineteenth century, indigo culture in Bengal became more modern, science-based, and expert driven. When a cheaper and purer synthetic indigo was created in 1897, the planters and the colonial state established laboratories to find ways to cheapen the cost of the agricultural dye and improve its purity. This indigo science crossed paths with the colonial state's effort to develop a science for agricultural development. For two decades, natural indigo survived the competition of the industrial substitute. The indigo industry's optimism faded only at the end of the First World War, when German proprietary knowledge of synthetic indigo became widely available and the industrial use of synthetic indigo for textile dyeing and printing became almost universal.

Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina
Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina

Author: S. Max Edelson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-05-15

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0674060229

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This impressive scholarly debut deftly reinterprets one of America's oldest symbols--the southern slave plantation. S. Max Edelson examines the relationships between planters, slaves, and the natural world they colonized to create the Carolina Lowcountry. European settlers came to South Carolina in 1670 determined to possess an abundant wilderness. Over the course of a century, they settled highly adaptive rice and indigo plantations across a vast coastal plain. Forcing slaves to turn swampy wastelands into productive fields and to channel surging waters into elaborate irrigation systems, planters initiated a stunning economic transformation. The result, Edelson reveals, was two interdependent plantation worlds. A rough rice frontier became a place of unremitting field labor. With the profits, planters made Charleston and its hinterland into a refined, diversified place to live. From urban townhouses and rural retreats, they ran multiple-plantation enterprises, looking to England for affirmation as agriculturists, gentlemen, and stakeholders in Britain's American empire. Offering a new vision of the Old South that was far from static, Edelson reveals the plantations of early South Carolina to have been dynamic instruments behind an expansive process of colonization. With a bold interdisciplinary approach, Plantation Enterprise reconstructs the environmental, economic, and cultural changes that made the Carolina Lowcountry one of the most prosperous and repressive regions in the Atlantic world.

Indigo
Indigo

Author: Catherine E. McKinley

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-08-01

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1408822369

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Indigo is the rich, electrifying history of a precious dye: its relationship to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, its profound influence on fashion, and its spiritual significance - all very much alive today. But it is also the story of a personal quest: Catherine McKinley's ancestors include a clan of Scots who wore indigo tartan, several generations of Jewish 'rag traders' and Massachusetts textile factory owners, and African slaves who were traded along the same Saharan routes as indigo. Her journey takes her to nine West African countries and is resplendent with powerful lessons of heritage and history which shape the way she understands her world at home.

Colonialism in Global Perspective
Colonialism in Global Perspective

Author: Kris Manjapra

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-05-07

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1108425267

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A provocative, breath-taking, and concise relational history of colonialism over the past 500 years, from the dawn of the New World to the twenty-first century.

Imperialism and the Natural World
Imperialism and the Natural World

Author: John MacDonald MacKenzie

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 9780719029004

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Many experts recognize that juvenile literature acts as an excellent reflector of the dominant ideas of an age; the values and fantasies of adult authors are often dressed up in fictional garb for youthful consumption. This collection examines a portion of the mass-produced juvenile literature, from the mid-19th century until the 1950s, focusing on the cluster of ideas connected with Britain's role in the maintenance of order and the spread of civilization. Western science, medicine, geographical ideas, and environmental assumptions were all vital to the creation of the imperial world system. The contributors to this volume illustrate new approaches to the study of conservation, botany, geology, economic geography, state scientific endeavor, and entomological and medical research in relation to the imperial rule of both Britain and France. Distributed in the US and Canada by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Materiality of Color
The Materiality of Color

Author: Andrea Feeser

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 9781409429159

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The purpose of this essay collection is to recover color's complex and sometimes morally troubling past. By emphasising color's materiality, and how it was produced, exchanged and used, contributors draw attention to the disjuncture between the beauty of color and the blood, sweat, and tears that went into its production, circulation and application as well as to the complicated and varied social meanings attached to color within specific historical and social contexts.

The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia
The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia

Author: Ulbe Bosma

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-10-07

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1107435307

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European markets almost exclusively relied on Caribbean sugar produced by slave labor until abolitionist campaigns began around 1800. Thereafter, importing Asian sugar and transferring plantation production to Asia became a serious option for the Western world. In this book, Ulbe Bosma details how the British and Dutch introduced the sugar plantation model in Asia and refashioned it over time. Although initial attempts by British planters in India failed, the Dutch colonial administration was far more successful in Java, where it introduced in 1830 a system of forced cultivation that tied local peasant production to industrial manufacturing. A century later, India adopted the Java model in combination with farmers' cooperatives rather than employing coercive measures. Cooperatives did not prevent industrial sugar production from exploiting small farmers and cane cutters, however, and Bosma finds that much of modern sugar production in Asia resembles the abuses of labor by the old plantation systems of the Caribbean.