Colonial Plantations and Their Afterlives: Legal Disciplines, Indian Historiographies and Their Lessons. An Interview with Rana Behal

Taking the form of an interview with a prominent historian of Indian plantations, this chapter discusses the multiple ways in which analyses of tea production in colonial Assam can contribute to broader discussions on plantations’ legal disciplines and labor regimes. Specifically, the conversation focuses on labor recruitment and management schemes after abolition, considering their continuities with and sharp differences from slave-based systems. From the perspective of world-system capitalist flows and forms of organization, it questions the import of subaltern, post-colonial and critical race studies in making sense of compulsory and coerced forms of labor. Moreover, the chapter probes the entanglements between plantation labor regimes, state formations and contemporary patterns of labor and migration.