Drawing from the disciplines of labor, law, environmental history, and political economy, Dey has produced an excellent, century-long, agro-ecological history of tea production in India’s hilly northeast province of Assam. Throughout his well-researched, insightful, and clearly written chapters, he analyzes the self-serving discourses and ideologies of British land speculators and tea-plantation owners and of British colonial officials. Dey consistently argues that “imperial disarray” resulted from, and characterized, the eco-social-legal system of tea plantations: “The analytics of ‘disarray’ or unkemptness in this book…is used as a heuristic framework to highlight ideological, material, and discursive inconsistencies, consequences, and contradictions of this plantation form and its purported mandate of agrarian development in the region” (19). His study integrates extensive archival research with strong control over the relevant scholarly theories.
Dey provides the historical context and sequence of events from the English East India Company’s annexation of Assam’s Brahmaputra River region in 1826 to...