Embedding Agricultural Commodities

Willem van Schendel has served as Professor of Modern Asian History at the University of Amsterdam and as head of the South Asia Department, International Institute of Social History. Among his recent books are The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India (with Joy Pachuau); A History of Bangladesh and Global Blue: Indigo and Espionage in Colonial Bengal. Recent co-edited volumes are Labour Migration and Human Trafficking in Southeast Asia: Critical Perspectives and The Bangladesh Reader: History, Culture, Politics.

Embedding Agricultural Commodities:

Using Historical Evidence, 1840s-1940s

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Contributors

1. Embedding Agricultural Commodities – An Introduction

Willem van Schendel

2. Staying Embedded: The Rocky Existence of an Indigo Maker in Bengal

Willem van Schendel

3. Multatuli, the Liberal Colonialists and their Attacks on the Patrimonial Embedding of Commodity Production in Java

Ulbe Bosma

4. Smallholdings versus European Plantations: The Beginnings of Coffee in Nineteenth-Century Mysore (India)

Bhaswati Bhattacharya

5. ‘Keeping Land and Labour under Control?’ Reporting on Tobacco-Shed Burnings in Besoeki (Java)

Ratna Saptari

6. Embedding Cigarette Tobacco in Colonial Bihar (India): A Multi-Dimensional Task

Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff

7. Cuba, Sugarcane and the Reluctant Embedding of Scientific Method: Agete’s La Caña de Azúcar en Cuba

Jonathan Curry-Machado

8. Globalization’s Agricultural Roots: Some Final Considerations

Marcel van der Linden

Index