Overview

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Colonialism created exclusive economic and segregatory social spaces for the exploitation and management of natural and human resources, in the form of plantations, ports, mining towns, hill stations, civil lines and new urban centres for Europeans. Contagion and Enclaves studies the social history of medicine within two intersecting enclaves in colonial India; the hill station of Darjeeling which incorporated the sanitarian and racial norms of the British Raj; and in the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal, which produced tea for the global market. This book studies the demographic and environmental transformation of the region: the racialization of urban spaces and its contestations, establishment of hill sanatoria, expansion of tea cultivation, labour emigration and the paternalistic modes of healthcare in the plantation. It examines how the threat of epidemics and riots informed the conflictual relationship between the plantations with the adjacent agricultural villages and district towns. It reveals how Tropical Medicine was practised in its ‘field’; researches in malaria, hookworm, dysentery, cholera and leprosy were informed by investigations here, and the exigencies of the colonial state, private entrepreneurship, and municipal governance subverted their implementation. Contagion and Enclaves establishes the vital link between medicine, the political economy and the social history of colonialism. It demonstrates that while enclaves were essential and distinctive sites of articulation of colonial power and economy, they were not isolated sites. The book shows that the critical aspect of the enclaves was in their interconnectedness; with other enclaves, with the global economy and international medical research.

Full Product Details

Author:   Nandini Bhattacharya (School of Humanities, University of Dundee (United Kingdom))
Publisher:   Liverpool University Press
Imprint:   Liverpool University Press
Volume:   10
Dimensions:   Width: 16.30cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 23.90cm
Weight:   0.544kg
ISBN:  

9781846318290

ISBN 10:   1846318297
Pages:   219
Publication Date:   20 November 2012
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations 1. Disease and Colonial Enclaves 2. The Sanatorium of Darjeeling: European Health in a Tropical Enclave 3. Pioneering Years in Plantation and Medicine in Darjeeling, Terai and Duars 4. The Sanatorium Enclave: Climate and Class in Colonial Darjeeling 5. Contending Visions of Health Care in the Plantation Enclaves 6. The Plantation Enclave, the Colonial State and Labour Health Care 7. Tropical Medicine in Its ‘Field’: Malaria, Hookworm and the Rhetoric of the ‘Local’ 8. Habitation and Health in Colonial Enclaves: The Hill-station and the Tea Plantations Bibliography Index

Reviews

Combining original observations with very sophisticated arguments, written both clearly and elegantly, this makes an important contribution to the field. -- Professor Mark Harrison, Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine

Combining original observations with very sophisticated arguments, written both clearly and elegantly, this makes an important contribution to the field. -- Mark Harrison Hill-stations in India represent perhaps the most interesting embodiment of colonial medical theories and ideas. It is therefore slightly puzzling that, apart from the initial forays by Dane Kennedy and Pamela Kanwar, there has been no full-length work on the theme. Nandini Bhattacharya's monograph fills this gap, but also breaks new ground by combining a study of hill-stations with that of plantations. It also shifts the emphasis away from Simla to the provincial summer-capital of Darjeeling. At first glance, the link between plantations and hill-stations appears tenuous-after all, despite their geographical proximity, they were worlds apart in terms of their use and purpose: whereas plantations were enmeshed within the logic of global capitalism and the exploitation of labour, hill-stations represented the question of 'medicalised leisure' for the sahibs. Yet, as Bhattacharya convincingly argues, both represented spaces that were out of the ordinary, where legal structures and social relations assumed extraordinary forms. In this sense, they were enclaves that worked within the same parameters as several other enclaves in the plains, including, for example, civil lines, cantonments, White towns and so on. Equally importantly, from a medical standpoint, both were places where ideas and cures could be tested much more thoroughly, though this was especially true of plantations. Bhattacharya cautions us, though, against over-emphasising the question of experimentation. While it is true that the nature of these enclaves allowed for a greater degree of investigation into new ideas, this did not always translate into new medical measures being implemented on a permanent basis. Planters showed little willingness to allocate more funds towards disease control, and continued to espouse certain long-standing medical theories. In fact, it was arguably more difficult to control disease within enclaves such as the plantations, as both government agencies and plantation authorities adopted the strategy of shifting all the blame on to each other. An equally complex picture is presented regarding the origins and role of Darjeeling as a hill-station. Contrary to accepted historical wisdom, Bhattacharya cites instances where these elevated spots were actually seen as detrimental to the health of Europeans. In one of the most striking instances of such opinion, the cantonment of Senchal, close to Darjeeling, was abandoned as there were rumours of several suicides by soldiers stationed there 'owing to the excessive isolation and bitter cold' (p. 35). Bhattacharya also points out that hill-stations were considered to be especially detrimental to the health of those Europeans whose bodies had become 'tropicalised' due to a long stay in the plains. Simultaneously, as we know, the hills were also seen as having a deleterious effect on the health of Indian sepoys and civilians. It is in dealing with the Indian response to the medical discourse surrounding the benefits of the hill-stations that Bhattacharya really makes a move away from existing studies, which have focused completely on European perceptions of the hills. The book presents an interesting account of the appropriation of the hill-station by various 'native' sections, particularly by elites and the bhadralok, who clamoured to the hills despite colonial insistence that these spots were not amenable to the 'native' constitution. What are equally interesting are the subsequent attempts that weremadeby these Indian sections to prevent the 'Indian riff-raff' from destroying the exclusivity of their new-found White paradise. On the subject of the relationship of 'natives' with these hill-stations, Bhattacharya also makes the important argument that, despite all the talk regarding their exclusivity, European settlements in these places depended to a large extent on 'native' support. In this sense, therefore, the boundaries of these hill-stations were both rigid and permeable at the same time. Overall, this is an interesting book with several fresh perspectives. One felt that the chaptersonhill-stations worked better than thoseonplantations, perhaps because they presented a much more rounded view of the rhythm of life in the hills. The medical history of plantations could perhaps have been embedded to a greater extent within an account of life in the plantations. Particularly missing is any perspective on the response of plantation labourers to medical and administrative measures that were implemented on them. But these are minor quibbles with a book that adds greatly to our understanding of European perceptions of the 'tropics'. Social History of Medicine, vol 27, no 1 ... this is an interesting book with several fresh perspectives. ... a book that adds greatly to our understanding of European perceptions of the 'tropics' Social History of Medicine, vol 27, no 1 It is possible that readers might come to this fluently written history of turn-of-the-century Darjeeling in hopes of settling into a tale of raj nostalgia, a book to accompany high tea served in one of the many manicured gardens across India's network of colonial hill stations. Those readers would be disappointed. Instead, in this often understated book, Nandini Bhattacharya serves up a devastating critique of the brutal logic of place, health, and labor under colonial rule. By tracing the history of the colonization of the Darjeeling Hills in north Bengal, Contagion and Enclaves illuminates the links that connected otherwise distinct spaces of labor, leisure, and tropical medicine in India. Maintaining a tight analytic focus on the making of Darjeeling, the book offers a comparative survey of distinct, if adjacent, colonial enclaves. Darjeeling was initially built as a colonial hill station-a socially and racially exclusive remote climatic zone designed to maintain and restore the health of colonial white power. Yet the climate that initially offered colonials a refreshing and restorative contrast to the heat and dust of the plains below soon came to be seen as dreary and wet. Bhattacharya argues that the changing fortunes of climate were part and parcel of a larger logic. Darjeeling was initially designed as an enclave to cater exclusively to white colonials who needed to recover their health compromised by tropical conditions. However, over the course of the early twentieth century, Darjeeling expanded to become a coveted site for medicalized leisure for affluent Indians (p. 91). In losing its exclusiveness as a site of whiteness, the very climate that was initially seen as health-giving came to be seen as health-sapping. From Bhattacharya's perspective, the very facts of nature are only legible when read through the lens of colonial power. Darjeeling was famous not only as a hill station but also as home to a distinctly different sort of colonial enclave: the tea plantation. As a distinct economic zone where much of colonial law was ceded to the rule of the planter, tea plantations were designed to extract the maximum profit out of a largely migrant labor force. By bringing both types of Darjeeling's colonial enclaves into a single analytic frame-hill station and tea plantation-Bhattacharya highlights the awkward ties that bound climate, leisure, health, and enterprise together as fundamentally intertwined components of colonial society and economy. Through the juxtaposition of tea plantation and hill station, this book posits the broader category of the colonial enclaves as a distinctive site for the articulation of colonial bio-power and its economic priorities. As Bhattacharya argues, colonial enclaves were ... an essential part of colonial civil society and economy and at the same time designed as special and distinct zones of colonial habitation, power and productivity (p. 8) In addition to presenting an analytics of enclave, Bhattacharya's work also extends our understanding of the plantation within colonial and tropical medicine. Over the course of the early twentieth century, the plantation enclave emerged worldwide as one of the sites for the circulation and diffusion of scientific and medical knowledge. As we have learned from the now significant literature on tropical medicine (largely produced in relation to its careers in colonial Africa), tropical medicine was virtually synonymous with colonial medicine. Received wisdom is that the rare medical interventions to which plantation workers were subject were justified on the basis that a labor force had to maintain a basic level of health for the plantation to turn a profit. Yet Bhattacharya shows that plantations did not manifest a functionalist economy of health expenditure under colonialism. Despite the fact that owners and managers were presented with research that suggested that public health investment and infrastructure created and maintained a more productive (and indeed more profitable) workforce, Darjeeling's individual plantations failed to embrace such measures. Although tropical medicine benefited from research in Darjeeling's plantations and among its laborers, the reverse was not true. Nor did plantations come under political pressure by the colonial state to adopt such measures. While the plantation was an economic necessity for the colonial state, the plantation functioned politically as what Bhattacharya calls a ceded territory with a nearly unending supply of cheap labor. In this impressive book, Bhattacharya demonstrates that, despite the recent fad for celebratory tales of great gushing flows that forge triumphant global connections, it is still possible to publish rigorous analyses of the interruptions over which colonialism and capitalism rode roughshod. She lays open the brutal ties that bound the health of laboring bodies to wider strategic aims of the Indian economy and polity. In the final analysis, Bhattacharya's book suggests that capitalism's growth story in India-that is, the seemingly endless supply of cheap and replaceable labor-remains much the same today as it was a century ago. e American Historical Review, vol 119, no 1 The Postcolonialism across the Disciplines Series seeks to span the traditional range of disciplines... in postcolonial studies but also those less acknowledged (front matter). Nandini Bhattacharya's Contagion and Enclaves does this admirably by considering how state actors, medical practitioners (British and Indian) and planters governed colonial enclaves and tea plantations in the Darjeeling hills of northern Bengal, through the intersection of political economy and tropical medical therapeutics. Bhattacharya asserts, Despite the richness of recent historiography on public health and Tropical Medicine in colonial India, historians have not analysed the discourse and praxis of medicine within colonial enclaves and the communities they engendered. She thus provides a social history of disease within two such enclaves, which argues that disease and its control was linked to the essential modes of colonial functioning, in practices of settlement, governance and in economic productivity. In Bhattacharya's terms, the book studies disease control as a mode of colonial power, governance and intervention in... special zones of economic interest and social habitation (8-9). Bhattacharya's first primary focus is colonial governance through the control of disease among, and medical research on, the mostly immigrant Nepalese labourers in tea plantations producing for export. This governance of plantations as sites of private enterprise involved constant negotiation between colonial government and planters (9-10, 16-17). Plantation medicine was enacted through a racialized and class hierarchy between a small number of British physicians who treated Whites and supervised labourer care during epidemics, overworked mostly high caste Bengali doctor babus responsible for labourer health, and Indigenous ojha (healers) who likely enacted most daily medical care (71, 74-81, 192). The book's second primary focus is practices of settlement and medicine, and medicalized leisure, predominantly for the British, in the sanatorium enclave of the hill-station of Darjeeling (10, 20). Here the Indian elite and many servants and minor clerks necessitated by colonialism subverted the idyll of this exclusive enclave. As a sanatorium town for members of the White colonial elite and British troops, but also as the summer capital of Bengal, Darjeeling, like the plantations, linked the colonial order to the globalized imperial economy (11-12, 14). Contagion and Enclaves provides fascinating analysis of the intersections between medical ideas and practices, and the struggles of colonial political economy. I provide just one nugget from Bhattacharya's examination of each enclave. She illustrates that British efforts for racialized exclusivity were co-produced with (and arguably more important than) medical concerns in the development of hill stations such as Darjeeling. This involved a double segregation: 1) between the masses and elites (in the hill station versus plains, and among practitioners of, versus labourers for, medicalized leisure); and 2) between the White European versus Indian elites who patronized respectively Darjeeling's Eden Sanitarium and Lowis Jubilee Sanatorium (35-39). A proportion of friends and relatives residing in Eden equal to that of patients-suffering from medically vague conditions -revealed how the social function of these institutions was at least as important as their medical practices (44-47). Relatedly, Bhattacharya's analysis of the dual dynamics of racialization and liberal capitalism in the governing of plantations reveals that disease control as a mode of colonial power involved a project of limited medical effectiveness. She highlights how colonial discourse constructed... racial typologies with reference to labourers' bodies. This racialization was reflected in a physical segregation of plantations that facilitated control over the labourers. Yet the legal definition of plantation labour as free also justified colonial state reluctance to intervene in plantations with regard to anything from vital statistics gathering to preventive health and sanitations, clean water supply or vaccinations. Labourers were racially managed but medically neglected. This colonial medical regime was rationalized in two primary ways: as best enacted through the paternalistic benevolence of planter oversight, and as limited by the cultural dispositions among the labourers (33, 64-68, 81-82, 110-11, 114-18, 153). I encourage the editors and authors in this series, which seeks to produce cross-disciplinary conversations about colonialism, to provide a bit more intellectual road mapping for non-expert readers. This reader could have used more signposts in Contagion and Enclaves: more sentences or paragraphs to introduce and contextualize sections, chapters and issues; definitions of uncommon terms; more and larger geographical maps (for example on 13-15, 21, 28). By way of illustration, I would have appreciated greater detail on the relations of rule among internal and colonizing political and commercial actors, and those from surrounding kingdoms, as well as on class and ethno-racialized relations among the Indian elite, middle and labouring classes, migrant labour and Indigenous tribes (see, for example, 7, 10, 12, 14-16, 20-22). Later in the book, a more detailed sketch of the terrain would have helped me grapple better with divisions among nationalist, provincial, local, and radical and labour politics (132-36, 146, 188-90). Some of this intellectual mapping gradually unfolds in Contagion and Enclaves, but readers without relevant backgrounds may find it difficult to immerse themselves, especially at the beginning. This reader recommends the effort, for the rewards of Bhattacharya's evidence and analysis. Contagion and Enclaves also leaves us yearning for more. I mention only two areas for future research. Bhattacharya's political economy material begs for gender analysis to expand our understanding of gender and medicine in colonial contexts.1 Her analysis of colonial medical governance also suggests that we need to know much more from the perspective of the targets of colonialism. Bhattacharya's examination of Bengal plantations as sites of experimentation in Tropical Medicine (16) brings to mind Ian Mosby's recent work on medical experimentation in Canadian Aboriginal communities and Residential Schools.2 Both these studies highlight the importance of engaging survivors of colonialism (from these eras already elderly) on their experiences. As Bhattacharya notes of medical research on plantation labourers, So little is known of workers' perceptions of their own illnesses, never mind of the colonial regime that exploited their labour as it failed to prioritize their wellbeing. Yet into the 1970s tea companies... continued to cite labourers' cultural values as justification for the lack of basic sanitary facilities on plantations (192). Witnesses of colonialism in Canada may be reminded of how alleged deficiencies in Aboriginal communities (from cultural to financial ills) are so often referenced to explain poor health and living conditions on and off reserves, even as Aboriginal people themselves are not adequately included as analysts of those conditions.3 Notes 1 See, for example, Maneesha Lal, The Politics of Gender and Medicine in Colonial India: The Countess of Dufferin's Fund, 1885-1888, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 68/1 (Spring 1994): 29-66; Mary Ellen Kelm, Diagnosing the Discursive Indian: Medicine, gender, and the 'dying race,' Ethnohistory 52/2 (2005): 371-406. 2 Ian Mosby, Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition research and human biomedical experimentation in Aboriginal communities and residential schools, 1942-1952, Histoire sociale/Social history 46/91 (May 2013): 145-72. 3 For critiques of this tendency outside the field of history see, for example, Dara Culhane, Their Spirits Live within Us: Aboriginal women in Downtown Eastside Vancouver emerging into visibility, American Indian Quarterly 27, 3-4 (Summer/Fall 2003): 593-606; Juanita Sherwood and Tahnia Edwards, Decolonisation: A critical step for improving Aboriginal health, Contemporary Nurse 22 (2006): 178-190; Jo-Anne Fiske and Annette Browne, Aboriginal Citizen, Discredited Medical Subject: Paradoxical constructions of Aboriginal women's subjectivity in Canadian health care policies, Policy Sciences 39, 1 (March 2006): 91-111. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 15.1 (13) The Postcolonialism across the Disciplines Series seeks to span the traditional range of disciplines... in postcolonial studies but also those less acknowledged (front matter). Nandini Bhattacharya's Contagion and Enclaves does this admirably ... Contagion and Enclaves provides fascinating analysis of the intersections between medical ideas and practices, and the struggles of colonial political economy. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15.1 (2013)

Combining original observations with very sophisticated arguments, written both clearly and elegantly, this makes an important contribution to the field. -- Professor Mark Harrison, Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine Hill-stations in India represent perhaps the most interesting embodiment of colonial medical theories and ideas. It is therefore slightly puzzling that, apart from the initial forays by Dane Kennedy and Pamela Kanwar, there has been no full-length work on the theme. Nandini Bhattacharya's monograph fills this gap, but also breaks new ground by combining a study of hill-stations with that of plantations. It also shifts the emphasis away from Simla to the provincial summer-capital of Darjeeling. At first glance, the link between plantations and hill-stations appears tenuous-after all, despite their geographical proximity, they were worlds apart in terms of their use and purpose: whereas plantations were enmeshed within the logic of global capitalism and the exploitation of labour, hill-stations represented the question of 'medicalised leisure' for the sahibs. Yet, as Bhattacharya convincingly argues, both represented spaces that were out of the ordinary, where legal structures and social relations assumed extraordinary forms. In this sense, they were enclaves that worked within the same parameters as several other enclaves in the plains, including, for example, civil lines, cantonments, White towns and so on. Equally importantly, from a medical standpoint, both were places where ideas and cures could be tested much more thoroughly, though this was especially true of plantations. Bhattacharya cautions us, though, against over-emphasising the question of experimentation. While it is true that the nature of these enclaves allowed for a greater degree of investigation into new ideas, this did not always translate into new medical measures being implemented on a permanent basis. Planters showed little willingness to allocate more funds towards disease control, and continued to espouse certain long-standing medical theories. In fact, it was arguably more difficult to control disease within enclaves such as the plantations, as both government agencies and plantation authorities adopted the strategy of shifting all the blame on to each other. An equally complex picture is presented regarding the origins and role of Darjeeling as a hill-station. Contrary to accepted historical wisdom, Bhattacharya cites instances where these elevated spots were actually seen as detrimental to the health of Europeans. In one of the most striking instances of such opinion, the cantonment of Senchal, close to Darjeeling, was abandoned as there were rumours of several suicides by soldiers stationed there 'owing to the excessive isolation and bitter cold' (p. 35). Bhattacharya also points out that hill-stations were considered to be especially detrimental to the health of those Europeans whose bodies had become 'tropicalised' due to a long stay in the plains. Simultaneously, as we know, the hills were also seen as having a deleterious effect on the health of Indian sepoys and civilians. It is in dealing with the Indian response to the medical discourse surrounding the benefits of the hill-stations that Bhattacharya really makes a move away from existing studies, which have focused completely on European perceptions of the hills. The book presents an interesting account of the appropriation of the hill-station by various 'native' sections, particularly by elites and the bhadralok, who clamoured to the hills despite colonial insistence that these spots were not amenable to the 'native' constitution. What are equally interesting are the subsequent attempts that weremadeby these Indian sections to prevent the 'Indian riff-raff' from destroying the exclusivity of their new-found White paradise. On the subject of the relationship of 'natives' with these hill-stations, Bhattacharya also makes the important argument that, despite all the talk regarding their exclusivity, European settlements in these places depended to a large extent on 'native' support. In this sense, therefore, the boundaries of these hill-stations were both rigid and permeable at the same time. Overall, this is an interesting book with several fresh perspectives. One felt that the chaptersonhill-stations worked better than thoseonplantations, perhaps because they presented a much more rounded view of the rhythm of life in the hills. The medical history of plantations could perhaps have been embedded to a greater extent within an account of life in the plantations. Particularly missing is any perspective on the response of plantation labourers to medical and administrative measures that were implemented on them. But these are minor quibbles with a book that adds greatly to our understanding of European perceptions of the 'tropics'. -- Saurabh Mishra Social History of Medicine, vol 27, no 1 201402 ... this is an interesting book with several fresh perspectives. ... a book that adds greatly to our understanding of European perceptions of the 'tropics' Social History of Medicine, vol 27, no 1 201402 It is possible that readers might come to this fluently written history of turn-of-the-century Darjeeling in hopes of settling into a tale of raj nostalgia, a book to accompany high tea served in one of the many manicured gardens across India's network of colonial hill stations. Those readers would be disappointed. Instead, in this often understated book, Nandini Bhattacharya serves up a devastating critique of the brutal logic of place, health, and labor under colonial rule. By tracing the history of the colonization of the Darjeeling Hills in north Bengal, Contagion and Enclaves illuminates the links that connected otherwise distinct spaces of labor, leisure, and tropical medicine in India. Maintaining a tight analytic focus on the making of Darjeeling, the book offers a comparative survey of distinct, if adjacent, colonial enclaves. Darjeeling was initially built as a colonial hill station-a socially and racially exclusive remote climatic zone designed to maintain and restore the health of colonial white power. Yet the climate that initially offered colonials a refreshing and restorative contrast to the heat and dust of the plains below soon came to be seen as dreary and wet. Bhattacharya argues that the changing fortunes of climate were part and parcel of a larger logic. Darjeeling was initially designed as an enclave to cater exclusively to white colonials who needed to recover their health compromised by tropical conditions. However, over the course of the early twentieth century, Darjeeling expanded to become a coveted site for medicalized leisure for affluent Indians (p. 91). In losing its exclusiveness as a site of whiteness, the very climate that was initially seen as health-giving came to be seen as health-sapping. From Bhattacharya's perspective, the very facts of nature are only legible when read through the lens of colonial power. Darjeeling was famous not only as a hill station but also as home to a distinctly different sort of colonial enclave: the tea plantation. As a distinct economic zone where much of colonial law was ceded to the rule of the planter, tea plantations were designed to extract the maximum profit out of a largely migrant labor force. By bringing both types of Darjeeling's colonial enclaves into a single analytic frame-hill station and tea plantation-Bhattacharya highlights the awkward ties that bound climate, leisure, health, and enterprise together as fundamentally intertwined components of colonial society and economy. Through the juxtaposition of tea plantation and hill station, this book posits the broader category of the colonial enclaves as a distinctive site for the articulation of colonial bio-power and its economic priorities. As Bhattacharya argues, colonial enclaves were ... an essential part of colonial civil society and economy and at the same time designed as special and distinct zones of colonial habitation, power and productivity (p. 8) In addition to presenting an analytics of enclave, Bhattacharya's work also extends our understanding of the plantation within colonial and tropical medicine. Over the course of the early twentieth century, the plantation enclave emerged worldwide as one of the sites for the circulation and diffusion of scientific and medical knowledge. As we have learned from the now significant literature on tropical medicine (largely produced in relation to its careers in colonial Africa), tropical medicine was virtually synonymous with colonial medicine. Received wisdom is that the rare medical interventions to which plantation workers were subject were justified on the basis that a labor force had to maintain a basic level of health for the plantation to turn a profit. Yet Bhattacharya shows that plantations did not manifest a functionalist economy of health expenditure under colonialism. Despite the fact that owners and managers were presented with research that suggested that public health investment and infrastructure created and maintained a more productive (and indeed more profitable) workforce, Darjeeling's individual plantations failed to embrace such measures. Although tropical medicine benefited from research in Darjeeling's plantations and among its laborers, the reverse was not true. Nor did plantations come under political pressure by the colonial state to adopt such measures. While the plantation was an economic necessity for the colonial state, the plantation functioned politically as what Bhattacharya calls a ceded territory with a nearly unending supply of cheap labor. In this impressive book, Bhattacharya demonstrates that, despite the recent fad for celebratory tales of great gushing flows that forge triumphant global connections, it is still possible to publish rigorous analyses of the interruptions over which colonialism and capitalism rode roughshod. She lays open the brutal ties that bound the health of laboring bodies to wider strategic aims of the Indian economy and polity. In the final analysis, Bhattacharya's book suggests that capitalism's growth story in India-that is, the seemingly endless supply of cheap and replaceable labor-remains much the same today as it was a century ago. -- Sarah Hodges e American Historical Review, vol 119, no 1 201402

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Dr Nandini Bhattacharya is Wellcome Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leicester.

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