Embedding Agricultural Commodities Using historical evidence, 1840s–1940s

Over the past 500 years westerners have turned into avid consumers of colonial products and various production systems in the Americas, Africa and Asia have adapted to serve the new markets that opened up in the wake of the "European encounter". The effects of these transformations for the long-term development of these societies are fiercely contested. How can we use historical source material to pinpoint this social change? This volume presents six different examples from countries in which commodities were embedded in existing production systems - tobacco, coffee, sugar and indigo in Indonesia, India and Cuba - to shed light on this key process in human history. To demonstrate the effectiveness of using different types of source material, each contributor presents a micro-study based on a different type of historical source: a diary, a petition, a "mail report", a review, a scientific study and a survey. As a result, the volume offers insights into how historians use their source material to construct narratives about the past and offers introductions to trajectories of agricultural commodity production, as well as much new information about the social struggles surrounding them.

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

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.