Jayeeta Sharma

British science, Chinese skill and Assam tea: Making empire's garden

This article traces the workings of science, ideology and economy which integrated Assam into imperial and global commodity networks as a tea ‘garden’. It discusses how imperial botanists and their colonial subordinates conceived of botanic gardens as a conduit for transplanting plants such as tea into British-ruled territories. While this clearly served British economic interests, they stressed its vital scientific and strategic implications. The East India Company was willing to finance the Indian tea enterprise when its profitable China monopoly ended. Although the tea plant was found growing wild in Assam, importing Chinese plants and skilled growers was a priority. Nineteenth-century ideas about race science had an important impact, denigrating Assams plants and people as wild and uncultured, as compared to the civilised lineage of the Chinese. However, as the British acquired greater knowledge about tea cultivation, planters began to prefer bringing cheap, unskilled labourers from other parts of India as indentured coolies to work on harsh terms. For Assams local people, their high hopes of the tea garden were belied. Their participation in the colonial tea enterprise was mostly limited to subsidiary roles as the region became a dependent outpost of global extractive capitalism.

A culinary hub in the global city: diasporic Asian foodscapes across Scarborough, Canada

Abstract This article examines the role of late twentieth-century transnational migrants to Canada in transforming Scarborough into a culinary hub with global and Asian resonances—a place where dense affective, sensory, social, cultural, and economic networks of foodways overlap and combine to create place-specific diasporic sensescapes. The primary research questions are: How does such an Asian culinary hub emerge and function in the transnational and diasporic setting of a contemporary global city and how do citizens’ negotiations of its mobile foodways constitute the hub, and act as its archive? To locate answers for these questions, the authors engaged with long-term collaborative research among academics, students, and community stakeholders connected to the Culinaria Research Centre of the University of Toronto.

Book Review: UTSA RAY, Culinary Culture in Colonial India: A Cosmopolitan Platter and the Middle Class

UTSA RAY, Culinary Culture in Colonial India: A Cosmopolitan Platter and the Middle Class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 274.

Book Review: Andrew J. May, Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism: The Empire of Clouds in North-east India

Andrew J. May, Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism: The Empire of Clouds in North-east India, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012, pp. 312.