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Record W4390458283 · doi:10.1017/9781009339810.004

Labour Resistance in Indenture Plantations in the Assam Valley

2023· other· en· W4390458283 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Rana P. Behal

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typeother
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicSouth Asian Studies and Conflicts
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsQuarter (Canadian coin)ColonialismCapital (architecture)PopulationGeographyResistance (ecology)Agricultural economicsEconomicsArchaeologyBiologyDemography

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The Growth of the Tea Industry The tea industry was the earliest commercial enterprise established by private British capital in the Assam Valley in the 1840s. It grew spectacularly during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and continued to expand in the first half of the twentieth century. Tea production increased from 6,000,000 pounds in 1872 to 75,000,000 pounds in 1900, and the area under tea cultivation expanded from 27,000 acres to 204,000 acres. From the mid-1860s, labour for the Assam Valley plantations was mobilised under the indenture system. Employment in the Assam Valley tea plantations increased from 107,847 employees in 1885 to 247,760 in 1900. At the end of colonial rule, the Assam Valley tea plantations employed nearly half a million labourers out of a total labour population of over three quarters of a million, more than 300,000 acres were under tea cultivation (with a million acres under the control of the tea companies) and 397 million pounds of tea were being produced. The important features of this plantation enterprise were the monopolitic control of private British capital, production for a global market and the employment of a migrant labour force recruited and transported under indenture contracts from different parts of British India. The Indentured Labour Regime Having failed to ‘persuade’ the indigenous communities of Assam to work in the plantations, the planters brought labour from other parts of the Indian subcontinent. Recruitment was arranged by British managing agencies based in Calcutta through a hierarchy of local intermediaries known, for example, as arkatti s and sirdar s. This mobilisation was described at the time as the ‘coolie trade’. Through a process of recruitment, transportation and employment, the colonial plantation regimes transformed Indian agrarian communities into labouring ‘coolies’. During the course of this transformation, their castes and their religious, regional, social and cultural diversities were homogenised under the disparaging term ‘coolie’, which was universally used by planters in plantations around the globe and the colonial bureaucracy. Individuality was subsumed within anonymous ‘gangs’ and ‘muster rolls’ and only survived in the plantation ‘coolie lines’ for the duration of their working lives. Labourers were converted into what James Duncan has described as ‘abstract bodies … that are made docile, useful, disciplined, rationalised, and controlled sexually’. Another common and significant feature of plantation life under the indenture regime was the immobilisation of the labour force upon arrival.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.075
Threshold uncertainty score0.149

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0120.003
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.029
GPT teacher head0.322
Teacher spread0.294 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

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Citations0
Published2023
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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