Local Subversions of Colonial Cultures

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction

   • Sandip Hazareesingh, Harro Maat

   Pages 1-9

3. Rice as Commodity and Anti-Commodity

   • Paul Richards

   Pages 10-28

4. Yellow Tobacco, Black Tobacco: Indigenous (desi) Tobacco as an Anti-Commodity

   • Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff

   Pages 29-48

5. Upland and Lowland Rice in the Netherlands Indies

   • Harro Maat

   Pages 49-69

6. Anti-Commodity Counterpoint: Smallholder Diversity and Rural Development on the Cuban Sugar Frontier

   • Jonathan Curry-Machado

   Pages 70-96

7. ‘Your Foreign Plants Are Very Delicate’: Peasant Crop Ecologies and the Subversion of Colonial Cotton Designs in Dharwar, Western India, 1830–1880

   • Sandip Hazareesingh

   Pages 97-124

8. Sanitising Commercialisation: Health and the Politics of ‘Waste’ in Colonial Punjab

   • Lauren Minsky

   Pages 125-146

9. East African Railways and Harbours, 1945–1960: From ‘Crisis of Accumulation’ to Labour Resistance

   • David Hyde

   Pages 147-169

10. Rice, Civilisation and the Swahili Towns: Anti-Commodity and Anti-State?

    • Erik Gilbert

    Pages 170-186

11. ‘Shun the White Man’s Crop’: Shangwe Grievances, Religious Leaders and Cotton Cultivation in North-Western Zimbabwe

    • Simeon Maravanyika

    Pages 187-209

12. Back Matter

    Pages 210-213

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The book brings together original, state-of-the-art historical research from several continents and examines how mainly local peasant societies responded to colonial pressures to produce a range of different commodities. It offers new directions in the study of African, Asian, Caribbean, and Latin American societies.

• Commodities
• anticommodities
• colonialism
• peasants
• resistance
• crops
• rice
• cotton
• science
• environment
• ecology
• indigenous cultures
• local practice
• Africa
• global history
• health
• history
• India
• society

• The Open University, UK

  Sandip Hazareesingh

• Wageningen University, The Netherlands

  Harro Maat

Sandip Hazareesingh is Research Fellow in the History Department at the Open University, UK. He is the author of The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity (2007), and is currently researching the interactions between peasant livelihoods, colonial policies, climate and environment in nineteenth and twentieth century western India.

Harro Maat is Sociologist and Historian of Agricultural Science and Technology at the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation group of Wageningen University, Netherlands. His main focus is on crop improvement in the colonial period and current (bio)technologies for international development in India, South-East Asia and Africa.

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