Tanroop’s Reviews > Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India > Status Update
Tanroop
is on page 45 of 360
"I agree with a new global labor history literature that the “classic” description of proletarianization was only an “ideal type” or “simplifying assumption” within the logic of political economy. In truth, such descriptions did not correspond to any real society, not even Victorian Britain."
— Mar 19, 2024 06:02AM
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Tanroop’s Previous Updates
Tanroop
is on page 160 of 360
"Increased commercialization since the Song had elevated the social status of shopkeepers and artisans...This trend had parallels in other commercialized regions around the world," like 17th C England or Tokugawa Japan." "Such similarities appear uncanny, insofar as they emerged without direct intellectual correspondence, [but] what united these authors was their shared experience of commercialization."
— Apr 30, 2025 08:55AM
Tanroop
is on page 115 of 360
Mobility of, and competition for, labour in colonial Assam caused chronic 'shortages'. Paying them more was *explicitly* declared to not be an option.. "The Assam Company's problem was not the physical absence of labor but rather the absence of the social conditions that would compel locals to sign up for low-paying jobs." So, planters pushed the colonial state to help implement a labor indenture system
— Aug 26, 2024 09:55AM
Tanroop
is on page 80 of 360
“Labor-intensive accumulation provides a useful framework for articulating how tea merchants of the nineteenth century straddled conventional divisons between early modern merchant capital and modern industrial capital…In real historical terms, labor-intensive accumulation has meant nothing less than pushing older arrangements to their limits.”
— Aug 25, 2024 12:08PM
Tanroop
is on page 75 of 360
"Falling prices and their attendant pressures toward productivity undergirded not only spectacular industrialization but also the social transformations of older arrangements in rural Asia and elsewhere...In order to expand, the production and consumption of commodities would require the continued discovery, employment, and disciplining of supplies of labor."
— Jun 29, 2024 02:50PM
Tanroop
is on page 39 of 360
"The abstract measurement of working time thereby began to preoccupy merchants and managers of production. For instance, overseers in Chinese tea factories used seemingly archaic technologies, such as slow-burning incense sticks, to measure and reward above-average efficiency. Likewise, colonial planters in India used gongs and an informal piece-wage system to keep their coolie workers on task."
— Mar 18, 2024 05:29PM
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Mar 19, 2024 06:32AM
"The tea gardens of upper Assam may have been built anew by colonial capital, but they drew upon archaic “master and servant” laws to pin down their coolie workforces. In spite of the planters’ rhetoric of industrial revolution, they owed their economic gains to a draconian regime of overworked and underpaid men, women, and children. Both regional industries also organized workers along older distinctions of ethnicity and sex, and they employed patriarchal & gures of village authority to shoulder the modern tasks of recruitment and management. Indeed, Chinese and Indian tea workers represented both extremes of “independent” and “unfree,” supposedly noncapitalist labor found at the margins of modern economic history—and yet they were unmistakably implicated within the expansion of British, Chinese, and Indian capital, prized in the twentieth century for the immense commercial value they generated."
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