What might it mean to articulate environmental transformations as outcomes of a Plantationocene? While the Anthropocene is readily taken up as a signature of novel natures and as a diagnosis for contemporary ecological crises, it often fails to center-stage questions of capitalism, colonialism, and race as pivots through which environmental change occurs. This chapter proposes a Plantationocene as an alternate analytic and fleshes out the book’s wider conceptual argument. Taking Assam’s tea and forestry plantations as a point of departure, the chapter specifies a Plantationocene and planetary change in four registers: the exploitation of human labor and other-than-human work, spatial orderings of life, the circulation and transport of biota, and the creation of simplified ecologies that assisted plunder. These features of a Plantationocene morph but persist in the present. Plantation logics operate as durations, fashioning habitation and conditioning future life.
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