Accumulation by Plantation

Agitations against persistent underdevelopment marking Assam’s Plantationocene present had a range of ecological repercussions: the extralegal exploitation of resource frontiers, violent land grabs, and the virulent rise in nonnative plants. This chapter tracks how these processes fostered the expansion of tea plantations, aggravating frictions between people and elephants. Specifying this dynamic as accumulation by plantation, the chapter develops an analysis of the contingent, extralegal expansion of postcolonial capital. Bringing a whole raft of agencies into specifying a Plantationocene present, the chapter shows how plantation logics are reproduced through varied pathways and at a number of scales.