No próximo dia 07 de maio, quarta-feira, o investigador John Bosco Lourdusamy (Department of Humanities and Social Science, Indian Institute of Technology Madras), irá proferir a palestra “Machines in Tea Gardens: Legacies of Labour in the colonial South Indian Tea plantations“. O evento irá decorrer no ICS, na Sala Maria de Sousa (Sala Polivalente), a partir das 11h00.
Contamos com a vossa participação!
Abstract: This paper will explicate the entanglement of the past and present in the tea gardens of colonial Southern India with regard to the condition of labour, through the intermediation of material forces and circumstances, particularly the introduction of new machinery in the tea plantation economy. The plantations were from their founding moments based on severe exploitation of labour in the newly cleared forest areas – with the labour force being brought by several enticing and coercive methods from distant plains. An important factor that marked out tea production in colonial India from the main player in the International market at that time – China – was the rapid introduction of machinery (relatively). Unlike in many other cases where introduction of machinery tends to replace labour, in this case, the increase of machinery, particularly increased the required labour to service the increased input that could be handled by the new machinery, the swelling production and the widening markets. The trend has hardly been reversed – with the current ‘crisis’ being the difficulty in finding the required labour and therefore expanding the ‘geography of labour’ in terms of assembling and transporting them through various modalities like clan, family and locality ties. This paper will try to capture the intricacies in such overflow between the past and present – mediated through various human and non-human agencies.
Bio: John Bosco Lourdusamy is with the Department of Humanities and Social Science, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He works in the domains of plantations, global movement of crops, and the history of science, technology and medicine in colonial India. He had a B.A in History in Loyola College, Chennai and M.A and M.Phil., in Pondicherry University, India. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford. While at Oxford, he had also been a Queen Elizabeth Visiting Scholar to the Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.Dr. Lourdusamy has authored the books: Science and National Consciousness in Bengal, 1870-1930, (2004); Religion and Modern Science in Colonial Bengal, 1870-1940 (2007), and co-authored the book Moving crops and the Scales of History (2023) which has won The 2024 Sidney Edelstein Prize of the Society for History of Technology and The 2024 World History Association Bentley Book Prize. He was an International Scholar of the Society for the History of Technology (2013-15) and a member of the Research Council, Indian National Commission for the History of Science – an organ of the Indian National Science Academy (2014-16). He is also a member of the Editorial Board of Technology and Culture – the leading international Journal in the area of History and Social Studies of Technology.