Papers presented by Rebekah McCallum since 2019

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

"Employee and Labor Contracts on British company Tea Plantations in early Twentieth-century India"

Abstract:

From the turn of the twentieth century until long after Indian independence from Britain, most of the tea plantations that shaped the agro-industrial landscape of India were owned and/or managed by large, British companies. These companies and their subsidiaries employed British management staff to oversee plantations with thousands of South Asian laborers, had representatives in leadership roles in planters’ associational groups, and exercised extensive lobbying power with the local colonial governments and international markets. Consequently, they had a major impact on how labor and plantation management was orchestrated on tea estates across the region. The contractual obligations of both British management staff and South Asian manual laborers to the company plantations were reinforced through various external measures at the management level—including wage-fixing across the plantations and agreements not to “poach” another plantation’s workers. Several histories have examined the extra-legal coercive nature of South Asian labor contracts under the British colonial administration in India in the early twentieth century. Less have examined those contracts in comparison with (and in contrast to) the contracts of lower management employees at the same production sites, who were bound to the plantations and their co-laborers in other ways—albeit from a more privileged position. Examples in employee letterbooks and recruitment papers indicate that the contractual relationship between employees and laborers under company management was often tested by elements of control and coercion, and by gendered power dynamics. This paper, adapted from a workshop presentation, examines in detail the correspondence and records of several companies’ lower management staff to elucidate close laborer/employee contractual engagement on these production sites in South Asia. By examining salaries, familial connections, behaviors, work evaluations, and more—this paper explores the politics of labor in the British tea company management structure in twentieth-century India.

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2022 Mexico City

"Global events, regional business decisions and local labor policy on company tea plantations in South Asia, 1901-1951"

Abstract:

From the late nineteenth century, the South Asian tea industry was largely dominated by British companies and run by a unique managing agency system that incorporated agents in the big cities of Calcutta and Madras, and directors in Glasgow and London. The structure of the tea companies and their agents was meant to reduce risk in an uncertain landscape. The first half of the twentieth century included several major global, imperial and regional events—global conflict, economic depression, emerging labor movements, and the rise of nationalism in India and Ceylon—that affected the business structure and labor regimes of these tea companies and plantations in South Asia. Competition between chiefly the South Asian tea-producing countries (India and Ceylon), China (to a lesser extent in the twentieth century) and the Dutch East Indies contributed to market saturation of tea. Shipping complications during World War One contributed to a stockpile of tea that flooded the market after the war. Because of these events, the tea companies in India and Ceylon agreed to reduce production. During the Great Depression from 1929–39, a similar, but expanded agreement was arranged between the three major tea-producing colonies of India, Ceylon, and the Dutch East Indies. These agreements, while ensuring profitability for the tea companies, had a deleterious impact on plantation laborers, who experienced high unemployment and stagnant wages in the interwar period. Money wages were, in part, replaced with payment-in-kind social welfare services—a continuous practice that led to unrest and strikes by laborers in the tea-planting regions of Assam, the greatest tea-producing area, that reverberated throughout India. This paper explores in detail the disruption engendered by international events which had a direct and long-lasting impact on labor on sites of production in South Asia, due to the decisions and responses of British tea companies.

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