Plants, People & Work: The Social History of Cash Crops in Asia, 18th to 20th Centuries

This research programme compares the social role of three important cash crops (tobacco, sugar and indigo) that were transferred from the Americas to Asia. The comparison, which covers the last 200 years, concentrates on how each crop was embedded in Asian societies, the way in which labour was mobilised to produce and process the crop, and the social after-effects of its cultivation. This programme is unusual in that we explore not only socio-economic aspects but link these emphatically with ecological, political and cultural aspects. We use careful empirical case studies of local circumstances as building blocks for a synthesis that will demonstrate the need to understand globalisation in a social-historical perspective. Socio-ecological and socio-cultural processes have been far more influential in making cash cropping in Asian societies a success (or failure) than current theorising acknowledges. The programme?s innovative aspects are primarily theoretical and methodological. Our principal purpose is to contribute to revitalising and broadening the study of cash-crop systems as they relocated across the globalising world of the 19th and 20th centuries. We seek to link insights in ecology with those in social history, to reinterpret local/national history-writing within broader systematic comparisons, and to show how cash-crop production influences many aspects of long-term societal change.