‘Your Foreign Plants Are Very Delicate’: Peasant Crop Ecologies and the Subversion of Colonial Cotton Designs in Dharwar, Western India, 1830–1880

摘要

This chapter emphasizes the ecological dimension of anticommodity as expressed in a peasant countermovement to colonial concerned with validating the production and use of the Dharwar agrarian environment as a sustainable socio-nature. For British colonial officials in 19th century Dharwar, cotton represented the natural fibre that could be magically tamed and engineered into a ‘transformative commodity’. This involved cotton ‘improvement’ projects that sought, for over half a century, to replace indigenous cotton by a transplanted American variety. However, these efforts were confronted by a range of socio-natural forces that colonial knowledge never quite got to grips with. The entwined social and natural worlds of peasant crop choices, cultivating knowledge, climate, rainfall and soil presented formidable barriers to colonial cotton designs, leading ultimately to their failure.