Book Review: Speece on Kumar. Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India
Prakash Kumar. Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India.
Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2012. 350 pp. $103.00
(cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-02325-3.
Reviewed by Darren Speece (Sidwell Friends School)
Published on H-Empire (August, 2014)
Commissioned by Charles V. Reed
Published on H-Empire (August, 2014)
Commissioned by Charles V. Reed
Prakash Kumar has written a deeply researched and compelling history
of "indigo science" as he describes it in _Indigo Plantations and
Science in Colonial India_. It is a story of plants, planters,
politicians, empire, and markets. His study narrates the ways in
which "savants," planters, chemists, bacteriologists, and botanists
experimented with indigo cultivation and manufacturing from the
sixteenth through early twentieth centuries. Simultaneously, Kumar
pulls the history of indigo into the stream of globalization since
the Columbian Exchange. Essentially, Kumar works to provincialize
India, England, and the Caribbean, following Dipesh Chakrabarty's
lead in his groundbreaking study, _Provincializing Europe _(2000)_.
_The Bengal planters are the center of the study's universe, reaching
out in time and space to the French and English Caribbean, ancient
India, England, Dutch Java, South Africa, Zululand, the United
States, and Germany. Those intellectual tentacles reaching out from
colonial Bengal, Kumar argues, help us understand how the "knowledge
world" of indigo was created from a "multivalent genealogy," a "local
version of a global knowledge system" (pp. 98, 297). This de-centered
notion of indigo knowledge is important because it helps Kumar
demonstrate that neither the colonial planters nor the imperial
bureaucrats "could claim complete monopoly" of indigo science (p.
297). Because of the dual nature of Kumar's ambition, the book reads
in many ways like two different studies: the analysis of the rise and
fall of agricultural indigo situated in global science and market
transactions, and an argument against viewing modernity and modern
science as something handed down from the British Empire to colonial
India. On the first account, _Indigo Plantations and Science
_succeeds exceedingly well. However, more work is needed to make the
second claim of the study fully convincing.
of "indigo science" as he describes it in _Indigo Plantations and
Science in Colonial India_. It is a story of plants, planters,
politicians, empire, and markets. His study narrates the ways in
which "savants," planters, chemists, bacteriologists, and botanists
experimented with indigo cultivation and manufacturing from the
sixteenth through early twentieth centuries. Simultaneously, Kumar
pulls the history of indigo into the stream of globalization since
the Columbian Exchange. Essentially, Kumar works to provincialize
India, England, and the Caribbean, following Dipesh Chakrabarty's
lead in his groundbreaking study, _Provincializing Europe _(2000)_.
_The Bengal planters are the center of the study's universe, reaching
out in time and space to the French and English Caribbean, ancient
India, England, Dutch Java, South Africa, Zululand, the United
States, and Germany. Those intellectual tentacles reaching out from
colonial Bengal, Kumar argues, help us understand how the "knowledge
world" of indigo was created from a "multivalent genealogy," a "local
version of a global knowledge system" (pp. 98, 297). This de-centered
notion of indigo knowledge is important because it helps Kumar
demonstrate that neither the colonial planters nor the imperial
bureaucrats "could claim complete monopoly" of indigo science (p.
297). Because of the dual nature of Kumar's ambition, the book reads
in many ways like two different studies: the analysis of the rise and
fall of agricultural indigo situated in global science and market
transactions, and an argument against viewing modernity and modern
science as something handed down from the British Empire to colonial
India. On the first account, _Indigo Plantations and Science
_succeeds exceedingly well. However, more work is needed to make the
second claim of the study fully convincing.