Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 258

Beginning in the 1820s, a handful of British would-be planters arrived in Ceylon, with aspirations to establish successful plantations. By the 1830s, it was clear that highland coffee was the most promising crop, and the coffee era was in full bloom by the 1840s. It ended somewhat abruptly in the 1870s, as the spread of a fungus, coffee rust, ruined the coffee plants, and the coffee plantations collapsed.

James Duncan explores the world of the British planters and their relations with the immigrant Tamils who laboured on their plantations, the Sinhalese villagers who lived nearby, and the British colonial government. His title evokes a nineteenth-century trope of light and shadows, in which the self-perceived ‘modernity’ of the British planters in Ceylon with their ‘rational’ strategies of plantation management was juxtaposed with their perceptions of the dark and dank highland forests. It is a book about the cultural constructions of Britishness within a largely male plantation elite in the heart of the Asian tropics and the exercise of British plantation power and its limitations.

In the shadows of the tropics is organized in seven chapters, with a brief conclusion. In his introductory chapter, the author explores the European discourse about race in the tropics, and in his second chapter he covers the rise of the plantation economy in the early nineteenth century, synthesizing the literature on the evolution of the coffee sector in Ceylon in the context of the global coffee enterprise. These are very successful, drawing upon diverse literatures about the larger European project of colonization in the tropics.

The third chapter, entitled ‘Dark thoughts: reproducing whiteness in the tropics’ explores British anxieties about cultural and racial deterioration. His thesis is that the largely male colonists in the highlands of Ceylon developed their understandings of their vulnerability to disease in the idiom of climate and that their vulnerability to disease prevented them from establishing British domestic values, in good measure because there were few British women who would travel to the tropics and submit to the rude lifestyles of the coffee planters. The result was profound cultural anxiety about maintaining their Britishness, as they found sexual partners among the labouring populations of Tamil migrants and local Sinhalese villagers. The colonists expressed their cultural concerns about degeneration in a discourse about race, and they used their financial power to dominate brutally the Tamil labourers who worked on their plantations.

In the fourth chapter, the ‘Quest to discipline estate labour,’ Duncan breaks entirely new ground, exploring the authoritarian power relations between the white manager, the ‘kangani’ or Tamil overseer, and the Tamil labourers. In chapter five, ‘The medical gaze and the spaces of biopower,’ he explores the British efforts to establish a modest program of public health to protect the Tamil workers who crossed annually by small boat from south India to Ceylon, and then walked for days under duress from the coast into the highlands. Duncan illuminates the tensions between the coffee planters who resisted paying for these public health initiatives, the unwillingness of the colonial government to impose financial obligations on the vitally important coffee sector, and the resistance by the Tamil workers themselves, who were suspicious of European medical practices.

In the sixth chapter, ‘Visualizing crime in the coffee districts,’ the author explores the tensions between the surrounding Sinhalese villagers and the plantation managers. Villagers ‘trespassed’ with their cattle onto the plantations. Some villagers stole coffee beans. These frictions continued throughout the coffee era. The British planters were unable to extend the writ of their authority and never successfully addressed these issues. The seventh chapter, ‘Landscapes of despair: the last years of coffee,’ synthesizes the historical literature on the impacts of coffee rust disease and investigates the social abandonment of the plantations. Here again, the planters were able to fend off the efforts of the colonial government to make them bear some of the costs of displaced workers. In the final years of the coffee enterprise, the plantation workers suffered grievously from short food supplies and negligent care.

Nineteenth-century studies of the plantation sector in Ceylon depend fundamentally upon English language materials that reflect British perspectives. These sources necessarily shape and constrain our historical understanding. The voices of the British plantation managers and government officials are clear; the voices of the Tamil workers are barely audible. The constraints of these historical sources likewise limit our understanding of the indigenous Sinhalese highland system of ‘biopower’ that was expressed, in part, in an idiom of ‘caste’ rather than ‘race’. The internal dynamics of Sinhalese communities played a large role in the nineteenth-century transformation of the highlands, far beyond the coffee plantations themselves. An even fuller understanding of ‘biopower’ and ‘governmentality’ in nineteenth-century Ceylon will come when scholars develop ways to explore these indigenous dynamics and integrate the two literatures.

Duncan has read the nineteenth-century materials on Ceylon closely and drawn thoughtfully on the broader literatures on race, sexuality, and power in the colonies. His analysis is refreshingly free of jargon and is full of new insights. In the shadows of the tropics makes a welcome and highly significant contribution to the historical literature on Ceylon. It deserves a broad readership.