PLANTATION DEVELOPMENT AND LABOR RESPONSE IN NINETEENTH CENTURY MYSORE (INDIA)

Plantations played an integral but largely ignored role in the nineteenth century economic history of India. This study examines the evolution of the coffee industry in the South Indian state of Mysore from an indigenous backyard garden crop to large-scale plantations. Mysore plantation development was unique in India because--unlike other plantation regions--native Indian coffee planting and marketing began well before the arrival of the British planters about 1840. Indigenous cultivation and British planting co-existed for over a century and each adapted certain cultivation and management techniques of the other. This study is organized into two parts. Part I deals with plantation development. Chapter One discusses indigenous coffee cultivation from its inception as a commercial crop in the late eighteenth century. Chapter Two deals with British coffee planting. Part II concerns plantation labor recruitment and labor response. Chapter Three examines the effect of coffee expansion on agrarian relations in the Malnad and on labor catchment areas in the plains. Chapter Four analyzes the importance of plantations as an option to life in the village during the Great Famine of 1876-78. The concluding chapter discusses labor\u27s changing perception of coffee employment in the late nineteenth century, a period when economic opportunities and higher wages elsewhere lured labor away from the plantation. An expanding coffee industry in the nineteenth century contributed to economic and social change in regions of outmigration and in the mountains where coffee plantations were established. Indian coffee planters customarily employed little wage labor--they relied on labor attached to the land or the landlord\u27s family. British planters found that by offering a higher wage than Indian landholders they obtained adequate amounts of labor. Planters eventually learned that labor weaned on a good wage began to leave plantations when planters cut wages late in the century. The exodus of labor and the concurrent coffee depression marked the eclipse of British planting in Mysore