Energy, Empire, and Colonial Assam's Tea Plantation Economy

Abstract: This article examines the rhetorical function of "energy" in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary archive of the imperial tea industry in colonial Assam. After the "discovery" of tea in Assam in the early nineteenth century, the British colonial government commenced tea production in the region in newly established plantations. By the late nineteenth century, the imperial tea industry was a flourishing business, created and sustained by, as tea planter and self-proclaimed tea expert Samuel Baildon puts it, "British energy and enterprise." This was also the period through which energy science became a dominant field of intelligibility in the Victorian cultural imagination, and its innovations found many uses in the developing tea plantation sites. It is fair to surmise that most usages of the term would thus be affixed to Victorian energy physics discourses, especially in the context of the plantation as an industrial/technological site of operations. However, in the tea industry's promotional rhetoric, "energy" instead operated as a flexible, floating concept stretched across its pre-technological and its post-industrialization semantic histories. Reading the varied usage of "energy" in tea advertising, trade manuals, and tea planters' memoirs, I show how the elasticity of the term and the concept served to authorize and make legible the tea industry's ideological claims about morality, race, capital, and imperial futures.