Abstract: This essay proposes the colonial tea plantation as a site where a unique form of imperial cosmopolitanism emerges that I study as plantation cosmopolitanism. Through short close readings of a few planter memoirs, I show that plantation cosmopolitanism is site-specific, born out of the material encounters between varied human and nonhuman actors, and charts a theory and practice of cosmopolitanism that both furthers and departs from imperial cosmopolitanism. Plantation cosmopolitanism also imagines a fraternity amongst other plantation worlds, enabling ideological discourses of race, economy, and capital to travel across disparate sites of violence and resistance.
Chandrica Barua (Sun,) studied this question.