Asian Plantation Histories at the Frontiers of Nation and Globalization.

This is a review article of four new books on plantation histories of Asia which offer a sophisticated analysis of the configurations of liberal imperialism, colonial capitalism, and the construction of post-colonial nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The works discussed here are Rana Behal's A hundred years of servitude (2014); Jayeeta Sharma's Empire's garden (2011); Ulbe Bosma's The sugar plantation in India and Indonesia (2013); and Kumari Jayawardena and Rachel Kurian's Class, patriarchy and ethnicity on Sri Lankan plantations (2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]