The estate—the British countryside’s most notable form—shaped colonial projects outside Britain. The landed estate formed a loose template for colonial plantations (usually called “estates”), and when British imperial power began to crumble, the estate form was re-articulated in the metropole. After World War II, scores of the descendants of Caribbean and South Asian plantation workers immigrated to the UK to provide labor for the postwar rebuilding effort, settling on the margins of major cities in publicly subsidized “council estates.” In this paper I explore a suite of “estate logics” that have allowed the country estate, the plantation, and the council estate to appear coherent—to make sense as simultaneous solutions to the problem of sustaining productive economies of scale and the problem of sustaining a settled labor force comprised of racialized, colonized, and classed others. I describe how estate logics were refined in and around the tea plantations of what is now West Bengal, India. Estate logics attempt to resolve contradictions between exploitation and care, extraction and settlement. To be sure, the term “estate” does important discursive work, referencing the pastoral aesthetics of the rural idyll. At the same time, the term draws attention to relationships of care that obscure the violence and dispossession fundamental to enclosure, enslavement, and urban marginalization.
Sarah Besky is Professor of the Anthropology of Work at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. Her research uses ethnographic and historical methods to explore questions of labor, environment, and capitalism in the Himalayas and India. She is the author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) and Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (University of California Press, 2020). She also co-edited How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR Press, 2019) with Alex Blanchette. Sarah’s currently working on a new book on the countryside, colonialism, and agrarian crisis in Kalimpong, West Bengal.
