In Plantation Worlds, Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amid tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly three million people were brought in to Assam’s plantations to work under conditions of indenture. Plantations dramatically altered the region’s landscape, plundered resources, and created fraught worlds for elephants and people. Their extractive logics and colonial legacies prevail as durations, forging the ambit of infrastructures, labor, habitability, and conservation in the present. And yet, as the perspectives of the Adivasi plantation worker community and lifeworlds of elephants show, possibilities for enacting a decolonial imaginary of landscape remain present amid immiseration. From the margins of the Global South, Barua offers an alternative grammar for articulating environmental change. In so doing, he prompts a rethinking of multispecies ecologies and how they are structured by colonialism and race.

“Rigorously researched and carefully argued, Maan Barua’s book is an important contribution to several overlapping fields: environmental history, political ecology, and conservation policy. It rests on a formidable knowledge of the uplands of eastern India, of its plants, animals, and rivers, of its varied human communities and their complicated and contested histories. The book effectively bridges worlds usually seen as separate and even opposed: the colonial and the postcolonial, biological science and humanistic scholarship, people and animals.” - Ramachandra Guha, author of (How Much Should a Person Consume? Environmentalism in India and the United States) “Plantation Worlds is a vital recalibration of some of the predominant ideas about the interrelationships among the environment, nature, human, and nonhuman life. In an often remarkable intersection of ethnography, botany, zoology, political theory, and history, Maan Barua makes a much-needed contribution to a vast range of concerns, from decoloniality and theory from the Global South to environmental transformation, human-nonhuman relations, and ontology.” - AbdouMaliq Simone, author of (The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture) "The book’s call for a conversation across epistemologies and for the reciprocity and generosity of Adivasi practices of worldmaking . . . will hopefully resound across many quarters." - Ujjal Kumar Sarma (Reviews in Anthropology) "This text will be of interest to scholars in animal geography, environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and conservation and development in South Asia. Barua’s broader project articulates a sense of place beyond linear narratives of damage to refuse rather than reify unequal power relations." - Dhruv Gangadharan (Social & Cultural Geography)

Maan Barua is University Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge and author of Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology.