“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) “<i>Plantation Worlds</i> 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)
Introduction. Postcolonial Fauna 1
1. Plantationocene 21
2. The Slow Violence of Infrastructure 64
3. Material Politics 98
4. Accumulation by Plantation 121
5. The Diagram of Connectivity 147
6. Decolonial Cartographies 185
Conclusion. A Reverse DÉjÀ Vu 205
Glossary 217
Notes 221
Bibliography 257
Index 289