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Accepted Paper:
Traveling tea: plant mobility, imperial infrastructures and ecological transformation.
Bengt G. Karlsson
(Stockholm University)
This paper deals with the movement of Assam tea plant (Camellia sinensis var. assamica) from the forests to the plantations in Assam, and further out in the world. The mobility of the plant has been facilitated through imperial infrastructures such as botanical gardens and tea research stations.
Paper long abstract:
The Assam tea plant (Camellia sinensis var. assamica) has travelled from the forest of Assam into the colonial plantation and further out in the world. The plant has proven to be especially robust and with several attractive properties rendering it suitable for large-scale, monocultural commodity production. The paper will focus on the role of imperial infrastructures in facilitating the movement of the tea plant, with particular focus on the knowledge infrastructure of botanical gardens and tea research institutions established across the colonial world. As a plantation crop, the key concern has been to develop ever more high yielding clones. Escalating climate change has brought this project to an impasse, and the critical issue today is how to bring diversity into the plantation.
In thinking through this history of plant mobility, I will use Head's et al (2012) notion of "plantiness", that is, "the materialities and capacities of plants in their own terms". As the tea plant has been brought into the confined and controlled space of the plantation, the lively features of plant life seems to be lost. Yet, as I will show, the tea plant still exercise independent agency and in the ruins of failed imperial projects, feral tea plants have made a home on new continents.