Date: Friday 10 January, 2025
Time: 04:00 p.m.
Venue: HSS Conference Hall
Title:
“A Global History of Assam Rubber in the Age of Empire”
Abstract:
In 1873, one of the world’s first large-scale, scientifically managed rubber plantations was established at Charduar, northeast India, in response to global fears of scarcity. This paper provides a revisionist account of this groundbreaking experimental field, which influenced rubber cultivation not only regionally and throughout South and Southeast Asia, but also globally. The agronomic practices and protocols developed through trial and error in the foothills of the eastern Himalayas were studied, adapted, and transformed on all five continents by the early 20th century, as the Assamese rubber tree, Ficus elastica, entered trans-imperial networks of knowledge and seed exchange, many of which were orchestrated by the managers of the government plantation at the government-run Charduar estate. Rethinking global/local dynamics as they played out in the realm of plantation knowledge mobilized at shifting “commodity frontiers”, the paper concludes by showing how Charduar exemplified a hybrid form of agronomic enterprise at the intersection of state-sponsored science, commodity colonialism, and private speculation.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Moritz von Brescius is currently an Ambizione Research Group Leader at the University of Bern (funded with 1 million USD), and a permanent participant at the Munich Center for Global History. Previously, he was a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies and Fellow of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard. He has studied in Berlin, Oxford, Florence and Cambridge (UK). His doctoral thesis won several prestigious awards. It was published as “German Science in the Age of Empire: Enterprise, Opportunity and the Schlagintweit Brothers” (Cambridge University Press, 2019). The book looked at the controversial careers of German explorers employed in British India in the long 19th century. He was recently awarded a SNSF Consolidator Grant (1.9 million USD) for a new project on the politics of resource consumption in the 20th century. He has published articles in Modern Asian Studies and Comparativ, among other journals, and is a contributor to The Oxford World History of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2020). His research interests include the global history of science and empire, the environmental and economic history of plantation economies, and the acclimatization of cash crops as part of the global expansion of commodity frontiers.