This paper considers the creation of a 'coolie' work-force for the Assam tea industry and the local dimensions of tea plantation enterprise. While the industry has flourished through its use of migrant labour and export markets for tea, it has retained important connections with the locality. The Assam tea industry was a predominantly colonial enterprise manned by white British planters. It allowed participation, albeit in subordinate and dependent roles, by local peasants and gentry, though mainly based on the labour of migrant 'coolies' recruited on indentured contracts. The prominence of 'imported' coolie workers has obscured the significance of various local groups as well as the tea industry's importance in the local 'imagination'. Despite the gradual development of nationalist antagonism towards the white 'Planters' Raj', tea enterprise retained a hallowed place for the Assamese middle classes, as tea workers continued as a racialized labouring class.

This article traces the workings of science, ideology and economy which integrated Assam into imperial and global commodity networks as a tea ‘garden’. It discusses how imperial botanists and their colonial subordinates conceived of botanic gardens as a conduit for transplanting plants such as tea into British-ruled territories. While this clearly served British economic interests, they stressed its vital scientific and strategic implications. The East India Company was willing to finance the Indian tea enterprise when its profitable China monopoly ended. Although the tea plant was found growing wild in Assam, importing Chinese plants and skilled growers was a priority. Nineteenth-century ideas about race science had an important impact, denigrating Assam's plants and people as wild and uncultured, as compared to the civilised lineage of the Chinese. However, as the British acquired greater knowledge about tea cultivation, planters began to prefer bringing cheap, unskilled labourers from other parts of India as indentured coolies to work on harsh terms. For Assam's local people, their high hopes of the tea garden were belied. Their participation in the colonial tea enterprise was mostly limited to subsidiary roles as the region became a dependent outpost of global extractive capitalism.

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