Locating 'Coolie' Women's Health in Tea Plantation Environments in Colonial Assam

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-228
Author(s):  
Namrata Borkotoky
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Tea Plantation ◽  
Female Workers ◽  
Manual Labour ◽  
Tea Plantations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Added Benefit ◽  
Assam Tea ◽  
Biological Reproduction ◽  
Female Presence

The history of Assam tea plantations in India is well-documented, yet a gender sensitive environmental history of these colonially-introduced plantation landscapes is absent. The colonial tea planters saw advantages in a growing female presence in their plantations, in terms of increased male ties to the plantation, lower wages for female workers and the added benefit of biological reproduction that would fulfil the need for manual labour in these plantations for generations. This paper attempts to understand how this plantation structure in general and the work regime in particular relied on a particular type of gender identity, which in turn had a detrimental effect on the health of the women labourers in this new landscape.

scholarly journals Corporate Responsibility for Human Rights in Assam Tea Plantations: A Business and Human Rights Approach

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (18) ◽  
pp. 7409
Author(s):  
Madhura Rao ◽  
Nadia Bernaz
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Corporate Responsibility ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Tea Plantation ◽  
Business And Human Rights ◽  
Tea Plantations ◽  
Protection Of Human Rights ◽  
Assam Tea ◽  
Corporate Social

This paper explores how UK-based companies deal with their responsibility to respect the human rights of Assam (India) tea plantation workers. Through qualitative content analysis of publicly available corporate reports and other documents, it investigates how companies approach and communicate their potential human rights impacts. It highlights the gap between well-documented human rights issues on the ground and corporate reports on these issues. It aims to answer the following research question: in a context where the existence of human rights violations at the end of the supply chain is well-documented, how do companies reconcile their possible connection with those violations and the corporate responsibility to respect human rights under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights? This paper reveals the weakness of the current corporate social responsibility (CSR) approach from the perspective of rights-holders. It supports a business and human rights approach, one that places the protection of human rights at its core.

The Historiography of Environmental History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Industrial Pollution ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.

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