In the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the northeastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local peasants were indolent, the British soon began importing indentured labor from central India. In the twentieth century these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods. In Empire’s Garden, Jayeeta Sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region’s social landscape. She argues that the racialized construction of the tea laborer catalyzed a process by which Assam’s gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community and a modern Indian political space. Various linguistic and racial claims allowed these elites to defend their own modernity while pushing the burden of primitiveness onto “non-Aryan” indigenous tribals and migrant laborers. As vernacular print arenas emerged in Assam, so did competing claims to history, nationalism, and progress that continue to reverberate in the present.

What makes photographs different from other kinds of documents that historians use to explain what happened in the past? What can photographic images do that other documents cannot? Can photography accurately depict labor? Contributors to this issue examine these questions with both fine art photography and visual archives of many kinds: state, corporate, family, trade union, ethnographic, photojournalistic, and environmental. They investigate the ways that photography has been central to both the expropriation and exploitation of labor and the potential of photography to enable new and radical approaches to historicizing the study of working peoples and labor. Articles showcase methodologically generative research that builds upon the recent boom in theoretical work in the fields of visual cultural studies and photography to reinvigorate historical studies of work. 

Contributors: Siobhan Angus, Ian Bourland, Oliver Coates, Kevin Coleman, Clare Corbould, Adrian De Leon, Rick Halpern, Daniel James, Tong Lam, Walter Benn Michaels, Jessica Stites Mor, Carol Quirke, Jayeeta Sharma, Erica Toffoli, Daniel Zamora