In the Shadows of the Tropics: Climate, Race and Biopower in Nineteenth Century Ceylon

This volume investigates the transformation of Ceylon during the mid-nineteenth century into one of the most important coffee growing regions of the world and the subsequent, sudden removal of coffee from the island.Using this fascinating case study by way of illustration, this book reveals the spatial unevenness and fragmentation of modernity through a focus on modern governmentality and biopower. It argues that the practices of colonial power, and the differences that race and tropical climates were thought to make, were central to the working out of modern governmental rationalities.Contributing an important rural focus to current work on studies of governmentality in geography, In The Shadows of the Tropics offers a welcome non-state dimension, with its emphasis on the role of the expanding plantation economy and the power of individual capitalists in the management of the lives and deaths of labourers, the destabilization of subsistence farming and the aggressive re-territorialization of populations from India to Ceylon. In this context, usefulness of Foucault's notion of biopower, discipline and governmentality are examined.