ABSTRACT
This paper examines plantations as laboratories of modernity in the colonial tropics during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Plantations can be conceived of as modern technologies for the reconfiguration of space, tools, scientific instruments and other material resources, bringing together culturally heterogeneous populations, stripping them of their former social attachments and reconstituting them as workers through the use of space-time strategies of monitoring and control. I argue that coffee plantations in Ceylon were intended to be sites of what Henri Lefebvre has termed abstract space: the commodification and bureaucratisation of everyday life. As an ideal, abstract space requires the construction of ‘abstract bodies’ to conform to it. This ideal remained largely unattained, however. In the first part of the paper, the strategies and technologies adopted by British planters as they attempted to produce and regulate abstract space and bodies are examined. Disciplinarity as internalised control, was rarely achieved and consequently dircct survcillancc and the threat of physical force was applied. The second section explores the way in which the Tamil plantation workers countered the planters technologies of control by engaging in tactics of resistance. In the final section, the strategies planters adopted in order to oppose the workers’ tactics and the middle space of Tamil overseers are examined.
