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Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India. By Prakash Kumar. cambridge: cambridge university Press, 2012. 350 pp., $125.00, hardback, iSBn 978-1-107-02325-3.
Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India is a social history of the global production of indigo knowledge from the Spanish caribbean in the sixteenth century to the province of Bihar in British india in the twentieth century. drawing on the work of Bruno latour and donna Haraway, Prakash Kumar examines the transnational genealogy of indigo science and challenges the "current historiographical frameworks" that presume knowledge of indigo cultivation was fully developed in the West and then simply introduced into india through the British empire (26). indigo planters in india were a "cosmopolitan class that was given to mobility and...