i2o SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



the planters found a new home in the East : in particular in the British 

 and Dutch East Indies. And to-day plantation denotes not only a system 

 of agriculture but a system which chiefly grows plants from wood as 

 opposed to plants from grass : tea, coffee, rubber, cocoa, coco-nut, cin- 

 chona. No doubt the capital investment required in raising wood plants 

 has been instrumental in bringing these products under the plantation 

 system, though it has not made it impossible for native growers, e.g. in 

 rubber, to produce for themselves. There are no cotton or tobacco 

 plantations in India and only a few sugar plantations ; and although 

 indigo is a grass plant and provided the first form of plantation in India, 

 it has all but disappeared through the supersession of indigo in commerce 

 by aniline dyes. In method of exploitation, therefore, the plantation of 

 to-day is closer to certain forms of forestry than it is to grain crops or 

 roots. One may think of it with advantage as intensive forestry conducted 

 in regions of hitherto sparse population. 



2. The History of Indigo. 



Indigo and saltpetre are the two export specialties of Indian economic 

 history : the former a crop yielding a textile dye, the latter a deposit, not 

 a mineral but a human and animal deposit, used in the making of gun- 

 powder. Neither is a foodstuff: and both have been superseded, the 

 one by aniline dyes, the other by nitrate of soda (Chile saltpetre). Be- 

 tween Latin America and the Tropical East there has been a many-sided 

 and age-long rivalry of supply. Cinchona and rubber were taken to the 

 East from their habitat in South America, and the planted product of the 

 East has ousted the wild product. Similarly, around 1830, in a battle of 

 the insects, the lac of India, which yielded the scarlet red of soldiers' 

 uniforms, displaced the cochineal of Central America. On the other 

 hand, coffee, first supplied to the European market from Mocha in Arabia 

 and later from South India, Ceylon and Java, to-day has its centre of 

 production in Brazil, which provides 60 per cent, of the world's coffee 

 and could easily provide the whole. Indigo has shared the same geo- 

 graphic pull. As the name signifies, its origin was in India, where the 

 English and Dutch competed as merchants for the finished native product, 

 but towards the close of the seventeenth century the trade was lost to 

 Latin America, to reappear at the end of the eighteenth century, when 

 there arose a new demand for ' navy blue ' and when the West Indies 

 were distracted by revolution, as in Haiti, or switching, as in the British 

 West Indies, to more profitable crops such as cotton. 



The revival of indigo production towards 1800 was the work of 

 European planters in Bengal ; and they were assisted by the East India 

 Company, which advanced large sums of money to the industry, en- 

 couraged its servants to take up planting, and relaxed, in favour of the 

 planters, its monopoly of trade. Hitherto the Europeans had been 

 merchants, buying in certain markets of West, North and East India the 

 village-made product. The planters of the seventeenth century were the 

 peasants themselves, but they were not independent producers. For 

 the Dutch trader, Pelsaert, writing in 1626, states that when supply is 



