“Rigorously researched and carefully argued, Maan Barua’s book is an important contribution to several overlapping fields: environmental history, political ecology, and conservation policy. It rests on a formidable knowledge of the uplands of eastern India, of its plants, animals, and rivers, of its varied human communities and their complicated and contested histories. The book effectively bridges worlds usually seen as separate and even opposed: the colonial and the postcolonial, biological science and humanistic scholarship, people and animals.” - Ramachandra Guha, author of How Much Should a Person Consume? Environmentalism in India and the United States
“Plantation Worlds is a vital recalibration of some of the predominant ideas about the interrelationships among the environment, nature, human, and nonhuman life. In an often remarkable intersection of ethnography, botany, zoology, political theory, and history, Maan Barua makes a much-needed contribution to a vast range of concerns, from decoloniality and theory from the Global South to environmental transformation, human-nonhuman relations, and ontology.” - AbdouMaliq Simone, author of The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture
"The book’s call for a conversation across epistemologies and for the reciprocity and generosity of Adivasi practices of worldmaking . . . will hopefully resound across many quarters." - Ujjal Kumar Sarma, Reviews in Anthropology
"The book makes a significant scholarly intervention in plantation studies by amplifying the voices of Adivasi communities and, remarkably, extending representational agency to non-human actors like elephants. By doing so, it comprehensively challenges both colonial and postcolonial governance’s reductive tendencies to construct artificial binaries between nature and society, and between forest and cultivation." - Prithiraj Borah, Asian Ethnicity
"This text will be of interest to scholars in animal geography, environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and conservation and development in South Asia. Barua’s broader project articulates a sense of place beyond linear narratives of damage to refuse rather than reify unequal power relations." - Dhruv Gangadharan, Social & Cultural Geography
"With his study of elephant/plantation-labourer relations, Barua has unquestionably enriched the vast existing literature on pioneer fronts and their future." - Benoit Daviron, Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies
"Plantation Worlds brings readers into the overlapping worlds of its many protagonists, in all of their complexity, precarity, and ambivalent interests. . . . It shines a light on many ways that multispecies communities keep each other alive and coexistent, whether in conflict or cooperation, in the face of encompassing and constantly transforming waves of violence." - Audra Mitchell, AAG Review of Books
"Plantation Worlds is a path-breaking contribution that develops concepts around life-making practices in a Plantationocene in transversal ways and brings fields such as animal geography, ethology, political ecology, environmental anthropology and conservation practices into fruitful dialogues." - Bikash K. Bhattacharya, South Asian Review
