The Darjeeling Distinction

"In the clear and evocative writing of Sarah Besky a landscape shaped by tea emerges as the changing terrain where rival ideas of justice are evaluated by the workers whose lives are most directly caught in their implications. Debates over fair trade, notions of terroir, and regional autonomy come together in this painstaking and pathbreaking work that generates terrific insights for anthropological studies of food systems, labor, commodities, and environmental issues from an Indian case of tea industry in the eastern Himalaya." --K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University "Written with beautiful and engaging prose, this book traces three distinct efforts to bring justice and post-colonial modernity to Darjeeling's plantations, showing how the reinforcement of a 'third world agrarian imaginary' fails to confront the violence of plantations themselves. In doing so, The Darjeeling Distinction makes an original and crucial contribution to the growing literature on ethical trade." --Julie Guthman, University of California, Santa Cruz