Global Labour Journal , 2017, 8(2), Page 159 Book Review Rana P. Behal (2014) One Hundred Years of Servitude: Political Economy of Tea Plantations in Colonial Assam. New Delhi: Tulika Books. ISBN 9789382381433. 404 pp. Hardcover $56.00 £46.95 Reviewed by Andrew B. Liu, Villanova University, United States In recent decades, the field of South Asian labour history has enjoyed a renaissance fuelled by several theoretical and geographical innovations. First, conceptually, the classic focus on factory proletarians has been joined by new studies on “non-classical” forms of wage labour, including informal labour, women labour and indentured labour (Carter, 1995; Kale, 1998; Sen, 1999). This move has reflected the historical reality of South Asia itself, where a formally free, male, factory proletariat has never constituted the majority of the workforce (Parthasarathi, 2012). Second, geographically, scholars have engaged in transnational dialogue with historians who focus on Europe, Africa and Latin America. Such interactions have benefited from greater institutionalisation, especially the establishment in 1996 of the Association of Indian Labour Historians (AILH) and its flagship conference held near New Delhi. Rana P. Behal’s One Hundred Years of Servitude: Political Economy of Tea Plantations in Colonial Assam (2014) stands at the crossroads of these two fruitful directions of research. As a co-organiser of the AILH, Behal has been on the frontline of efforts to conceptualise a new “global labour history” (Van der Linden, 2010). And it was his breakthrough 1992 article, co-authored with Prabhu Mohapatra, that first provided a conceptually rigorous overview of the history of labour indenture in the tea plantations of Assam (Behal and Mohapatra, 1992). In hindsight, it seems difficult to imagine how the labour history of India could ever be written without Assam tea, what Samita Sen (2002: 231) has called “the most spectacularly successful colonial business enterprise”, and an industry that at the turn of the century featured a larger workforce than those of cotton and jute combined (Royal Commission, 1931: 6, 349). One Hundred Years of Servitude provides the first comprehensive treatment of the history of the labour indenture system in Assam while simultaneously providing an economic history of the tea industry. It is already an indispensable source for future scholarship on the topic. The culmination of over thirty years of research, Behal’s work draws upon a wide range of sources, including government archives, company records, planter memoirs and family papers located across India and the United Kingdom. In his introduction, Behal takes issue with the “revisionist” neoclassical framework that suggests labour migration was free and voluntary. Rather, he highlights the role of the colonial state in creating an indentured labour regime that enforced contracts with tea workers through two coercive mechanisms: first, “the provision that a breach of contract resulted in criminal prosecution” and, secondly, “the widespread penal sanctions granted to the planters” (p. 4). During the period from 1860 until Indian independence, recruiters transported over three million contract workers into Assam, many from the same groups of central and eastern