Rebekah McCallum
Supported by The William Lind Foundation
Rebekah McCallum is a historian whose research engages with business and labor history in South Asia and the Indian Ocean World region. She completed her PhD in History at McGill University in early 2022; her doctoral research and work was housed at McGill’s Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC). While at the IOWC, she collaborated with clusters of researchers on several multidisciplinary projects examining present-day bondage, labor, and migration networks in connection with climatic events, colonial and post-colonial policy, and regional exigencies. She received several grants to support her doctoral research and subsequent work as a Mellon Just Transformations/ Humanities in the World Postdoctoral fellow at the Humanities Institute of Pennsylvania State University. She has since continued her research as an independent scholar.
Her current research builds upon her dissertation project which examined the influence of international tea companies on the development of labor policy and legislation for tea plantations in India and Sri Lanka—with a case study of James Finlay & Co. and their suite of companies. For the dissertation project, she was able to use the James Finlay & Co. collection at the Scottish Business Archives at the University of Glasgow, and, therefore, is excited to come back to the archives to further develop the research for a monograph. The expanded project will explore James Finlay & Co. in relation to other colonial companies operating in India and Ceylon over the same time period, contextualizing industry-wide labor practices, policies, and management agreements in light of labor unrest, anti-colonial movements, war, and global economic fluctuations over the course of the twentieth century.
“I am incredibly grateful to the University of Glasgow Library for this research fellowship which will enable me to continue the process of transforming my dissertation project into a monograph. For my dissertation, I used the James Finlay & Co. collections at the University of Glasgow Scottish Business Archives to explore James Finlay & Co.’s large subsidiary tea companies which owned and operated tea plantations across India and Sri Lanka over the course of the late nineteenth into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The companies’ participation in business interest associations enabled them to have a considerable impact on the colonial tea industry’s organization, labor policies and lobbying practices.
As I expand my dissertation into a monograph, I will revise my research to further contextualize James Finlay & Co.’s influence as agents to smaller tea companies and their cooperation with other prominent tea companies operating at the same time. I aim to give a wider view of the colonial tea industry and the management practices that shaped the business of tea globally. I am excited to return to the archive to continue my research and refine my work for publication.”
