"This unique study contributes to three important research fields: the history of commodities, the history of the colonial developmental state, and the agrarian history of South Asia. First, it demonstrates the dynamism of cash-crop production systems and how these systems influenced each other. Second, it explores how colonial state policy came to stimulate research-based agronomic interventions, often with unintended consequences. And finally, it shows how cash cropping entangled South Asians and Europeans in new forms of struggle and cooperation. This meticulous and illuminating study deserves a wide readership"-- [back cover].