Camille Neufville (University of Strasbourg), The Transnational Origins of Soviet Tea: Foreign Expertise and Foreign Presence on the South Caucasian Tea Plantations Before and After the Establishment of Soviet Power (1915-1935)

When the Bolsheviks took over the Georgian Democratic Republic in 1921, they inherited, among the country’s most valuable (and little-known) assets, its tea-growing and tea-making industry. This budding branch of the rural economy had been established in Western Georgia in the 1880’s-1890’s, following the conquest of the formerly Ottoman region of Adjara. Tea culture was promoted as the perfect tool for imperial integration, as it made the landscape more « legible » through agronomy, soil sciences and plant biology, and enabled better control over an unruly and elusive local workforce composed of ottomanized Muslim Georgians (Adjarans), Greek, Armenian and Gurian peasants, and Kurdish nomadic groups. The founding of a South Caucasian tea industry was made possible by the tireless efforts of a few Russian scientists and adventurers who travelled to the main tea-producing regions of Asia, in order to extract knowledge, tools, seedlings, and even men who could help them in their enterprise, like the Cantonese tea master Liu Jenzhou. The South Caucasian tea industry was therefore a transnational enterprise from its very inception, having taken inspiration from both traditional Chinese tea farming, and the colonial tea plantations established by the British in Assam and on Ceylon, and by the Dutch in Java. But how did this transnational character evolve past the critical years of World War I, the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Civil War ? Could the tea industry survive the severing of international ties that followed the Bolshevik takeover of the country ? And was this transnational heritage ideologically compatible with the Soviet ideal of proletarian self-sufficiency ? I will show how local actors of the tea industry (workers, managers, as well as plant scientists) and local, regional and national authorities tried to navigate the hardships of post-war disorganisation, and the conundrum of having to build a highly modern and productive Soviet tea industry from the rubbles of a once cosmopolitan one.

Amrit Deol (California State University, Fresno), A Bridge Between Empires: Anticolonialism, Labor, and the Geopolitics of Labor and Surveillance in Panama

This paper situates Panama as a critical yet under-examined site in the global and transnational history of the Ghadar movement, foregrounding the intersection of migrant labor, anticolonial politics, and imperial surveillance in the early twentieth century. Centered on South Asian laborers who traversed the Panama Canal Zone and surrounding port cities, the paper argues that Panama functioned not merely as a transit space but as a politically charged site where imperial infrastructures of labor extraction and intelligence gathering converged. The Canal, then, simultaneously generated transnational working-class solidarities and heightened anxieties among colonial and imperial authorities.
Drawing on British India Office records, U.S. news/media publications, and scattered references in revolutionary correspondence and intelligence reports, the paper demonstrates how Ghadar ideology circulated through maritime routes, labor camps, and emerging diasporic social networks in Panama. British and U.S. officials closely monitored South Asian workers, viewing them as mobile political threats whose anticolonial consciousness exceeded the territorial boundaries of empire and nation-state alike. This paper reveals how cooperation and tension between British and U.S. surveillance regimes shaped intelligence sharing, deportation practices, and racialized categories of suspicion (particularly as the United States emerged as a hemispheric imperial power after 1904). Methodologically, the paper bridges labor history and the history of surveillance, treating censorship, policing, and intelligence not as reactive measures but as foundational features of imperial governance. By centering Panama, this paper challenges nationalist historiographies of Ghadar that privilege North America or South Asia alone, and instead advances a transoceanic framework attentive to infrastructure, mobility, and state power. In doing so, it repositions Panama as a vital site in the making of global anticolonial radicalism and the early architecture of modern imperial surveillance.