Making of a capitalist frontier: tobacco cultivation and changing agrarian relations in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) were mainly covered with forest and interspersed jhum—shifting cultivation—plots until the beginning of the British colonial period in 1760. Since then, policy interventions undertaken by the state regimes to govern and regulate the indigenous people and maximize the extraction of natural resources gradually transformed the region into a capitalist frontier. Consequently, the operation of large-scale tobacco companies in the CHT during the last two decades radically reconfigured indigenous peoples’ relationship with the land and the state. Analytically, in this article, we explore: Who has access to what? Who does what? Who gets what? And what do they do with it? Our ethnography reveals that agrarian changes via tobacco cultivation in the CHT included converting communal lands into private property, contract farming, land control polarization, and labor commodification. Despite emerging precarity, the indigenous people identified tobacco cultivation as a way to earn cash profits to build a life “free” from their inferior status—historically linked with their Pahari identity. Overall, our ethnographic findings problematizing the presumption that indigenous people evade “state spaces” to preserve their autonomy suggest that the CHT became a capitalist frontier embodying “zones of potential” and generating competing interests, actors, and imaginations.