Sizes

<italic>Sizes</italic> argues that there is no natural or optimal size or scale for a cropscape. Scrutiny of how orthodoxies of size, whether “big is better” or “small is beautiful,” the industrial farm or the intensive smallholding, have taken shape reveals that a particular scale may be highly efficacious in one context yet inefficient in a different place and time. The cases of tea plantations, tobacco farms, coffee mosaics and water management demonstrate that there is no necessary linearity about sizes: what was once seen as unsuitable can return, albeit in a different form, dictated and colored by changing historical circumstances, locations, and factors, animate and inanimate. As one looks beyond standard narratives and towards possible variations, one also encounters rich coexistence of sizes. All of these call for alternative periodizations, chronologies, and temporalities, and for sensitivity to some of the erasures in historiography flowing from excessive focus on privileged scales and assumptions of universal logic of growth.