This is my first post kicking off the two-week Building a Digital Portfolio summer institute. I hope to learn many new tools during this program, especially helpful ways I can organize and compare the many images I am beginning to find in my search for nineteenth-century photographs of tea production in South Asia.

(detail from the book Tea Planting in Ceylon by T.C. Owen. c. 1900)

From personal albums, to publications for new railroads, agricultural textbooks and general travel guides, I am beginning to investigate how images of labor were disseminated across the British Empire.

(illustration from Indian Tea: A Textbook on the Culture and Manufacture of Tea)