Along with human management, landscape manipulation was a sine qua non of this cash-crop economy. Chapter 5 focuses on the relationship between the forest department and the tea enterprise. It shows that the association between these two major resource stakeholders was organic and incompatible, competing as well as co-dependent. For tea’s early advent had not only short-changed the forest department’s jurisdiction over Assam’s forest resources; it regularly found itself in run-ins with the planting community regarding right-of-way, access to forests, and efforts at conservation. But for all these ills, the tea enterprise’s timber demands created much of the agro-economic raison d’être for the forest department’s existence in the region. I build on this historical irony to show that the paradigm of ‘rational’ scientific forestry underwent unregulated and extra-legal tweaks to suit the fiscal exigencies of these two parties in British India.