12/10/2020: The Coolie’s Great War with author Radhika Singha

Join us for the final fall edition of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies’ latest series, New Books in Asian Studies. We will host Radhika Singha, Professor of Modern Indian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, for the US launch of her book The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labor in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921. Benjamin D. Hopkins, Director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, will bring his expertise on British imperialism and serve as moderator for this lively discussion.

In The Coolie’s Great War, Singha pens a spectacular history of the 550,000+ unacknowledged Indian laborers who kept the Allied supply lines flowing in World War I. The labor regimes built on the backs of these non-combatant ‘coolies’ sustained the military infrastructure of empire; their deployment in inter-regional arenas bent to the demands of global war in various capacities from the porters, stevedores, and construction workers in the Coolie Corps to those who maintained supply lines and removed the wounded from the battlefield. Viewed as racially subordinate and subject to ‘non-martial’ caste designations, they fought back against their status, using the warring powers’ need for manpower as leverage to challenge traditional service hierarchies and wage differentials.

Singha will share a general outline of the book and then focus on the last chapter, which deals with homecoming. The Coolie’s Great War views that global conflict through the lens of Indian labor, constructing a distinct geography of the war—from tribal settlements and colonial jails, beyond India’s frontiers, to the battlefronts of France and Mesopotamia.