Tuesday, November 16, 2021
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM EST
WebEx Events
The Sigur Center invites you to its upcoming 2021 New Books in Asian Studies event with author Neilesh Bose!
In this upcoming edition of the 2021 New Books in Asian Studies series, the Sigur Center will host a discussion of South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labor, Law, and Wayward Lives, featuring insights from editor Neilesh Bose (University of Victoria) and contributors Daniel Kent Carrasco (UNAM-Mexico City) and Andrea Wright (College of William & Mary), and moderated by Sigur Center Director Benjamin D. Hopkins.
South Asian migrants appear in most corners of the globe in the present day, from the cityscapes of Dubai and Singapore to the variegated landscapes of North America to the port cities of the Indian Ocean. What are the histories of the various migrations that originate in South Asia yet touch so many parts of the world? How do they relate to histories of globalization? Neilesh Bose’s edited volume South Asian Migrations in Global History: Law, Labor, and Wayward Lives explores how South Asian migrations in modern history have shaped key aspects of globalization since the 1830s. Including original research from colonial India, Fiji, Mexico, South Africa, North America and the Middle East, the essays explore indentured labor and its legacies, law as a site of regulation and historical biography.
Including recent scholarship on the legacy of issues such as consent, sovereignty and skilled/unskilled labor distinctions from the history of indentured labor migrations, this volume brings together a range of historical changes that can only be understood by studying South Asian migrants within a globalized world system. Centering south Asian migrations as a site of analysis in global history, the contributors offer a lens into the ongoing regulation of laborers after the abolition of slavery that intersect with histories in the Global North and Global South. The use of historical biography showcases experiences from below, as well as offers a world history of migrants outside the frameworks of empire and nation.
Editor
Neilesh Bose is an historian of modern South Asia and its diasporas. His research interests include religion, colonialism, decolonization, and migration. He currently holds the Tier II Canada Research Chair in Global and Comparative History at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. In addition to the work under discussion, he has published Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (Oxford, 2014) as well as articles in journals such as BC Studies, Modern Asian Studies, and South Asia Research.
Contributors
Daniel Kent Carrasco is a historian of South Asia, North America and the shared histories of the Third World. He teaches at UNAM, the National University in Mexico City.
Andrea Wright is an assistant professor of Anthropology and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at William & Mary. Andrea Wright examines the histories of capitalism and its contemporary expressions in South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. Her first book Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil (Stanford University Press, November 2021) uses ethnographic and archival materials to explore labor migration as a social process that shapes global capitalism. Currently, Wright is finishing her second book, Producing Labor Hierarchies: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea, which uncovers the process by which the lines between citizens and noncitizens were drawn and enforced in South Asia and the Middle East over the course of the twentieth century.
Moderator
Benjamin D. Hopkins is Director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. Hopkins is a historian of modern South Asia, specializing in the history of Afghanistan and British imperialism on the Indian subcontinent. He has authored, co-authored, and co-edited numerous books on the region. Hopkins has received fellowships from the Council on Foreign Relations, the National University of Singapore, the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, and the Wilson Center in DC. Writing for the public, he has been featured in The New York Times, The National Interest, and the BBC. Hopkins holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and BSc from the London School of Economics.
