Global Capitalism and Modern South Asia: Intersections and Directions

Capitalism was formerly much studied, but the shift away from Marxist analysis in the late 1970s and the impact of various ‘turns’ from the 1980s (the linguistic, the cultural, the global, for instance) caused scholarly interest to dwindle while the last vestiges of analysis were deracinated and thus hollowed out. 2009 quickly became a watershed, therefore, for the global financial crisis urgently renewed interest in capitalism and its histories. Some of this work seems to ignore the impact of the global turn, being thoroughly Eurotropic in its preoccupations and Eurocentric in its assumptions. Some work has puzzled (largely unsuccessfully) over what capitalism means, others over its origins. More usefully for South Asian studies, perhaps, is scholarship linking the capitalism of the bazaar with that of the emerging global system before c. 1950, or which connects the workings of (global) capital in our own times to various intellectual agendas (e.g., nature, emotions, gender, inequality, communalism). In this masterclass, we’ll start by discussing the broader developments in the field, then sharing where capitalism crops up in our current research as well as the opportunities and problems that creates, before homing-in upon how and why to study capitalism in relation to a handful of especially pertinent topics (e.g., caste, jugaad, time) and thereby contribute to an important and growing research field.

Jagjeet Lally is Associate Professor of the History of Early Modern and Colonial India at University College London, where he is also Director of the UCL Centre for Transnational and Global History and Co-Director of the UCL Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World. He studied the social sciences at Oxford before training as a historian, first at the London School of Economics and then at Cambridge. A historian of South Asian economic and material life, he is the author of three books: India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World (2021), India and the Early Modern World (2024), and Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar: Commerce and Everyday Life in the Mughal World. Jagjeet is a Trustee of the Royal Asiatic Society, is on the international editorial board of The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and has previously worked on the award-winning South Asia Gallery at Manchester Museum, with the British Museum and Royal Collection, and with Channel 4 and the BBC.