Organic Matter and Consumer Society in Shahjahanabad-Delhi, c. 1648-1858

In 1648, the Mughal court settled into the empire’s new capital. In 1858 – after a long twilight of a century or so that cast its shadow most darkly over the monumental city – the last emperor was sent into exile. The city had been made of mud and bricks and mortar, was conceived by philosophes and theologians as a microcosm of the universe, and is often comprehended metaphorically – that is, as a sort of body complete with head, heart, gut, and orifices. This much we know. Turning such thinking on its head, however, this talk conceives the city not as body, but as a place of bodily experience(s) and relations. These experiences, it will be argued, reveal the shifting dynamics between aristocratic privilege and the power of commercial elites, capital and labour, people and space, city and empire and planet. They signal the birth of something we might call consumer society, itself a marker of the interaction between local or vernacular versus global or systemic or ‘modern’ capitalism. At the heart of this discussion will be various kinds of organic matter, for these are crucial to reconnecting the history of capitalism to the advent of the Anthropocene.

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.