FALL 2025

Monday, September 22, 2025

Room location TBD

ICM NEW BOOKS SERIES

"Moorings: Voyages of Capital Across the Indian Ocean"

NIDHI MAHAJAN (Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz)

The Institute for Comparative Modernities is thrilled to welcome Cornell alum Nidhi Mahajan '15 to campus for a talk about her recently published book Moorings: Voyages of Capital Across the Indian Ocean.

Moorings follows sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh in India as they voyage across the Indian Ocean on mechanized wooden sailing vessels known as vahans, or dhows. These voyages produce capital through moorings tht are spatial, moral, material, and conceptual. With a view from the dhow, the book examines the social worlds of Muslim seafarers who been rendered invisible even as they maneuver multiple regulatory regimes and the exigencies of life, navigatiing colonialism, neoliberalism, the rise of Hindutva, insurgency, climate change, and border regimes across the ocean. Based on historical and ethnographic research aboard ships, at ports, and in religious shrines and homes, Moorings shows how capitalism derives value from historically sedimented practices grounded in caste, gender, and transregional community-based forms of regulation.

BIO

Nidhi Mahajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. She was recently the inaugural Fatema Mernissi Postdoctoral Fellow in Social and Cultural Studies at The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE, where she continued research on a new project that examines multiple contestations over belonging and notions of sovereignty in contemporary coastal Kenya. Mahajan is also a practicing artist and has developed multi-media exhibitions for the Fort Jesus Museum in Mombasa, Khoj International Artists’ Association in New Delhi and the 2019 Sharjah Architecture Triennial.

Talk by David Engerman (History, Yale University)

Apostles of Development offers a history of international development through the lives and work of six South Asian economists who all studied together in Cambridge in the 1950s. They were an illiustrious group, with long careers and many succeses: winning a Nobel Prize (Amartya Sen), spending a decade as Prime Minister of India (Manmohan Singh), inventing the Human Development Index (Mahbub ul Haq), becoming a leading economist of international trade (Jagdish Bhagwati), agitating for independent Bangladesh (Rehman Sobhan), and helping create the modern Sri Lankan economy (Lal Jayawardena).

David C. Engerman, Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History and Global Affairs, teaches international history at Yale University. Between receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1998 and joining Yale in 2018, he was on the faculty at Brandeis University. In 2016, he served as elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of four books – Modernization from the Other Shore; American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard, 2003), Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford, 2009), The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Harvard, 2018), and most recently Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (Penguin/Random House-India, Oxford, 2025); he is also the editor or coeditor of multiple collections, including a volume of the new Cambridge History of America and the World.

South Asia Librarian Kelsey Utne will introduce graduate students to resources available through the Cornell University Library for doing research on South Asia.

The Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program provides fully funded immersive summer programs for U.S. undergraduate and graduate students to learn languages of strategic importance to the United States’ national security, economic prosperity, and engagement with the world. Each summer, over 500 American students enrolled at colleges and universities across the United States spend approximately eight weeks studying one of a dozen languages either overseas or virtually. Participants gain the equivalent of one year of language study, as the CLS Program maximizes language and cultural instruction in an intensive environment.

Can't attend? Email programs@einaudi.cornell.edu for more information.

Peasant History and the Accumulation of Difference in Colonial Panjab

Talk by Gill Navyug History, William Paterson University

One of the most durable figures in modern history, the peasant has long been a site of intense intellectual and political debate. Yet underlying much of this literature is the assumption that the peasantry simply existed everywhere, a general if not generic group, traced backward from the present to antiquity. Within the British empire, Panjab has been regarded as the quintessential agrarian province inhabited by a diligent, prosperous and “martial race” of peasants. Against such essentialist depictions, I explore the landowning peasant and landless laborer as novel political subjects forged in the encounter between colonialism and struggles over culture and capital within Panjabi society. Colonial officials and ascendant Panjabis together disrupted existing forms of identity and activity to generate a new kind of rural hierarchy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through an interrogation of a disparate archive – settlement reports and legal judgments to labor contracts, vernacular poetry, and family budgets – I challenge the givenness of the peasant by explicating the ideological and material divisions that transformed the equation of power in the countryside, and thus reconfigured global capitalism. Weaving together economic logic with cultural difference, this presentation offers a way to rethink the itinerary of comparative political economy alongside alternative possibilities for emancipatory futures.

Navyug Gill is a historian of modern South Asia and global history. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Liberal Studies at William Paterson University. His research explores questions of agrarian change, labor politics, caste hierarchy, postcolonial critique, and histories of capitalism. His first book, Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab, was published by Stanford University Press in 2024. A South Asa edition was released by Navayana in 2025. The book won the “Henry A. Wallace Award” for the best book on agricultural history outside the US from the Agricultural History Society. Gill’s scholarly and public writings have appeared in venues such as Past and Present, the Journal of Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Al Jazeera, the Law and Political Economy Project and Trolley Times.

Talk by Llerena Guiu Searle (Anthropology, University of Rochester)

In order to build a more just world order, philosopher Olúfémi Táíwo argues that we must contend with the fact that our current social order builds on relations of colonialism that did not end with colonial independence in the 1940s-1960s. Slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism have created what he calls the “Global Racial Empire” which accumulates advantages and disadvantages, harms and capabilities unevenly (2022). How might we understand “design” as a set of practices that operates within such a world system? Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with furniture and interior designers in India, this talk examines the ways in which designers navigate capitalist markets that continue to be haunted by colonialism. On the one hand, creative experts shaping elite Indian homes describe design as an anti-colonial project, poised to free India from tastes, fashions, and products from abroad. On the other, designers navigate hierarchies of values set by global markets, including demand for exotic, uniquely “Indian” products. Furniture and interior production also relies on production methods still defined through neocolonial discourses of “crafts difference” (McGowan 2009) and on caste and class dynamics that legitimize labor exploitation. By investigating how these unseen forces – histories, values, and ideologies – structure design practice in India, this paper contributes to our understanding of the politics of the creative industries and their imbrication in “Global Racial Empire.”

Llerena Guiu Searle is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Visual & Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where she also co-edits the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series. She is the author of Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Her research examines capitalism and the production of the built environment in urban India.