We apologize for the short notice but Prof. Guha’s talk has been canceled due to some unforeseen circumstances.
A talk by Sumit Guha, Professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, on Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400–1900 (University of Washington Press, July 2023), his new book that compares the practices of the Mughal and British Empires to demonstrate how their fluctuating capacity for domination was imbricated in the formation of environmental knowledge itself.
Event moderated by Munis D. Faruqui, Director, Institute for South Asia Studies; Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies; Associate Professor, South & South East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley
About the Book: The perception, valuation, and manipulation of human environments all have their own layered histories. So Sumit Guha argues in this sweeping examination of a pivotal five hundred years when successive empires struggled to harness lands and peoples to their agendas across Asia. Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400–1900 compares the practices of the Mughal and British Empires to demonstrate how their fluctuating capacity for domination was imbricated in the formation of environmental knowledge itself. The establishment of imperial control transforms local knowledge of the world into the aggregated information that reproduces centralized power over it. That is the political ecology that reshapes entire biomes. Animals and plants are translocated; human communities are displaced or destroyed. Some species proliferate; others disappear. But these state projects are overlaid upon the many local and regional geographies made by sacred cosmologies and local sites, pilgrimage routes and river fords, hot springs and fluctuating aquifers, hunting ranges and nesting grounds, notable trees and striking rocks. Guha uncovers these ecological histories by scrutinizing little-used archival sources. His historically based political ecology demonstrates how the biomes of a vast subcontinent were changed by struggles to make and to resist empire.
About the Author: Sumit Guha holds the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professorship in History at The University of Texas at Austin.
He was born in New Delhi, India and received his M.A. from JNU Delhi before winning a scholarship to the University of Cambridge where he was awarded a PhD in History in 1981.
He taught at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi from 1981 to 1991 and the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, 1996-1999. He was appointed S. P. Das Professor at Brown University in 2000. He left Brown in 2004 to become Professor at Rutgers University and joined the University of Texas in 2013.
He is the author of Tribe and State in Asia through Twenty-Five Centuries (Asian Studies, 2021) and History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 (University of Washington Press, 2019).
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PARKING INFORMATION
Please note that parking is not always easily available in Berkeley. Take public transportation if possible or arrive early to secure your spot.
Event is FREE and OPEN to the public.
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If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Puneeta Kala at pkala@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.
