Historian & Author
Jayita Sarkar is Associate Professor (UK: Senior Lecturer) of Economic & Social History at the University of Glasgow and Fellow at the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Her research and teaching areas are connected partitions, decolonisation as a process, global histories of capitalism, and nuclear infrastructures.
Her first book, Ploughshares and Swords. India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, July 2022, 300 pp. $24.95, paperback) examines India’s nuclear and space programmes from the 1940s to the 1980s through the prisms of technopolitics and territoriality. It shows how the programmes served goals of economic modernity and geopolitics with consequences for democratic accountability.
She is completing her second book, Atomic Capitalism. A Global History, for Princeton University Press. The monograph explores the role of corporations and governments in land expropriation, labor exploitation, and debt generation from the 1890s to the 1990s through mining, explosions, and energy sites of nuclear infrastructures.
She holds a Ph.D. in History from the Graduate Institute Geneva in Switzerland and an MRes. in Sociology from the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne in France. She was born and raised in Calcutta, India, and lived and worked in northeastern United States for nearly a decade before recently moving to Scotland.
India’s nuclear program is often misunderstood as an inward-looking endeavor of secretive technocrats. In Ploughshares and Swords, Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom, narrating a global story of India’s nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program’s civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program. Through nuclear and space technologies, India’s leaders served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries.
The politically savvy, transnationally-connected scientists and engineers who steered the program obtained technologies, materials, and information through a variety of state and nonstate actors from Europe and North America, including both superpowers. They thus maneuvered around Cold War politics and the chokepoints of the nonproliferation regime. Hyperdiversification increased choices for the leaders of the nuclear program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation.
Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization.
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR of Economic & Social History
University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK
July 2022—present
ESH4087: Global South Asia, Undergraduate Honours: Global and local entanglements in economic, social, and political spheres in the South Asian subcontinent since the 19th century to the present.
Decolonisation & International Economic Relations, Postgraduate Taught: Global histories of capitalism, empire, and decolonisation to study the sources of inequality in the modern world.
Research Methods & Studies in Economic & Social History: ESH 3001, 3002, 3003
Global South Asia. IR377
Undergraduate elective
Spring 2022 (21 students)
Spring 2020 (29 students)
Fall 2017 (5 students)
History, Policy, & Statecraft. IR539
Graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar
Spring 2022 (20 students)
Summer 2020 (17 students)
International Nuclear Politics. IR315
Undergraduate elective
Fall 2021 (49 students)
Summer 2021 (43 students)
Spring 2020 (44 students)
Fall 2018 (40 students)
Spring 2018 (47 students)
Global Decolonisation
The Global Decolonisation Initiative, founded and directed by Dr. Jayita Sarkar is a multidisciplinary research endeavor that brings together students and staff across the university to understand the ongoing processes of decolonization in the contemporary world. Hosted at Boston University from May 2020 until May 2022, the Initiative will be reconstituted. Stay tuned for the 2023 iteration of Global Decolonisation by joining the mailing list and following on Twitter.
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