India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War
A Global History
Under contract, Princeton University Press, America in the World Series
Publication expected in 2025/26.
U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki created, in the words of George Orwell, a world “horribly stable” and “a peace that is no peace,” increasing power of the state over the individual and of the United States over the world. Atomic Capitalism critically examines this view and assumptions about preponderance of the United States by placing nuclear infrastructures in a global and transnational perspective. It is a global history of nuclear infrastructures examined through the materiality of the uranium cycle — uranium mining, nuclear weapons, and nuclear energy— to trace their extractivist, surveillant, and inegalitarian nature in Euro-American late imperialism and its racialized and gendered nature of exploitation. The book emphasizes political history, history of capitalism, and history of technology, but also feature perspectives from environmental history and social anthropology.
Jayita Sarkar, “Nuclear Reaganomics: Corporate Lobbying after Three Mile Island, 1979-1985,” in Diplomacy and Capitalism: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Relations edited by Christopher R. W. Dietrich (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 206-220.
In Progress
Partitions centres statelessness and precarious citizenships to study how the idea and practice of territorial divisions spread since the late nineteenth century from the South Asian subcontinent to the rest of the world through imperial statecraft and international organisations, such as the League of Nations and United Nations.
Jayita Sarkar, “Battlefields to Borderlands: Rohingyas between Global War and Decolonisation,” in South Asia Unbound: New International Histories of the Subcontinent, edited by Bérénice Guyot-Réchard and Elisabeth Leake (Leiden, Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 2023), 103-123.
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, Global History of Inequalities
University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK
July 2022—present
ESH 4087: 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.
SPS 5063: Nuclear Technologies in History, Politics, and Society, Postgraduate Taught: An historical, sociological, and political immersion into “technopolitics of nuclear things,” from mining, energy, weapons to waste.
ESH 5069: Decolonisation & International Economic Relations, Postgraduate Taught: Global histories of capitalism, empire, and decolonisation to study the sources of inequality in the modern world.
ESH 1A & 1B: Team-taught modules on global histories of inequalities, including empires, slavery, anticolonialism, development politics, and cold wars.