Partition Machine @ Glasgow
August 10-11, 2023
Funded by a 2023 British Academy Conference Grant (BAC23\220114)
and the Scottish Council on Global Affairs
Partitions are everywhere. The media and policy spaces have been riddled with calls for new partitions, as in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, or the reignition of tensions by the unravelling of old ones, like in post-Brexit Northern Ireland, Kashmir, and Palestine. How did we get here? What insights could we draw from partitions’ brutal past, their lived experiences, and their shared intellectual genealogies to understand them in contemporary times?
Partition Machine is a two-day conference at the University of Glasgow on the centennial of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne to examine how the Treaty was the genesis of the norm for territorial divisions as a “solution” to protracted political violence in the world. The conference foregrounds new research on territorial divisions, their travelogues, and worldmaking influence in order to better understand the world that partitions have made in the short twentieth century.
A selection of conference papers will be published as part of the edited volume provisionally titled, Partition Machine: Legacies of the 1920s in a Violent World.
Book
Ploughshares and Swords.
India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War
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.
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The book has been positively reviewed in Cold War History, Choice, Kirkus, Toynbee Prize, and Passport among others. Reviews are forthcoming in Diplomatic History, Technology and Culture, H-Diplo, and elsewhere.
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New Book
Connected Partitions.
From South Asia to the World
In Progress, Invited by Cambridge University Press
Connected Partitions centres statelessness and precarious citizenships to study how the idea and practice of territorial divisions spread in the twentieth 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.
Relevant publication:
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.
New Book
Atomic Capitalism.
A Global History
Under contract, Princeton University Press, America in the World Series, Publication expected in 2025.
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.
Relevant publication:
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.
Teaching
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR of Economic & Social History
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.
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR of International Relations
Boston University, Massachusetts, USAJuly 2017– June 2022
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