Asia

Hector Duenes, Fall 2024 CGII GGR Research

Victoria Slabinski, Fall 2024 CGII GGR Research

This study explores the relationship between Britain’s abolition of slavery in its Caribbean colonies (1838) and its instigation of the First Opium War with China (1839).

The book project, “Capitals in the Margins: South Asia Since Partition” seeks to answer why, despite the shared experience of colonial British rule and a shared investment in anticolonial nationalist movements, South Asia remains the least integrated region in the world.

How did British colonial efforts to expand “commodity frontiers” come to shape environmental changes on one hand and contestations over belonging, citizenship and territory on the other in South Asia?

I plan to do a historical analysis of the convict labor used by the British East India Company in the early nineteenth century in their newly acquired territory in the North Western Provinces of British India.

I study the interaction of state capacity and an underexplored religious institution – religious cults that center around one figure of authority.

Benefitting from interdisciplinary methodologies of spatial analysis and digital history, my research tries to rediscover its history by questioning the economic, social, and cultural impacts of the slave trade on the Ottoman Imperial Capital.

What can Gandhian ideas offer to a world caught in ever-expanding environmental crises?

My doctoral project examines the complex legal and social attitudes towards women who committed 'reproductive crimes' such as infanticide and abortion in colonial India.