4 Oct. Matt Shutzer (Harvard), Manu Vimalassery (Barnard)

4:00-5:15 Matt Shutzer, Indigenous Labor and Agrarian Capitalism: The “Frontier” in India’s Plantation-Mining Complex [Link to Readings (1) (2)]

Matthew Shutzer is a historian of the environment and science and technology. He is currently an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His manuscript, The Energy State: Fossil Fuels, Economic Development, and Extractive Democracy in Postcolonial India, examines the emergence of the Indian developmental state in the era of global fossil fuel production. Matthew received his Ph.D. from New York University in Modern South Asian History in 2019.

Abstract: This presentation takes up the issue of changing agrarian relations in India’s Chotanagpur plateau during the pivotal era of European capital investment in mines, plantations, and railways beginning in the early nineteenth century. Whereas earlier scholars have highlighted the expansionary or “frontier” dynamics of both European capital and British imperial governance in the Chotanagpur region, this presentation will instead examine the mobility of indigenous or Adivasi communities in shaping processes of agrarian change and networks of labor recruitment. I will argue that the remaking of Chotanagpur as a major “coolie” labor recruiting depot, as well as a site of plantation agriculture and coal extraction, occurred within regional shifts in agricultural land reclamation and the weakening of the social authority of landowners over Adivasi agrarian labor. This perspective on the conjunctural processes attending the arrival of European firms and imperial governors into the region is consequential because it challenges a mode of framing Adivasi identity in terms of fixed territorial belonging shaped primarily by modes of frontier governance. The reframing of Chotanagpur’s history in this way will allow us to consider the significance of colonial capitalism in producing indigenous histories at regional and global scales, as well as the manner in which these same processes created hierarchical distinctions within Adivasi communities themselves.

5:30 – 6:45 Manu Karuka,“Railroad Colonialism” [Link to Readings (1) (2)]

Manu Karuka is the author of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019). He is a co-editor, with Juliana Hu Pegues and Alyosha Goldstein, of “On Colonial Unknowing,” a special issue of Theory & Event, and with Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, and Sujani Reddy, he is a co-editor of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His work appears in Critical Ethnic Studies, J19, Settler Colonial Studies, The Settler Complex: Recuperating Binarism in Colonial Studies (UCLA American Indians Studies Center, 2016, edited by Patrick Wolfe), and Formations of United States Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2014, edited by Alyosha Goldstein). He is an assistant professor of American Studies at Barnard College.

Abstract: This chapter covers a history of railroads and colonialism. Spanning Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America, it examines historical periods and patterns in imperialism, as they materialize in distinct phases of railroad construction and maintenance in the colonized world.