Currently an associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Arnab is a historian of modern India and the British Empire, with research interests centred around questions of law, labour and the environment. Arnab’s first monograph, Tea Environments and Plantation Culture looked at the monoculture tea enterprise of British east India. This study brought the plant and the plantation together in analysing the praxis and politics of commodity capitalism. His associated research agendas and publications have similarly involved tracing imperial capital, legal regimes and environmental transformations in the British colonial world and the Indian subcontinent.

‘Below’ Nature: Globalization, Work, and the Non-Present

Arnab’s project at global dis:connect will examine the ‘invisible’ costs and consequences of mining in the British Empire, especially in India, between 1820-1940. This imperial mainstay and its global dominance have been studied in terms of ‘overground’ activities and material relations of production. This project takes an ‘underground’ approach to highlight the ‘invisible’ and ‘precarious’ in transnational energy regimes. It will focus on obscure — and historiographically ignored – issues of industrial health and ecological ‘ruin’ to connect globalisation, work and the politics of ‘absence’.

Please click HERE to watch an Interview with Arnab.

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