Anirban Karak

I am a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago. I am also a former SSRC-IDRF Fellow and hold a PhD in History from New York University.

My work has appeared in a range of academic journals and public-facing fora in both English and Bangla, including Modern Asian Studies, Critical Historical Studies, Review of Radical Political Economics, Development and Change, Mediations, Serenade Magazine, and Nirantar.

Currently I am working on my first monograph titled "Caste, Commercial Capitalism, and Subaltern Aspirations in Bengal, c.1550-1859." It argues that despite the centrality of colonial initiatives in the development of Indian capitalism, the history of capitalism in India is irreducible to colonial rule. Through a study of caste conflict and the nature of lower-caste aspirations in pre-colonial and early colonial (c.1760-1858) Bengal, I show that subaltern actors often affirmed capitalist norms, including the abstract equality of all “humans,” the need for commerce to be free from “arbitrary” impositions by upper-caste elites and the state, and the Lockean claim that all labor should be seen as constituting property equally. For peasants, weavers, artisans, agrarian slaves, devotional poets, and petty merchants belonging to lower and middling castes, capitalist norms offered a critique of two practices – the control of access to land and markets – that enabled the maintenance and reproduction of caste hierarchies.
Supervisors: Andrew Sartori, John Shovlin, and Rachel McDermott
Phone: 4134376570
Address: https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/Anirban-Karak