Book presentation by Nitin Sinha (ZMO), Nitin Varma (re:work, HU Berlin) and Pankaj Jha (Lady Shri Ram College for Women)

We cordially invite you to the discussion of two edited volumes on the long history of domestic servants and service in South Asia. The volumes cover the period from the early modern (going back to medieval and ancient times as well) to the contemporary, charting a regionally diversified and linguistically varied history of domestic service. The volumes are the result of the project ‘Domestic Servants in South Asia’, which ran at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient and re:work (Humboldt University), Berlin from 2015 to 2018. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (ERC Starting Grant) under grant agreement No 640627.

Discussants:

We are extremely grateful to have two discussants holding diverse expertise in the fields of early modern South Asian and Global labour histories.

• Abhishek Kaicker, associate professor, department of History, UC, Berkeley. Prof. Kaicker is a historian of Persianate South Asia (c. 1200-1900) with expertise in the history of the Mughal empire. He is interested in questions of intellectual history and the history of concepts; early modern global history; religion, politics and the city; and more generally in the continuities between precolonial and postcolonial south Asia. He is the author of The King the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (OUP 2020). The book shows how ordinary urbanites emerged as assertive political subjects in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) over the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
• Christian G. de Vito, researcher and coordinator of Rsearch Group, ‘Punishment, Labour, Dependency’ at Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies, Univserity of Bonn, Germany. With a long-term research focus on convicts and questions of methodology related to global labour, Dr de Vito’s current pursuit is the intersecting histories of labour, punishment, and empire. He has widely published on the theme of convicts in various journals including the International Review of Social History and Past and Present. He has also co-edited a number of volumes including Global Convict Labour (2015) and Micro-Spatial Histories of Global Labour (2018).

Both volumes are open access, which can be downloaded from:

• Nitin Sinha, Nitin Varma, Pankaj Jha, eds., Servants’ Pasts, Orient Blackswan, Delhi (2019), Vol. 1.
• Nitin Sinha & Nitin Varma, eds., Servants’ Pasts, vol. 2.  

The event will be held via Zoom. Please register at registration@zmo.de. Links will be started to send out only a few days ahaed of the event.