Dr. Kalyani Ramnath, Assistant Professor from the Department of History at the University of Georgia, will present a talk about her book Boats in a Storm.
Before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers moved across the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British empire. During the tumult of postwar decolonization, Boats in a Storm centers the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional patterns of life. Kalyani Ramnath narrates how these former migrants battled legal requirements to revive prewar circulations of credit, capital, and labor, in a postwar context of rising ethno-nationalisms. Ultimately, she shows how decolonization was marked not only by shipwrecked empires and nation-states emerging from the debris of imperial collapse, but also by wartime displacements and their afterlives.
Drawing on archival research conducted in India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, London, and Singapore, Boats in a Storm narrates how former migrants battled legal requirements to revive prewar circulations of credit, capital, and labor, in a postwar context of rising ethno-nationalisms that accused migrants of stealing jobs and hoarding land. Ultimately, the book shows how decolonization was marked not only by shipwrecked empires and nation-states assembled and ordered from the debris of imperial collapse, but also by these forgotten stories of wartime displacements, their unintended consequences, and long afterlives.
This event is free and open to the public. Hosted by the South Asian Studies Initiative (a working group of the Humanities Institute), the Department of History and Mershon Center.
Dr. Kalyani Ramnath is a historian of modern South Asia, interested in researching and teaching legal history, histories of migration and displacement, transnational and global history and questions of archival method.
Hosted by the South Asian Studies Initiative.
