Race, Caste, and Labor: South Asia in Global History

Catalog description

This course explores one region's connections and entanglements with the rest of the globe. It explores movement across oceanic space to and from the Indian subcontinent, the largest and most-prized colony of the British Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. Circulation under this empire reached out on the one side to the western Indian ocean, the Caribbean and the Americas, and on the other side to the Bay of Bengal, and the Pacific Rim. Students will learn to think beyond national histories and use comparative frameworks to explore the long and contradictory histories of globalization. Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, new forms of forced migration, technologies of exclusion, and infrastructures of transport moved thousands of ordinary people from one part of the world to another. Throughout the course, students examine how race and caste intersected with class and gender to reorder existing social inequalities, and forge new communities and identities along pathways of circulation and settlement. Our focus is on the role of non-elite groups such as convicts and laborers working on construction sites and plantations, sailors manning steamships, and soldiers and non-combatants in colonial military service. Students will examine memoirs, court cases, newspaper reports, films, letters such as *Testimonies of Indian women in 19th century Mauritius*, *Maulana Thanesari in the Andaman Islands, Thirteen Months in China, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the Question of Racial Equality*, *Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers' Letters*, *Bengali Harlem, *and *Continuous Journey*.