Varieties of Empire: Famine and the Political Economy of Colonial Rule in India

Thursday Jan, 23^rd, 4:30 – 6pm, Auditorium, Mary Allen Building (Follow signs for Homerton College Porters' Lodge)

This event is in-person only.

Professor Gurminder Bhambra, Professor of Historical Sociology, Sussex University

Abstract: Across the social sciences, empires – despite their different characteristics – are consistently defined in terms of their commonalities across time and place. In this paper, I ask what we can learn about the varieties of empire by examining the ways in which famine was addressed during the period of British colonial rule in India. I argue for more attention to be given to the colonial histories constitutive of European overseas empires as developing a distinct type of empire; what I call ‘empires of extraction’ in contrast to ‘empires of incorporation’. One key difference in the way in which famine is approached is that under the logic of ‘incorporation’, foodstuffs are moved within empire from areas of surplus to areas of deprivation, whereas under the logic of ‘extraction’ they are moved from areas of deprivation to the geographically distant metropole. In this paper, I move from the different treatment of famine to construct a sociological understanding of the distinctiveness of modern European empire.

Bio: Gurminder K Bhambra is Professor of Historical Sociology at the University of Sussex. She is co-author of Colonialism and Modern Social Theory (2021, with John Holmwood), and author of Connected Sociologies (2014), and the award-winning Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (2007). She is co-editor of both the Sage Handbook of Global Sociology (2024) and Imperial Inequalities: The politics of economic governance across European empires (2023). She is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, and the Academy of Social Sciences; and has been President of the British Sociological Association. She directs the Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project.