My research on economic aspects of imperial retreat from British India and the establishment of post-colonial states in August 1947 builds on scholarly research on the limits of ‘decolonization’. My publications reflect the microhistorical approach to the extraordinarily violent and extensively studied Partition of British India that I developed during my doctoral research (PhD in International History and Politics, Graduate Institute, October 2023).
A 2025 paper in the Business History Review underscores a neglected distinction between the political partition of British India into post-colonial India and Pakistan, and the less telegraphed economic division of an economy that ended World War II as the tenth largest producer of manufactured goods in the world (B.R. Tomlinson, Political Economy of the Raj, page 31).
Forthcoming research examines imperial financial and monetary continuities after the establishment of India and Pakistan in 1947.
An important turning point in my thinking was the Unearthing Traces conference in May 2021, which forced me, in the middle of the pandemic, to re-think the temporalities of post-coloniality and ‘decolonization’ and resulted in the following paper: “Post-colonial pieces,” Unearthing Traces, EPFL Press, Lausanne, February 2023: 85-95.
In January 2021, I published a paper linking colonial police records to contemporary turmoil in post-colonial India:
“Revolutionary Indian Women: Re-reading Colonial Police Records in 2020,” Papiers d’actualité, No. 1, January 2021, Fondation Pierre du Bois, Geneva.
