Sandip.Hazareesingh@open.ac.uk
Born in Mauritius, I have a PhD in History from Warwick and MA and BA degrees from SOAS and Kent respectively. I have taught at Birkbeck and Cardiff and previously worked for Save The Children Fund for a decade. This campaigning background has influenced my research interests which are focused on India and on the southern world, and I remain committed to radical perspectives in history writing. I joined the Open University in 2003 as lecturer at the newly established Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies. I joined the History Department in 2008 and am a member of its Empire and Postcolonial Studies Research Group. I am also a member of the OpenSpace Research Centre, the research centre led by the Department of Geography in the Faculty of Social Sciences.
I am Co-Director of a British Academy interdisciplinary research project, Commodities of Empire (2007-12), with Professor Jean Stubbs of the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Involving a widening network of international scholars, the project explores the spatial movements of a range of commodities over the past couple of centuries with the aims of interrogating the meanings of ‘globalisation’ and of introducing new historical perspectives from the world beyond Europe.
I am also currently Principal Investigator on an AHRC Research Networking digital project, Commodity Histories (2012-13). The project involves the design of an interactive website that will function as a collaborative space for scholars engaged in commodities-related research on Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America.
Finally I am involved in a collaborative research project, Commodities and Anticommodities (2009-13), with colleagues from Wageningen University, the Netherlands funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). This programme investigates sustainable modes of indigenous agricultural production in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean during the colonial era.
My research interests are primarily focused on South Asia and combine social history with historical geography. I am currently researching the interactions between cotton production and climate change in colonial western India. I have more general research interests in environment and climate history, in the commodity-based interconnections between different places during the colonial period, and in the modern histories of colonial and imperial cities.
I also have theoretical interests in political ecology, marxism, and postcolonialism in terms of the interrogations they pose to the study of history and geography.
I would welcome enquiries from prospective research students in any of the above areas.
2012: Cotton, climate and colonialism in Dharwar, western India, 1840-1880. Journal of Historical Geography, 38 (1), pp 1-17. Link to paper (ORO)
2009a: ‘Interconnected synchronicities: the production of Bombay and Glasgow as modern global ports c.1850-1880’, Journal of Global History, volume 1 part 4, pp. 7-31.
2009b: ‘Commodities, empires, and global history’ (with Jonathan Curry-Machado). Guest Editorial, special issue of the Journal of Global History, volume 1 part 4, pp. 1-5.
2007: The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity: Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay 1900-1925. Delhi, Orient Longman.
See also Open Research Online for further details of Sandip Hazareesingh’s research publications
