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Dr. Navyug Gill (PhD, ’14) Publishes Article in ‘Past & Present’

PhD alum Dr. Navyug Gill has published an article in the journal Past & Present. Gill completed his dissertation, “Labours of Division: Peasant Castes and the Politics of Agrarian Hierarchy in Colonial Panjab,” in 2014 under the advisement of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor Gyanendra Pandey. Gill is now Assistant Professor in the Department of History at William Paterson University. Read the abstract of the Past & Present article below along with the full piece here: “Accumulation by Attachment: Colonial Benevolence and the Rule of Capital in Nineteenth-Century Panjab.”

A persistent theme in the emergence of capitalism is the displacement of peasants from the countryside into industrializing cities, with regions not undergoing such a transition usually deemed semi-feudal, proto-capitalist or pre-modern. Instead of separations, however, Panjab was the site of an altogether different dynamic of accumulation based on forging a series of novel attachments. This article begins by tracing the East India Company’s conquest in 1849, and the development of an ostensibly benevolent land revenue settlement based on surveying, measuring and calculating agrarian potential. Next, it examines how this process generated a set of natural and human contingencies so that certain castes were fixed to parcels of land, and expected to pay increasing rates while cultivating global commodities and conducting exchanges in cash. To make sense of this difference, it then contrasts the archive of settlement work with Karl Marx’s narrative of primitive accumulation, to explicate the conditions and limitations of its universality. Together this demonstrates how caste-based peasant agriculture in Panjab was a new phenomenon implicated in a modern yet distinctive rule of capital. In a broader sense, this offers possibilities to rethink the politics of comparative analysis as well as the alterity of capitalist transitions across the colonial world.

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Anderson in ‘The Guardian’: “White supremacists declare war on democracy and walk away unscathed”

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently published an opinion piece in The Guardian. Surveying U.S. history since the eighteenth century, Anderson highlights a pattern of white supremacists endangering U.S. democracy and yet suffering few to no consequences thereafter. Anderson links this historical pattern to the results of current cases brought against the invaders of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Read an excerpt from the article below along with the full piece: “White supremacists declare war on democracy and walk away unscathed.”

“This horrific attack on American democracy should have resulted in a full-throttled response. But, once again, white supremacy is able to walk away virtually unscathed. US senators and representatives who were at the rally inciting the invaders were not expelled from Congress. Similarly, in shades of the post- civil war Confederacy, several politicians who attended the incendiary event at the Ellipse were recently re-elected to office. And those who stormed the Capitol are getting charged with misdemeanors, being allowed to go on vacations out of the country, and, despite the attempt to stage a coup and overturn the results of a presidential election, getting feather-light sentences.”

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Dr. Aditya Pratap Deo (PhD, ’13) Publishes ‘Kings, Spirits and Memory in Central India’

Congratulations to Dr. Aditya Pratap Deo on the publication of his book Kings, Spirits and Memory in Central India: Enchanting the State (Routledge, 2022). Deo, who teaches History at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, completed his dissertation in 2013 under the advisement of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor Gyanendra Pandey. Read Routledge’s summary of Kings, Spirits and Memory below.

“Part anthropological history and part memoir, this book is a unique study of the polity of the colonial-princely state of Kanker in central India. The author, a scion of the erstwhile ruling family of Kanker, delves into the oral accounts given in the ancestral deity practices of the mixed tribe-caste communities of the region to highlight popular narratives of its historical polity. As he struggles with his own dilemmas as ethnographer-king, what comes into view is a polity where the princely state is drawn out amidst a terrain of gods and spirits as much as that of law courts and magistrates, and political power is divided, contested and shared between the raja/state and the people. This study constitutes not only an intervention in the larger debate on the relationship between state formations and tribal peoples, but also on the very nature of history as a knowledge practice, especially the understandings of power, authority and sovereignty in it.

“Combining intensive ethnography, complementary archival work and crucial theoretical questions engaging social scientists worldwide, the author charts an unusual explanatory path that can allow us to obtain a meaningful understanding of societies/peoples that have historically been marginalized and seen as different. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of history, anthropology, politics, religion, tribal society and Modern South Asia.“

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Lipstadt Serves as Expert Witness in Civil Trial Against Organizers of Charlottesville Rally

Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, is serving as an expert witness in a civil lawsuit against the organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Counterprotesters charge that the rally organizers promoted violence against them based on racial and religious hatred. That violence led to the death of one counterprotester, Heather Heyer, who was killed when white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. In her expert testimony (published here), Lipstadt concludes that “the ideology, symbols, and rhetoric that were on display at the Unite the Right rally fit comfortably within a long tradition of antisemitism and share in the tradition that led to the violent murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust.” Read more about the case in The New York Times article: “For Holocaust Scholar, Another Confrontation With Neo-Nazi Hate.”

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Patterson Appointed Distinguished Visiting Humanities Professor at Agnes Scott College

Dr. Cynthia Burchell Patterson, Professor of History and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, has been appointed the Dabney Adams Hart Distinguished Visiting Humanities Professor at Agnes Scott College for Spring 2022. The Dabney Adams Hart Distinguished Visiting Humanities Professorship was established in 2003 by Madeline and Howell E. Adams, Jr. in honor of his sister, Dabney Hart ’48. This fund welcomes visiting scholars to campus in a variety of topics and disciplines.

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Sean Andrew Wempe (PhD, 2015) Discusses ‘Revenants of the German Empire’ on New Books Network

Dr. Sean Andrew Wempe, A 2015 PhD alumnus and Assistant Professor of Modern European History at California State University–Bakersfield, was recently interviewed for New Books Network. Wempe discusses his 2019 book Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations (Oxford UP) with Jack Guenther, a doctoral candidate in history at Princeton University. Find the link to the interview here.

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History Dept. Co-Sponsors Rothschild Memorial Lecture Featuring Dahlia Lithwick

The History Department is a co-sponsor of the 13th annual Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild Memorial Lecture, scheduled for Nov. 11 and featuring lawyer, writer, and journalist Dahlia Lithwick. A Supreme Court expert and senior editor at Slate, Lithwick is also Senior Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Kogod Research Center and Lecturer at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she recently taught a course on the legacy of Justice Ginsburg. As a leading commentator on law, politics, and the Supreme Court, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Commentary.

Lithwick will speak on the legacy of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and will also give a faculty/graduate student seminar on the approach of the current Supreme Court to church-state issues. The program will explore the life and jurisprudence of Justice Ginsburg through a Jewish lens, including how her religious upbringing and immigrant background shaped her constitutional worldview and philosophy of what America could and should be. Find more information about the event, including registration, here.

The event is sponsored by Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and co-sponsored by Emory University’s Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Center for Ethics, Center for Women, Departments of German Studies, History, Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, and Religion, Office of Spiritual and Religious Life, and School of Law.

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Reuters Quotes Anderson as Supreme Court Revisits Second Amendment

Reuters recently quoted Dr. Carol Anderson in a piece titled, “NRA lawsuit gives SCOTUS chance to confront 2nd Amendment’s roots in racism.” The article discusses a pending Supreme Court case on the 2nd Amendment and the possible implications if the justices were to consider the central argument from Anderson’s most recent book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021): that anti-Blackness was fundamental to the clause guaranteeing the right to bear arms. Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor, Chair of African-American Studies, and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read an excerpt from the Reuters piece below along with the full article: “NRA lawsuit gives SCOTUS chance to confront 2nd Amendment’s roots in racism.”

“But there’s another ‘originalist’ narrative evident in the very source materials the justices studied, which seems to have more support than their versions of history. Indeed, the historical record shows that the Second Amendment is rooted in racism and was written to preserve Southern state militias whose job it was to crush slave rebellions and capture runaways.

“The court’s acknowledgement of that narrative would indicate its willingness to confront our history in the forthright manner demanded by originalism — whether or not one agrees that we should adhere to the founders’ ideals.

“The thesis of racism at the root of the Second Amendment has been developed, most notably, by Carol Anderson, a bestselling author and historian at Emory University. Anderson published The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America in June. Anderson’s book also asserts that the right to weapons has been continuously denied to Black people.“

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2020-’21 Clio Prize Winners Announced

The Emory History Dept. Undergraduate Committee recently announced the winners of the 2021-’21 Clio Prizes. These awards are given annually for the best research paper in a junior/senior History Colloquium and to the best paper in a Freshman History Seminar. Browse past winners here and see the 2021-22 recipients below:

The Clio Prize for the best paper written in a freshman seminar has been awarded to:

Julia Pecau

Paper title:  “Justice in Medieval Europe”

Nominated by Prof. Michelle Armstrong-Partida

The Clio Prize for the best research paper written in a junior/senior colloquium has been awarded to:

Alex Levine

Paper title: “‘The Most Potent of All Human Agencies’: Missionary Printing and the Development of the Chinese Indigenous Church”

Nominated by Prof. Tonio Andrade

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Scott Benigno (C22) Publishes Article on British Railway Investments in Brazil

History major Scott Benigno (C22) recently published an article in the Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History titled, “The Economics of Empires: An Analysis of British Railway Investments in 1850s Imperial Brazil.” The article investigates Britain’s interests in developing railways in Brazil before the country’s industrialization. The paper was mentored by Dr. Thomas D. Rogers, Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History and Arthur Blank/NEH Chair in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences (2018-2021). Read the article abstract below and find the full piece here.

“While Brazil is not often thought to be connected to Britain in our present day, Brazil’s early independent history was inextricably linked with the European imperial power. Using A Report on the Proposed Railway in the Province of Pernambuco, Brazil written by British civil engineer Edward De Mornay in 1855 as an example, this paper looks specifically at Britain’s interests in developing railways in the mostly non-industrialized Brazil and the reasons behind.”