Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Center for Contemporary South Asia

Tariq Omar Ali — A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta

Friday, April 12, 2019

2:00pm – 4:00pm

McKinney Conference Rm, Watson Institute

Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois. Tariq completed his dissertation titled "The Envelope of Global Trade: Political Economy and Intellectual History of Jute in the Bengal Delta, the 1850s to the 1950s" at Harvard University in August 2012. In his dissertation and current manuscript project, Tariq explores how the Bengal delta's integration into global circuits of commodity and capital shaped local economic, political and intellectual histories as well as how economic lives, social and cultural formations, and political processes in the delta were informed and influenced by the cultivation and trade of jute. Alongside his work on jute in east Bengal during the colonial period, Tariq is also working on the history of rural development in post-colonial Pakistan.

He is interested in how the discourse and practice of rural development and agrarian modernization informed processes of nation and state formation in post-colonial East Pakistan between 1947 and 1971.Tariq teaches courses in South Asian history, agrarian and peasant histories, and histories of capitalism and commodities.

South Asia Seminar