Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Arun Bala, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

How did the British conquer South Asia in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries? Islanded reconsiders the arrival of British rule in South Asia as a dynamic and unfinished process of territorialization and state building, by turning to Sri Lanka and revealing that the British colonial project was framed by the island’s traditions and maritime placement and built in part on the model they provided. Using palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka to read the official colonial archive, Islanded tells the story of two sets of islanders in combat and collaboration. It proposes four modes of reconsidering the colonial transition of South Asia c. 1800 from Sri Lanka: ‘islanding’ and ‘partitioning’, processes of creating, but not completing, a separable unit of governance; and ‘recycling’ and ‘movement’, the appropriation and redefinition of extant traditions of knowledge as well as the (dis)connectivity of colonialism and the way these set its train colonialism’s long-standing effects.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sujit Sivasundaram is Reader in World History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He received his PhD in History of Science and MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science, both from University of Cambridge. His work includes, Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795-1850 (2005) and Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (2013). He edited a special issue of Isis (2010), calling for globally-directed histories of science and is the Principal Investigator on an AHRC-funded grant, ‘Exploring Traditions: Sources for a Global History of Science.’ In 2012, he won a Philip Leverhulme Prize for History, awarded to young scholars in the UK for distinction in research. He has recently held visiting fellowships at the University of Sydney and also at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He is currently a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society Cluster with the Asia Research institute, National University of Singapore.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Ms Tay Minghua via email: minghua.tay@nus.edu.sg.