Debjani Bhattacharyya delivered a lecture on ‘Oceanic Settlements: Underwriting Cyclones in the Bay of Bengal’. It was chaired by Awadhendra Sharan.
ZOOM ID: 822 2430 8032 PASSCODE: csdsdelhi
This talk argued that the coterminous development of financial instruments of risk management and the British imperial expansion in the Indian ocean critically shaped the very parameters of colonial weather knowledge. Analyzing navigational journals and insurance cases fought in the marine courts in India and the admiralty courts in London, the talk argues that tropical cyclones, instead of becoming limits to be overcome simply through scientific forecasting, were instead financialized and made profitable through a brisk and thriving underwriting business. Bridging economic and environmental history, the talk documents how the modalities and frameworks for producing knowledge about climate emanated out of the very webs of insurance and trade that enveloped the globe during this period.
Debjani Bhattacharyya is Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies at Drexel University. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center, Princeton University, Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, Germany and the Center for Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. Her book Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.
Awadhendra Sharan is Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Friday, 17 December 2021, 7 pm, Zoom https://bit.ly/3Gj1f64
