South Asia is of great geopolitical significance. Home to nearly a quarter of humanity and comprising states such as Afghanistan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, it is marked by enduring regional antagonisms and hosts three nuclear powers.
For years, our understanding of South Asia’s long history of international relations and connections remained patchy, hampering scholarly debate along with our capacity to envision the region’s future. This is changing. New questions are being asked, archives previously unavailable are opening up, and scholars are exchanging across disciplinary boundaries—revealing multi-faceted interactions between South Asia and the rest of the world.
What is NIHSA?
NIHSA was founded in 2019. Our members come from universities and research institutes in South Asia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe. They research and publish cutting-edge work within multiple fields including History, International Relations, Anthropology, and International Development.
Objectives
Our network has three aims:
- To act as a hub for the dissemination of cutting-edge research on the international past of South Asia as widely as possible;
- To expand the momentum in the field through workshops, conference panels, and public events;
- To develop international and interdisciplinary research collaborations.
This comes with a twin commitment:
- To foster greater dialogue between scholars and the wider public, from policy interlocutors to anyone interested in History and South Asia.
- To create and share accessible content about South Asia in its historical and international context.
- To establish stronger, more equal connections between the global south and global north.
People
Associate Professor of History at MIT
Professor of History, Human Rights, and Public Policy at the City University of New York
Senior Lecturer in International Politics
Lecturer in International Relations at The University of Western Australia
Associate Professor in the International Relations of South Asia
Reader (Associate Professor) in International and South Asian History
Projects
South Asia Unbound Conference
Organised by NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network (namely Dr Bérénice Guyot-Réchard (King's College London) and Dr Elisabeth Leake (Leeds), with the assistance of Nairn Brown), this series of workshops gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars from across the world to investigate states, institutions, networks, communities and individuals as agents of South Asian global engagement at the local, regional, national and supra-national levels, spanning the time before and after independence and indeed going back to pre-colonial times.
News
Taking the Elephant out of the Room: Non-Indo Centric International Histories of South Asia
New International Histories of South Asia (NIHSA) holds conference panel.
NIHSA calls on co-panellists for Association for Asian Studies conference
New International Histories of South Asia (NIHSA) looks for co-panellists interested in attending the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference in...
Events
Changing imaginaries of South Asia
The final weekly panel of the "South Asia Unbound" event series (Feb-Apr 2021), organised by NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network
Please note: this event has passed.
Within and beyond foreign affairs ministries: Institutions of international relations in South Asia
The fifth weekly panel of the "South Asia Unbound" event series (Feb-Apr 2021), organised by NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network
Please note: this event has passed.
Artistic, literary, professional and business entanglements across and beyond South Asia
The fourth weekly panel of the "South Asia Unbound" event series (Feb-Apr 2021), organised by NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network
Please note: this event has passed.
Intimate spaces of internationalism in South Asia
The third weekly panel of the "South Asia Unbound" Event Series (Feb-Apr 2021), organised by NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network
Please note: this event has passed.
Alternative histories of humanitarianism in South Asia
The second weekly panel of the "South Asia Unbound" event series (Feb-Apr 2021), organised by NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network
Please note: this event has passed.
Resources
NIHSA wants to make research on the international past of South Asia as accessible to students, researchers and the wider public as possible.
Feel free to use it in the classroom or elsewhere.
Podcasts
A series of Podcasts with a focus on South Asia.
Blogs & Magazines
- Afro-Asian Visions: New Perspectives on Decolonisation, the Cold War, and Asian-African Connections
- Contingent a magazine led by a NIHSA member, Marc Reyes, that publishes cutting-edge history writing and champions scholars otherwise marginalised within academia
- High Peaks, Pure Earth provides commentary on Tibet related news and issues and provides translations from writings in Tibetan and Chinese posted on blogs and social media from Tibet and the People’s Republic of China
- Sikhs in Shanghai a blog by Meena Vathyam, dedicated to Indian presence in quasi-colonial Shanghai, with particular reference to Sikhs (1860s-1960s)
- Statecraft an independent, non-partisan global affairs publication that investigates the relationship between the politics of South Asia and the world at large
Projects
- Afro-Asian Networks: Transitions in the Global South
- Global Decolonization Initiative, Boston University
- Indian Indenture Project maps, spatially and chronologically, the migration of Indian indentured workers to Trinidad
- India in German archives, 1706-1989 (MIDA - DAS MODERNE INDIEN IN DEUTSCHEN ARCHIVEN 1706-1989) records the contents of German archives on the history of modern India and the German-Indian history of entanglements between 1706 and 1989/90 in a freely available database.
- The Global Thinkers Project, Oxford: Reviving Silenced Internationalist Voices in IR
- Refugee History, a site and interactive network for anyone interested in enriching and informing current debates about refugees with new research, insights and reports.
- Beyond Partition: Migration and Citizenship post Decolonisation in South Asia, a working group formed by several academics including fellow NIHSA members Dr Kalyani Ramnath and Dr Jay Sarkar
Archives & Guides to Archives
- Abilekh Patal for materials from the Indian National Archives, Delhi
- Afghanistan Digital Collections offers an online database of sources on Afghan history compiled by the University of Arizona and Kabul University
- Archives of Economic Life in South and Southeast Asia offers an overview of archival materials on South and Southeast Asia available freely online
- The Asiatic Society of Mumbai Digital Collections
- British Documents on the End of Empire growing collection of academic and archival resources tracing the process and effects of Britain’s twentieth century withdrawal from its colonial territories
- Cambridge Centre of South Asian Studies Audio Archive
- Cambridge Centre of South Asian Studies Video/Film Archive
- Films Division India has archival reels on YouTube
- Fresh from the archives – Dissertation Reviews offers guides to specific archival collections, including many in or about South Asia
- Gokhale Library (Maharashtra, India) Printed Reports
- Harvard University Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection
- Horst Krüger Archives papers and microfilms of Horst Krüger, an East German South Asianist, working to the Indian labour movement during GDR times
- Indian Kanoon Indian Case Law and Legislation going back to the 1870s
- International History Declassified: Digital Archives for collections of primary sources that examine twentieth-century South Asian history in international context, hosted by the Wilson Center
- International Institute of Social History
- Kerala Sahitya Akademi Portal in Malayalam
- Lahore University of Management Sciences Digital Library
- MIDA Archival Reflexicon offers an online database and an open-access forum for reflexive discussions on the rich India-related holdings of German archives
- National Archives of Singapore Digital Collections
- National Digital Library of India
- Prasar Bharati Archives the online repository of the Indian public broadcaster
- SHAFR Task Force on On-Line Research has a bibliography of electronic resources on international relations ordered by regions
- Shiju Alex Kerala History Archive mainly consisting of printed texts in Malayalam but also including several English language Missionary papers
- South Asia American Digital Archive (SAADA) offers archival materials on the South Asian diaspora, particularly South Asian Americans
- South Asia Open Archive an extensive archive of South Asian materials including several collections in the English language.
- University of Tubingen Hermann Gundert Portal Indian Language Printed Material and Manuscript Collections
- University of Wisconsin Bhopal Disaster Archive
- West Bengal Public Library Network
Bibliography & Resources
A new generation of historians—alongside social scientists influenced by the post-colonial and historical “turns”—is reshaping our understanding of South Asia‘s international past. They approach international relations as an unstable assemblage of institutions, personalities, ideas, and constraints. These new international histories of South Asia are driven by a deep engagement with historical evidence, often revisionist or sceptical of conventional analytical framing, and buoyed by increasing access to archives, including less traditional sources such as oral testimonies, private collections and visual material.
Internationalisms
- Baghavan, Manu, The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
- Balasubramanian, Aditya, and Srinath Raghavan, ‘Present at the Creation: India, the Global Economy, and the Bretton Woods Conference’, Journal of World History 29 (2018): 65-94
- Bayly, Martin, ‘Lineages of Indian International Relations: The Indian Council on World Affairs, the League of Nations, and the Pedagogy of Internationalism’, International History Review (2021), https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2021.1900891
- Crews, Robert D., Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation (Harvard University Press, 2015)
- Davies, Andrew, Geographies of Anticolonialism: Political Networks across and beyond South India, c. 1900-1930 (John Wiley & Sons, 2019)
- Featherstone, David, ‘Reading Subaltern Studies Politically: Histories from Below, Spatial Relations, and Subalternity’, in Subaltern Geographies, ed. by T. Jazeel and S. Legg (University of Georgia Press, 2019)
- Featherstone, David, Solidarities: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (Zed Books, 2012)
- Goswami, Manu, ‘Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms’, American Historical Review 117 (2012): 14610-85
- Green, Nile, ‘Afghanistan in Asia: Reflections on the Study of Afghan Transnationalism’, Afghanistan 4, no. 1 (2021): 50-6
- Hauser, Julia, ‘Internationalism and Nationalism: Indian Protagonists and Their Political Agendas at the 15th World Vegetarian Congress in India (1957)’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 44, no. 1 (2021): 152-66
- Ho, Engseng, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)
- Legg, Stephen, ‘Imperial Internationalism: The Round Table Conference and the Making of India in London, 1930-32’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 11 (2020): 32-53
- Legg, Stephen, ‘"Political Atmospherics": The India Round Table Conference's Atmospheric Environments, Bodies and Representations, London 1930-32’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110 (2020): 774-92
- Legg, Stephen, ‘Political Lives at Sea: Working and Socialising to and from the India Round Table Conference in London, 1930–1932’, Journal of Historical Geography 68 (2020): 21-32
- Lewis, Su Lin, ‘Asian Socialism and the Forgotten Architects of Post-Colonial Freedom, 1952–1956’, Journal of World History 30 (2019): 55-88
- Louro, Michele Comrades Against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
- Ludden, David, ‘The Centrality of Indo-Persia in Global Asia and Historical Formation of Afghanistan’, Afghanistan 4, no. 1 (2021): 57-9
- Mukherjee, Sumita, ‘The All-Asian Women's Conference 1931: Indian Women and Their Leadership of a Pan-Asian Feminist Organisation’, Women's History Review 26 (2017): 363-81
- Olcott, Jocelyn, International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History (Oxford University Press, 2017)
- O’Malley, Alanna, ‘India, Apartheid and the New World Order at the UN, 1946-1962’, Journal of World History 31, no. 1 (2020): 195-223
- Raza, Ali, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah (eds.), The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917-39 (Sage, 2015)
- Raza, Ali, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
- Singh, Sinderpal, ‘From Delhi to Bandung: Nehru, “Indian-ness” and “Pan-Asian-ness”, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 34 (2011): 51-64
- Stolte, Carolien and Harald Fischer-Tiné, ‘Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905–1940)’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54 (2012): 65-92
International Relations & Foreign Policy
- Abraham, Itty, How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics (Stanford University Press, 2014)
- Baghavan, Manu (ed.), India and the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, 'Coping with defeat. Posters of the 1962 Sino-Indian War', Invisible Histories, (July 2018) https://histecon.fas.harvard.edu/invisible-histories/captions/defeat/index.html [accessed 7 May 2020]
- Nayudu, Swapna Kona ‘In the Very Eye of the Storm: India, the UN, and the Lebanon Crisis of 1958’, Cold War History 18, no. 2 (2018): 221-37
- Paliwal, Avinash, My Enemy’s Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal (Hurst & Co., 2017)
- Sarkar, Jayita, ‘The Making of a Non-Aligned Nuclear Power: India’s Proliferation Drift, 1964-8’, International History Review 37 (2015): 933-50
- Stolte, Carolien, ‘“The Asiatic Hour”: New Perspectives on the Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, 1947’, in The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War, ed. by N. Miskovic, H. Fischer-Tiné and N. Boskovska (Routledge, 2014)
- Thakur, Vineet, ‘An Asian Drama: The Asian Relations Conference, 1947’, The International History Review 41 (2019): 673-95
- Thakur, Vineet, and Davis, Alexander E., ‘A Communal Affair over International Affairs: The Arrival of IR in Late Colonial India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 40 (2017): 689-705
- Thakur, Vineet, ‘Liberal, Liminal and Lost: India’s First Diplomats and the Narrative of Foreign Policy’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45 (2017): 232-58
Imperialisms, Anti-Imperialisms, & Post-Imperialisms
- Ahmed, Faiz, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires (Harvard University Press, 2017)
- Ahmed, Manan, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (Harvard University Press, 2020)
- Bannerjee, Sukanya, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Duke University Press, 2010)
- Bayly, Martin, Taming the Imperial Imagination: Colonial Knowledge, International Relations, and the Anglo-Afghan Encounter, 1808-1878 (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
- Biedermann, Zoltan, (Dis)connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia (Oxford University Press, 2018)
- Boittin, Jennifer Anne, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (University of Nebraska Press, 2010)
- Gandhi, Leela, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Duke University Press, 2005)
- Ghosh, Durba, and Dane Kennedy (eds.), Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Sangam Books, 2006)
- Green, Nile, ‘The Trans-Border Traffic of Afghan Modernism: Afghanistan and the Indian “Urdusphere”’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53 (2011): 479–508
- Hanifi, Shah Mahmoud (ed.), Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia: Pioneer of British Colonial Rule (Hurst & Co., 2019)
- Hasan, Mushirul (ed.), Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India (Manohar, 1981)
- Hopkins, Bendjamin, Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State (Harvard University Press, 2020)
- Kia, Mana, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism (Stanford University Press, 2020)
- Laursen, Ole Birk, ‘Anti-Colonialism, Terrorism and the “Politics of Friendship”: Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and the European Anarchist Movement, 1910-1927’, Anarchist Studies 27 (2019): 47–62
- Legg, Stephen, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007)
- Manchanda, Nivi, Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
- Manjapra, Kris, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Harvard University Press, 2014)
- Matera, Marc, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonisation in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2015)
- Pinto, Rochelle, ‘Race and Imperial Loss: Accounts of East Africa in Goa’, South African Historical Journal 75 (2007): 82-92
- Sinha, Mrinalini, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Duke University Press, 2006)
- Sinha, Mrinalini, ‘Whatever Happened to the Third British Empire? Empire, Nation Redux’, in Writing Imperial Histories, ed. by A. Thompson (Manchester University Press, 2013)
- Six, Clemens, ‘Challenging the Grammar of Difference: Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Global Mobility and Anti-Imperialism around the First World War’, European Review of History 25 (2018): 431-49
- Stolte, Carolien, ‘"The People's Bandung": Local Anti-Imperialists on an Afro-Asian Stage’, Journal of World History 30 (2019): 125-56
Decolonisation and Postcolonial Statehood
- Beverley, Eric Lewis, ‘Rethinking Sovereignty, Colonial Empires, and Nation-States in South Asia and Beyond’, special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 40 (2020)
- Carney, Scott, The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers (Harper Collins, 2011)
- Chari, Sharad, Fraternal Capital (Permanent Black, 2004)
- Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton University Press, 1993)
- De, Rohit, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in The Indian Republic (Princeton University Press, 2018)
- Fejzula, Merve, ‘The Cosmopolitan Historiography of Twentieth-Century Federalism,’ The Historical Journal 64 (2020): 477-500
- Gupta, Pamila, ‘The Disquieting of history: Portuguese (de)colonisation and Goan migration in the Indian Ocean’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 44 (2009): 19-47
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, 'The fear of being compared: State-shadowing in the Himalayas, 1910–62', Political Geography, 75:(2019)
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-1962 (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
- Haines, Daniel, Rivers Divided: Indus Basin Waters in the Making of India and Pakistan (Hurst & Co., 2017)
- Kapoor, Ria, ‘Nehru’s Non-Alignment Dilemma: The Tibetan Refugees in India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42 (2019): 675-93
- Nayudu, Swapna Kona (ed.), ‘Modern Indian Thinkers’, special issue, Global Intellectual History 2, no. 3 (2017)
- Semyanov, Alexander, ‘The Ambiguity of Federalism as a Postimperial Political Vision’, special issue of Ab Imperio 3 (2018)
- Siegel, Benjamin, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
- Terretta, Meredith, ‘Anti-Colonial Lawyering, Postwar Human Rights, and Decolonization across Imperial Boundaries in Africa’, Canadian Journal of History 52 (2017): 448-78
- Walker, Lydia, ‘Decolonization in the 1960s: On Legitimate and Illegitimate Nationalist Claims-Making’, Past and Present (2019): 227-64
South Asians Abroad & Intimate Internationalisms
- Ahmed, Rehana, and Sumita Mukherjee, South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858-1947 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011)
- Aiyar, Sana, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2015)
- Fisher, Michael H., Shompa Lahiri and Shinder Thandi, A South-Asian History of Britain (Greenwood World, 2007)
- Framke, Maria, ‘Shopping Ideologies for Independent India? Taraknath Das’s Engagement with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism’, Itinerario 40 (2016): 55–81
- Goebel, Michael, ‘Geopolitics, Transnational Solidarity or Diaspora Nationalism? The Global Career of M.N. Roy, 1915–1930’, European Review of History 21 (2014): 485–99
- Kidambi, Prashant, Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2018)
- Liebau, Heike, ‘Networks of Knowledge Production: South Asian Muslims and German Scholars in Berlin (1915-30)’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 40 (2020): 309–21
- Loomba, Ania, Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India (Routledge, 2018)
- Manjapra, Kris, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (Routledge, 2010)
- McGetchin, Douglas T., ‘Indo-German Contact Through the Lens of Gender: Three Cases of Anti-Imperialist Miscegenation: Dr. Zakir Husain, Virendrenath ‘Chatto’ Chatto-padhyaya, and S.C. Bose’, in Gendered Encounters between Germany and Asia, ed. by Joanne Miyang Cho and Douglas T. McGetchin (Springer International Publishing, 2017)
- Namakkal, Jessica, ‘Decolonizing Marriage and the Family: The Lives and Letters of Ida, Benoy, and Indira Sarkar’, Journal of Women’s History 31 (2019): 124–47
- Ramnath, Maia, ‘Meeting the Rebel Girl: Anticolonial Solidarity and Interracial Romance’, in The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917-39, ed. by Ali Raza, Franziska Roy, and Benjamin Zachariah (Sage, 2015)
- Shehabuddin, Elora, Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (University of California Press, 2021)
- Srinivas, Mytheli, Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India (University of Washignton Press, 2021)
- Sriraman, Tarangini, In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India (Oxford University Press, 2018)
- Stoler, Ann Laura, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (California University Press, 2002)
- Wardaki, Marjan, ‘Rediscovering Afghan Fine Arts: The Life of an Afghan Student in Germany, Abdul Ghafur Brechna’, Modern Asian Studies 55, no. 5 (2021): 1544-80
Humanitarianisms
- Durbach, Nadja, ‘The Politics of Provisioning: Feeding South Asian Prisoners during the First World War’, War & Society 37 (2018): 75-90
- Fischer-Tiné, Harald, ‘“Unparalleled Opportunities”: The Indian Y.M.C.A.’s Army Work Schemes for Imperial Troops During the Great War (1914–1920)’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 47 (2019): 100–37
- Framke, Maria ‘Political Humanitarianism in the 1930s: Indian Aid for Republican Spain’, European Review of History, 23 (2016): 63–81
- Framke, Maria, ‘We must send a gift worthy of India and the Congress!’ War and political humanitarianism in late colonial South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies 51 (2017): 1969-98
- Hyson, Samuel, and Alan Lester, ‘“British India on Trial”: Brighton Military Hospitals and the Politics of Empire in World War I’, Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012): 18–34
- Kapoor, Ria, ‘Removing the International from the Refugee’, Humanity (2021): 1-19
- Marcussen, Eleonor, ‘Cooperation and Pacifism in a Colonial Context: Service Civil International and Work Camps in Bihar 1934-1937’, in HerStory: Historical Scholarship between South Asia and Europe (CrossAsia, 2018)
- Nunan, Timothy, Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
- Ruprecht, Adrian, ‘The Great Eastern Crisis (1875-1878) as a Global Humanitarian Moment’, Journal of Global History 16, no. 2 (2021): 159-84
- Simonow, Joanna, ‘The Great Bengal Famine in Britain: Metropolitan Campaigning for Food Relief and the End of Empire, 1943–44’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48 (2020): 168-97
Frontiers, borderlands and border-making
- Bashir, Shahzad, and Robert D. Crews (eds), Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands (Harvard University Press, 2012)
- Chester, Lucy P., Borders and Conflict in South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of Punjab (Manchester University Press, 2009)
- Dubnov, Arie M., and Laura Robson (eds.), Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford University Press, 2019)
- Dutta, Anwesha, ‘Forest Becomes Frontline: Conservation and Counter-insurgency in a Space of Violent Conflict in Assam, Northeast India’, Political Geography 77 (2020)
- Gardner, Kyle, The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border (Cambridge, University Press, 2021)
- Gohain, Swargajyoti, Imagined Geographies in the Indo-Tibetan Borderlands: Culture, Politics, Place (Amsterdam University Press, 2020)
- Gupta, Sonika, ‘Frontiers in Flux: Indo-Tibetan Border: 1946–1948’, India Quarterly (2021)
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, 'Nation-building or state-making? India's North-East Frontier and the ambiguities of Nehruvian developmentalism, 1950–1959', Contemporary South Asia (CSA), 21:1 (2013), 22-37
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, 'Reordering a border space: Relief, rehabilitation, and nation-building in northeastern India after the 1950 Assam earthquake', Modern Asian Studies, 49:4 (2015), 931-962
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, 'Tour diaries and itinerant governance in the eastern Himalayas, ca.1909-1962', The Historical Journal, 60:4 (2017), 1023-1046
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, 'When legions thunder past: The Second World War and India’s northeastern frontier', War in History, 25:3 (2018), 328-60
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, ‘Tangled Lands: Burma and India’s Unfinished Separation, 1937-1948’, Journal of Asian Studies (2020)
- Leake, Elisabeth, The Defiant Border: The Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonization, 1936-65 (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
- Leake, Elisabeth, and Daniel Haines, ‘Lines of (In)Convenience: Sovereignty and Border-Making in Postcolonial South Asia, 1947-1965’, Journal of Asian Studies 76 (2017): 963-85
- Longkumer, Arkotong, The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast (Stanford University Press, 2020)
- McGranahan, Carole, ‘Imperial but Not Colonial: Archival Truths, British India, and the Case of the “Naughty” Tibetans’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 59 (2017): 68-95
- Murton, Galen, ‘Facing the Fence: The Production and Performance of a Himalayan Border in Global Contexts’, Political Geography (2019)
- Omrani, Bijan, ‘The Durand Line: History and Problems of the Afghan-Pakistan Border’, Asian Affairs 40 (2009): 177–95.
- Van Schendel, Willem, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (Anthem, 2004)
- Van Schendel, Willem, and Itty Abraham, Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2005)
Blogs & Magazines
- Afro-Asian Visions: New Perspectives on Decolonisation, the Cold War, and Asian-African Connections
- Contingent a magazine led by a NIHSA member, Marc Reyes, that publishes cutting-edge history writing and champions scholars otherwise marginalised within academia
- High Peaks, Pure Earth provides commentary on Tibet related news and issues and provides translations from writings in Tibetan and Chinese posted on blogs and social media from Tibet and the People’s Republic of China
- Sikhs in Shanghai a blog by Meena Vathyam, dedicated to Indian presence in quasi-colonial Shanghai, with particular reference to Sikhs (1860s-1960s)
- Statecraft an independent, non-partisan global affairs publication that investigates the relationship between the politics of South Asia and the world at large
Projects
- Afro-Asian Networks: Transitions in the Global South
- Global Decolonization Initiative, Boston University
- Indian Indenture Project maps, spatially and chronologically, the migration of Indian indentured workers to Trinidad
- India in German archives, 1706-1989 (MIDA - DAS MODERNE INDIEN IN DEUTSCHEN ARCHIVEN 1706-1989) records the contents of German archives on the history of modern India and the German-Indian history of entanglements between 1706 and 1989/90 in a freely available database.
- The Global Thinkers Project, Oxford: Reviving Silenced Internationalist Voices in IR
- Refugee History, a site and interactive network for anyone interested in enriching and informing current debates about refugees with new research, insights and reports.
- Beyond Partition: Migration and Citizenship post Decolonisation in South Asia, a working group formed by several academics including fellow NIHSA members Dr Kalyani Ramnath and Dr Jay Sarkar
Archives & Guides to Archives
- Abilekh Patal for materials from the Indian National Archives, Delhi
- Afghanistan Digital Collections offers an online database of sources on Afghan history compiled by the University of Arizona and Kabul University
- Archives of Economic Life in South and Southeast Asia offers an overview of archival materials on South and Southeast Asia available freely online
- The Asiatic Society of Mumbai Digital Collections
- British Documents on the End of Empire growing collection of academic and archival resources tracing the process and effects of Britain’s twentieth century withdrawal from its colonial territories
- Cambridge Centre of South Asian Studies Audio Archive
- Cambridge Centre of South Asian Studies Video/Film Archive
- Films Division India has archival reels on YouTube
- Fresh from the archives – Dissertation Reviews offers guides to specific archival collections, including many in or about South Asia
- Gokhale Library (Maharashtra, India) Printed Reports
- Harvard University Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection
- Horst Krüger Archives papers and microfilms of Horst Krüger, an East German South Asianist, working to the Indian labour movement during GDR times
- Indian Kanoon Indian Case Law and Legislation going back to the 1870s
- International History Declassified: Digital Archives for collections of primary sources that examine twentieth-century South Asian history in international context, hosted by the Wilson Center
- International Institute of Social History
- Kerala Sahitya Akademi Portal in Malayalam
- Lahore University of Management Sciences Digital Library
- MIDA Archival Reflexicon offers an online database and an open-access forum for reflexive discussions on the rich India-related holdings of German archives
- National Archives of Singapore Digital Collections
- National Digital Library of India
- Prasar Bharati Archives the online repository of the Indian public broadcaster
- SHAFR Task Force on On-Line Research has a bibliography of electronic resources on international relations ordered by regions
- Shiju Alex Kerala History Archive mainly consisting of printed texts in Malayalam but also including several English language Missionary papers
- South Asia American Digital Archive (SAADA) offers archival materials on the South Asian diaspora, particularly South Asian Americans
- South Asia Open Archive an extensive archive of South Asian materials including several collections in the English language.
- University of Tubingen Hermann Gundert Portal Indian Language Printed Material and Manuscript Collections
- University of Wisconsin Bhopal Disaster Archive
- West Bengal Public Library Network
Forthcoming and Unpublished Projects
- Balaji, Shruti, ‘Third World Women of the International: Spatial Identities and Transnational Networks (c. 1920-50)’ (LSE)
- Gujral, Diva, ‘Picturing Non-Alignment: Photography, Nation, Identity in India, c. 1950-1975’ (UCL)
- Krishna, Sneha, Errant Girls: Intimate internationalism in Twentieth-Century South Asia
- Kuncheria, Cheri, ‘The Remaking of Indian Tobacco: Science, Business, and the Cultivator, 1971-1948' (Jawaharalal Nehru University, 2019)
- Marcussen, Eleonor ‘Acts of Aid: The Politics of Relief and Reconstruction after the 1934 Bihar-Nepal Earthquake’ (University of Heidelberg, 2016)
- Prakash, Teesta, ‘Strategic Assessments: Aid and Bureaucracy in Australia-India Relations 1951-1989’ (Griffith University, 2021)
- Ruprecht, Adrian P., ‘De-Centering Humanitarianism: The Red Cross and India, c. 1877-1939’ (University of Cambridge, 2017)
- Simonow, Joanna, ‘After the “Late Victorian Holocausts”: Transnational Responses to Famines and Malnutrition in India, c. 1900-1955’, (ETH Zurich, 2019)
People
Associate Professor of History at MIT
Professor of History, Human Rights, and Public Policy at the City University of New York
Senior Lecturer in International Politics
Lecturer in International Relations at The University of Western Australia
Associate Professor in the International Relations of South Asia
Reader (Associate Professor) in International and South Asian History
Projects
South Asia Unbound Conference
Organised by NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network (namely Dr Bérénice Guyot-Réchard (King's College London) and Dr Elisabeth Leake (Leeds), with the assistance of Nairn Brown), this series of workshops gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars from across the world to investigate states, institutions, networks, communities and individuals as agents of South Asian global engagement at the local, regional, national and supra-national levels, spanning the time before and after independence and indeed going back to pre-colonial times.
News
Taking the Elephant out of the Room: Non-Indo Centric International Histories of South Asia
New International Histories of South Asia (NIHSA) holds conference panel.
NIHSA calls on co-panellists for Association for Asian Studies conference
New International Histories of South Asia (NIHSA) looks for co-panellists interested in attending the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference in...
Events
Changing imaginaries of South Asia
The final weekly panel of the "South Asia Unbound" event series (Feb-Apr 2021), organised by NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network
Please note: this event has passed.
Within and beyond foreign affairs ministries: Institutions of international relations in South Asia
The fifth weekly panel of the "South Asia Unbound" event series (Feb-Apr 2021), organised by NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network
Please note: this event has passed.
Artistic, literary, professional and business entanglements across and beyond South Asia
The fourth weekly panel of the "South Asia Unbound" event series (Feb-Apr 2021), organised by NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network
Please note: this event has passed.
Intimate spaces of internationalism in South Asia
The third weekly panel of the "South Asia Unbound" Event Series (Feb-Apr 2021), organised by NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network
Please note: this event has passed.
Alternative histories of humanitarianism in South Asia
The second weekly panel of the "South Asia Unbound" event series (Feb-Apr 2021), organised by NIHSA - the New International Histories of South Asia network
Please note: this event has passed.
Resources
NIHSA wants to make research on the international past of South Asia as accessible to students, researchers and the wider public as possible.
Feel free to use it in the classroom or elsewhere.
Podcasts
A series of Podcasts with a focus on South Asia.
Blogs & Magazines
- Afro-Asian Visions: New Perspectives on Decolonisation, the Cold War, and Asian-African Connections
- Contingent a magazine led by a NIHSA member, Marc Reyes, that publishes cutting-edge history writing and champions scholars otherwise marginalised within academia
- High Peaks, Pure Earth provides commentary on Tibet related news and issues and provides translations from writings in Tibetan and Chinese posted on blogs and social media from Tibet and the People’s Republic of China
- Sikhs in Shanghai a blog by Meena Vathyam, dedicated to Indian presence in quasi-colonial Shanghai, with particular reference to Sikhs (1860s-1960s)
- Statecraft an independent, non-partisan global affairs publication that investigates the relationship between the politics of South Asia and the world at large
Projects
- Afro-Asian Networks: Transitions in the Global South
- Global Decolonization Initiative, Boston University
- Indian Indenture Project maps, spatially and chronologically, the migration of Indian indentured workers to Trinidad
- India in German archives, 1706-1989 (MIDA - DAS MODERNE INDIEN IN DEUTSCHEN ARCHIVEN 1706-1989) records the contents of German archives on the history of modern India and the German-Indian history of entanglements between 1706 and 1989/90 in a freely available database.
- The Global Thinkers Project, Oxford: Reviving Silenced Internationalist Voices in IR
- Refugee History, a site and interactive network for anyone interested in enriching and informing current debates about refugees with new research, insights and reports.
- Beyond Partition: Migration and Citizenship post Decolonisation in South Asia, a working group formed by several academics including fellow NIHSA members Dr Kalyani Ramnath and Dr Jay Sarkar
Archives & Guides to Archives
- Abilekh Patal for materials from the Indian National Archives, Delhi
- Afghanistan Digital Collections offers an online database of sources on Afghan history compiled by the University of Arizona and Kabul University
- Archives of Economic Life in South and Southeast Asia offers an overview of archival materials on South and Southeast Asia available freely online
- The Asiatic Society of Mumbai Digital Collections
- British Documents on the End of Empire growing collection of academic and archival resources tracing the process and effects of Britain’s twentieth century withdrawal from its colonial territories
- Cambridge Centre of South Asian Studies Audio Archive
- Cambridge Centre of South Asian Studies Video/Film Archive
- Films Division India has archival reels on YouTube
- Fresh from the archives – Dissertation Reviews offers guides to specific archival collections, including many in or about South Asia
- Gokhale Library (Maharashtra, India) Printed Reports
- Harvard University Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection
- Horst Krüger Archives papers and microfilms of Horst Krüger, an East German South Asianist, working to the Indian labour movement during GDR times
- Indian Kanoon Indian Case Law and Legislation going back to the 1870s
- International History Declassified: Digital Archives for collections of primary sources that examine twentieth-century South Asian history in international context, hosted by the Wilson Center
- International Institute of Social History
- Kerala Sahitya Akademi Portal in Malayalam
- Lahore University of Management Sciences Digital Library
- MIDA Archival Reflexicon offers an online database and an open-access forum for reflexive discussions on the rich India-related holdings of German archives
- National Archives of Singapore Digital Collections
- National Digital Library of India
- Prasar Bharati Archives the online repository of the Indian public broadcaster
- SHAFR Task Force on On-Line Research has a bibliography of electronic resources on international relations ordered by regions
- Shiju Alex Kerala History Archive mainly consisting of printed texts in Malayalam but also including several English language Missionary papers
- South Asia American Digital Archive (SAADA) offers archival materials on the South Asian diaspora, particularly South Asian Americans
- South Asia Open Archive an extensive archive of South Asian materials including several collections in the English language.
- University of Tubingen Hermann Gundert Portal Indian Language Printed Material and Manuscript Collections
- University of Wisconsin Bhopal Disaster Archive
- West Bengal Public Library Network
Bibliography & Resources
A new generation of historians—alongside social scientists influenced by the post-colonial and historical “turns”—is reshaping our understanding of South Asia‘s international past. They approach international relations as an unstable assemblage of institutions, personalities, ideas, and constraints. These new international histories of South Asia are driven by a deep engagement with historical evidence, often revisionist or sceptical of conventional analytical framing, and buoyed by increasing access to archives, including less traditional sources such as oral testimonies, private collections and visual material.
Internationalisms
- Baghavan, Manu, The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
- Balasubramanian, Aditya, and Srinath Raghavan, ‘Present at the Creation: India, the Global Economy, and the Bretton Woods Conference’, Journal of World History 29 (2018): 65-94
- Bayly, Martin, ‘Lineages of Indian International Relations: The Indian Council on World Affairs, the League of Nations, and the Pedagogy of Internationalism’, International History Review (2021), https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2021.1900891
- Crews, Robert D., Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation (Harvard University Press, 2015)
- Davies, Andrew, Geographies of Anticolonialism: Political Networks across and beyond South India, c. 1900-1930 (John Wiley & Sons, 2019)
- Featherstone, David, ‘Reading Subaltern Studies Politically: Histories from Below, Spatial Relations, and Subalternity’, in Subaltern Geographies, ed. by T. Jazeel and S. Legg (University of Georgia Press, 2019)
- Featherstone, David, Solidarities: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (Zed Books, 2012)
- Goswami, Manu, ‘Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms’, American Historical Review 117 (2012): 14610-85
- Green, Nile, ‘Afghanistan in Asia: Reflections on the Study of Afghan Transnationalism’, Afghanistan 4, no. 1 (2021): 50-6
- Hauser, Julia, ‘Internationalism and Nationalism: Indian Protagonists and Their Political Agendas at the 15th World Vegetarian Congress in India (1957)’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 44, no. 1 (2021): 152-66
- Ho, Engseng, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)
- Legg, Stephen, ‘Imperial Internationalism: The Round Table Conference and the Making of India in London, 1930-32’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 11 (2020): 32-53
- Legg, Stephen, ‘"Political Atmospherics": The India Round Table Conference's Atmospheric Environments, Bodies and Representations, London 1930-32’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110 (2020): 774-92
- Legg, Stephen, ‘Political Lives at Sea: Working and Socialising to and from the India Round Table Conference in London, 1930–1932’, Journal of Historical Geography 68 (2020): 21-32
- Lewis, Su Lin, ‘Asian Socialism and the Forgotten Architects of Post-Colonial Freedom, 1952–1956’, Journal of World History 30 (2019): 55-88
- Louro, Michele Comrades Against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
- Ludden, David, ‘The Centrality of Indo-Persia in Global Asia and Historical Formation of Afghanistan’, Afghanistan 4, no. 1 (2021): 57-9
- Mukherjee, Sumita, ‘The All-Asian Women's Conference 1931: Indian Women and Their Leadership of a Pan-Asian Feminist Organisation’, Women's History Review 26 (2017): 363-81
- Olcott, Jocelyn, International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History (Oxford University Press, 2017)
- O’Malley, Alanna, ‘India, Apartheid and the New World Order at the UN, 1946-1962’, Journal of World History 31, no. 1 (2020): 195-223
- Raza, Ali, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah (eds.), The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917-39 (Sage, 2015)
- Raza, Ali, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
- Singh, Sinderpal, ‘From Delhi to Bandung: Nehru, “Indian-ness” and “Pan-Asian-ness”, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 34 (2011): 51-64
- Stolte, Carolien and Harald Fischer-Tiné, ‘Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905–1940)’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54 (2012): 65-92
International Relations & Foreign Policy
- Abraham, Itty, How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics (Stanford University Press, 2014)
- Baghavan, Manu (ed.), India and the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, 'Coping with defeat. Posters of the 1962 Sino-Indian War', Invisible Histories, (July 2018) https://histecon.fas.harvard.edu/invisible-histories/captions/defeat/index.html [accessed 7 May 2020]
- Nayudu, Swapna Kona ‘In the Very Eye of the Storm: India, the UN, and the Lebanon Crisis of 1958’, Cold War History 18, no. 2 (2018): 221-37
- Paliwal, Avinash, My Enemy’s Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal (Hurst & Co., 2017)
- Sarkar, Jayita, ‘The Making of a Non-Aligned Nuclear Power: India’s Proliferation Drift, 1964-8’, International History Review 37 (2015): 933-50
- Stolte, Carolien, ‘“The Asiatic Hour”: New Perspectives on the Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, 1947’, in The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War, ed. by N. Miskovic, H. Fischer-Tiné and N. Boskovska (Routledge, 2014)
- Thakur, Vineet, ‘An Asian Drama: The Asian Relations Conference, 1947’, The International History Review 41 (2019): 673-95
- Thakur, Vineet, and Davis, Alexander E., ‘A Communal Affair over International Affairs: The Arrival of IR in Late Colonial India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 40 (2017): 689-705
- Thakur, Vineet, ‘Liberal, Liminal and Lost: India’s First Diplomats and the Narrative of Foreign Policy’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45 (2017): 232-58
Imperialisms, Anti-Imperialisms, & Post-Imperialisms
- Ahmed, Faiz, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires (Harvard University Press, 2017)
- Ahmed, Manan, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (Harvard University Press, 2020)
- Bannerjee, Sukanya, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Duke University Press, 2010)
- Bayly, Martin, Taming the Imperial Imagination: Colonial Knowledge, International Relations, and the Anglo-Afghan Encounter, 1808-1878 (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
- Biedermann, Zoltan, (Dis)connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia (Oxford University Press, 2018)
- Boittin, Jennifer Anne, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (University of Nebraska Press, 2010)
- Gandhi, Leela, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Duke University Press, 2005)
- Ghosh, Durba, and Dane Kennedy (eds.), Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Sangam Books, 2006)
- Green, Nile, ‘The Trans-Border Traffic of Afghan Modernism: Afghanistan and the Indian “Urdusphere”’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53 (2011): 479–508
- Hanifi, Shah Mahmoud (ed.), Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia: Pioneer of British Colonial Rule (Hurst & Co., 2019)
- Hasan, Mushirul (ed.), Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India (Manohar, 1981)
- Hopkins, Bendjamin, Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State (Harvard University Press, 2020)
- Kia, Mana, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism (Stanford University Press, 2020)
- Laursen, Ole Birk, ‘Anti-Colonialism, Terrorism and the “Politics of Friendship”: Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and the European Anarchist Movement, 1910-1927’, Anarchist Studies 27 (2019): 47–62
- Legg, Stephen, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007)
- Manchanda, Nivi, Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
- Manjapra, Kris, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Harvard University Press, 2014)
- Matera, Marc, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonisation in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2015)
- Pinto, Rochelle, ‘Race and Imperial Loss: Accounts of East Africa in Goa’, South African Historical Journal 75 (2007): 82-92
- Sinha, Mrinalini, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Duke University Press, 2006)
- Sinha, Mrinalini, ‘Whatever Happened to the Third British Empire? Empire, Nation Redux’, in Writing Imperial Histories, ed. by A. Thompson (Manchester University Press, 2013)
- Six, Clemens, ‘Challenging the Grammar of Difference: Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Global Mobility and Anti-Imperialism around the First World War’, European Review of History 25 (2018): 431-49
- Stolte, Carolien, ‘"The People's Bandung": Local Anti-Imperialists on an Afro-Asian Stage’, Journal of World History 30 (2019): 125-56
Decolonisation and Postcolonial Statehood
- Beverley, Eric Lewis, ‘Rethinking Sovereignty, Colonial Empires, and Nation-States in South Asia and Beyond’, special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 40 (2020)
- Carney, Scott, The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers (Harper Collins, 2011)
- Chari, Sharad, Fraternal Capital (Permanent Black, 2004)
- Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton University Press, 1993)
- De, Rohit, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in The Indian Republic (Princeton University Press, 2018)
- Fejzula, Merve, ‘The Cosmopolitan Historiography of Twentieth-Century Federalism,’ The Historical Journal 64 (2020): 477-500
- Gupta, Pamila, ‘The Disquieting of history: Portuguese (de)colonisation and Goan migration in the Indian Ocean’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 44 (2009): 19-47
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, 'The fear of being compared: State-shadowing in the Himalayas, 1910–62', Political Geography, 75:(2019)
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-1962 (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
- Haines, Daniel, Rivers Divided: Indus Basin Waters in the Making of India and Pakistan (Hurst & Co., 2017)
- Kapoor, Ria, ‘Nehru’s Non-Alignment Dilemma: The Tibetan Refugees in India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42 (2019): 675-93
- Nayudu, Swapna Kona (ed.), ‘Modern Indian Thinkers’, special issue, Global Intellectual History 2, no. 3 (2017)
- Semyanov, Alexander, ‘The Ambiguity of Federalism as a Postimperial Political Vision’, special issue of Ab Imperio 3 (2018)
- Siegel, Benjamin, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
- Terretta, Meredith, ‘Anti-Colonial Lawyering, Postwar Human Rights, and Decolonization across Imperial Boundaries in Africa’, Canadian Journal of History 52 (2017): 448-78
- Walker, Lydia, ‘Decolonization in the 1960s: On Legitimate and Illegitimate Nationalist Claims-Making’, Past and Present (2019): 227-64
South Asians Abroad & Intimate Internationalisms
- Ahmed, Rehana, and Sumita Mukherjee, South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858-1947 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011)
- Aiyar, Sana, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2015)
- Fisher, Michael H., Shompa Lahiri and Shinder Thandi, A South-Asian History of Britain (Greenwood World, 2007)
- Framke, Maria, ‘Shopping Ideologies for Independent India? Taraknath Das’s Engagement with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism’, Itinerario 40 (2016): 55–81
- Goebel, Michael, ‘Geopolitics, Transnational Solidarity or Diaspora Nationalism? The Global Career of M.N. Roy, 1915–1930’, European Review of History 21 (2014): 485–99
- Kidambi, Prashant, Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2018)
- Liebau, Heike, ‘Networks of Knowledge Production: South Asian Muslims and German Scholars in Berlin (1915-30)’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 40 (2020): 309–21
- Loomba, Ania, Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India (Routledge, 2018)
- Manjapra, Kris, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (Routledge, 2010)
- McGetchin, Douglas T., ‘Indo-German Contact Through the Lens of Gender: Three Cases of Anti-Imperialist Miscegenation: Dr. Zakir Husain, Virendrenath ‘Chatto’ Chatto-padhyaya, and S.C. Bose’, in Gendered Encounters between Germany and Asia, ed. by Joanne Miyang Cho and Douglas T. McGetchin (Springer International Publishing, 2017)
- Namakkal, Jessica, ‘Decolonizing Marriage and the Family: The Lives and Letters of Ida, Benoy, and Indira Sarkar’, Journal of Women’s History 31 (2019): 124–47
- Ramnath, Maia, ‘Meeting the Rebel Girl: Anticolonial Solidarity and Interracial Romance’, in The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917-39, ed. by Ali Raza, Franziska Roy, and Benjamin Zachariah (Sage, 2015)
- Shehabuddin, Elora, Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (University of California Press, 2021)
- Srinivas, Mytheli, Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India (University of Washignton Press, 2021)
- Sriraman, Tarangini, In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India (Oxford University Press, 2018)
- Stoler, Ann Laura, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (California University Press, 2002)
- Wardaki, Marjan, ‘Rediscovering Afghan Fine Arts: The Life of an Afghan Student in Germany, Abdul Ghafur Brechna’, Modern Asian Studies 55, no. 5 (2021): 1544-80
Humanitarianisms
- Durbach, Nadja, ‘The Politics of Provisioning: Feeding South Asian Prisoners during the First World War’, War & Society 37 (2018): 75-90
- Fischer-Tiné, Harald, ‘“Unparalleled Opportunities”: The Indian Y.M.C.A.’s Army Work Schemes for Imperial Troops During the Great War (1914–1920)’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 47 (2019): 100–37
- Framke, Maria ‘Political Humanitarianism in the 1930s: Indian Aid for Republican Spain’, European Review of History, 23 (2016): 63–81
- Framke, Maria, ‘We must send a gift worthy of India and the Congress!’ War and political humanitarianism in late colonial South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies 51 (2017): 1969-98
- Hyson, Samuel, and Alan Lester, ‘“British India on Trial”: Brighton Military Hospitals and the Politics of Empire in World War I’, Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012): 18–34
- Kapoor, Ria, ‘Removing the International from the Refugee’, Humanity (2021): 1-19
- Marcussen, Eleonor, ‘Cooperation and Pacifism in a Colonial Context: Service Civil International and Work Camps in Bihar 1934-1937’, in HerStory: Historical Scholarship between South Asia and Europe (CrossAsia, 2018)
- Nunan, Timothy, Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
- Ruprecht, Adrian, ‘The Great Eastern Crisis (1875-1878) as a Global Humanitarian Moment’, Journal of Global History 16, no. 2 (2021): 159-84
- Simonow, Joanna, ‘The Great Bengal Famine in Britain: Metropolitan Campaigning for Food Relief and the End of Empire, 1943–44’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48 (2020): 168-97
Frontiers, borderlands and border-making
- Bashir, Shahzad, and Robert D. Crews (eds), Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands (Harvard University Press, 2012)
- Chester, Lucy P., Borders and Conflict in South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of Punjab (Manchester University Press, 2009)
- Dubnov, Arie M., and Laura Robson (eds.), Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford University Press, 2019)
- Dutta, Anwesha, ‘Forest Becomes Frontline: Conservation and Counter-insurgency in a Space of Violent Conflict in Assam, Northeast India’, Political Geography 77 (2020)
- Gardner, Kyle, The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border (Cambridge, University Press, 2021)
- Gohain, Swargajyoti, Imagined Geographies in the Indo-Tibetan Borderlands: Culture, Politics, Place (Amsterdam University Press, 2020)
- Gupta, Sonika, ‘Frontiers in Flux: Indo-Tibetan Border: 1946–1948’, India Quarterly (2021)
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, 'Nation-building or state-making? India's North-East Frontier and the ambiguities of Nehruvian developmentalism, 1950–1959', Contemporary South Asia (CSA), 21:1 (2013), 22-37
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, 'Reordering a border space: Relief, rehabilitation, and nation-building in northeastern India after the 1950 Assam earthquake', Modern Asian Studies, 49:4 (2015), 931-962
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, 'Tour diaries and itinerant governance in the eastern Himalayas, ca.1909-1962', The Historical Journal, 60:4 (2017), 1023-1046
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, 'When legions thunder past: The Second World War and India’s northeastern frontier', War in History, 25:3 (2018), 328-60
- Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice, ‘Tangled Lands: Burma and India’s Unfinished Separation, 1937-1948’, Journal of Asian Studies (2020)
- Leake, Elisabeth, The Defiant Border: The Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonization, 1936-65 (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
- Leake, Elisabeth, and Daniel Haines, ‘Lines of (In)Convenience: Sovereignty and Border-Making in Postcolonial South Asia, 1947-1965’, Journal of Asian Studies 76 (2017): 963-85
- Longkumer, Arkotong, The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast (Stanford University Press, 2020)
- McGranahan, Carole, ‘Imperial but Not Colonial: Archival Truths, British India, and the Case of the “Naughty” Tibetans’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 59 (2017): 68-95
- Murton, Galen, ‘Facing the Fence: The Production and Performance of a Himalayan Border in Global Contexts’, Political Geography (2019)
- Omrani, Bijan, ‘The Durand Line: History and Problems of the Afghan-Pakistan Border’, Asian Affairs 40 (2009): 177–95.
- Van Schendel, Willem, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (Anthem, 2004)
- Van Schendel, Willem, and Itty Abraham, Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2005)
Blogs & Magazines
- Afro-Asian Visions: New Perspectives on Decolonisation, the Cold War, and Asian-African Connections
- Contingent a magazine led by a NIHSA member, Marc Reyes, that publishes cutting-edge history writing and champions scholars otherwise marginalised within academia
- High Peaks, Pure Earth provides commentary on Tibet related news and issues and provides translations from writings in Tibetan and Chinese posted on blogs and social media from Tibet and the People’s Republic of China
- Sikhs in Shanghai a blog by Meena Vathyam, dedicated to Indian presence in quasi-colonial Shanghai, with particular reference to Sikhs (1860s-1960s)
- Statecraft an independent, non-partisan global affairs publication that investigates the relationship between the politics of South Asia and the world at large
Projects
- Afro-Asian Networks: Transitions in the Global South
- Global Decolonization Initiative, Boston University
- Indian Indenture Project maps, spatially and chronologically, the migration of Indian indentured workers to Trinidad
- India in German archives, 1706-1989 (MIDA - DAS MODERNE INDIEN IN DEUTSCHEN ARCHIVEN 1706-1989) records the contents of German archives on the history of modern India and the German-Indian history of entanglements between 1706 and 1989/90 in a freely available database.
- The Global Thinkers Project, Oxford: Reviving Silenced Internationalist Voices in IR
- Refugee History, a site and interactive network for anyone interested in enriching and informing current debates about refugees with new research, insights and reports.
- Beyond Partition: Migration and Citizenship post Decolonisation in South Asia, a working group formed by several academics including fellow NIHSA members Dr Kalyani Ramnath and Dr Jay Sarkar
Archives & Guides to Archives
- Abilekh Patal for materials from the Indian National Archives, Delhi
- Afghanistan Digital Collections offers an online database of sources on Afghan history compiled by the University of Arizona and Kabul University
- Archives of Economic Life in South and Southeast Asia offers an overview of archival materials on South and Southeast Asia available freely online
- The Asiatic Society of Mumbai Digital Collections
- British Documents on the End of Empire growing collection of academic and archival resources tracing the process and effects of Britain’s twentieth century withdrawal from its colonial territories
- Cambridge Centre of South Asian Studies Audio Archive
- Cambridge Centre of South Asian Studies Video/Film Archive
- Films Division India has archival reels on YouTube
- Fresh from the archives – Dissertation Reviews offers guides to specific archival collections, including many in or about South Asia
- Gokhale Library (Maharashtra, India) Printed Reports
- Harvard University Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection
- Horst Krüger Archives papers and microfilms of Horst Krüger, an East German South Asianist, working to the Indian labour movement during GDR times
- Indian Kanoon Indian Case Law and Legislation going back to the 1870s
- International History Declassified: Digital Archives for collections of primary sources that examine twentieth-century South Asian history in international context, hosted by the Wilson Center
- International Institute of Social History
- Kerala Sahitya Akademi Portal in Malayalam
- Lahore University of Management Sciences Digital Library
- MIDA Archival Reflexicon offers an online database and an open-access forum for reflexive discussions on the rich India-related holdings of German archives
- National Archives of Singapore Digital Collections
- National Digital Library of India
- Prasar Bharati Archives the online repository of the Indian public broadcaster
- SHAFR Task Force on On-Line Research has a bibliography of electronic resources on international relations ordered by regions
- Shiju Alex Kerala History Archive mainly consisting of printed texts in Malayalam but also including several English language Missionary papers
- South Asia American Digital Archive (SAADA) offers archival materials on the South Asian diaspora, particularly South Asian Americans
- South Asia Open Archive an extensive archive of South Asian materials including several collections in the English language.
- University of Tubingen Hermann Gundert Portal Indian Language Printed Material and Manuscript Collections
- University of Wisconsin Bhopal Disaster Archive
- West Bengal Public Library Network
Forthcoming and Unpublished Projects
- Balaji, Shruti, ‘Third World Women of the International: Spatial Identities and Transnational Networks (c. 1920-50)’ (LSE)
- Gujral, Diva, ‘Picturing Non-Alignment: Photography, Nation, Identity in India, c. 1950-1975’ (UCL)
- Krishna, Sneha, Errant Girls: Intimate internationalism in Twentieth-Century South Asia
- Kuncheria, Cheri, ‘The Remaking of Indian Tobacco: Science, Business, and the Cultivator, 1971-1948' (Jawaharalal Nehru University, 2019)
- Marcussen, Eleonor ‘Acts of Aid: The Politics of Relief and Reconstruction after the 1934 Bihar-Nepal Earthquake’ (University of Heidelberg, 2016)
- Prakash, Teesta, ‘Strategic Assessments: Aid and Bureaucracy in Australia-India Relations 1951-1989’ (Griffith University, 2021)
- Ruprecht, Adrian P., ‘De-Centering Humanitarianism: The Red Cross and India, c. 1877-1939’ (University of Cambridge, 2017)
- Simonow, Joanna, ‘After the “Late Victorian Holocausts”: Transnational Responses to Famines and Malnutrition in India, c. 1900-1955’, (ETH Zurich, 2019)
Group lead
Reader (Associate Professor) in International and South Asian History