Ghulam Nadri
Professor, Director of Asian Studies Center History- Education
Ph.D. (2007) Leiden University, The Netherlands
M.A. & M. Phil. (1993 & 1996) Aligarh Muslim University, India
- Specializations
Social and economic history of early modern and colonial South Asia and the Indian Ocean world
- Biography
Ghulam A. Nadri (Professor of History and Director of the Asian Studies Center at Georgia State) specializes in the social and economic history of early modern and colonial India/South Asia. He obtained his Ph.D. from Leiden University in 2007. During 2011-2012, he held the two-year Newton International Fellowship at the Economic History Department of the London School of Economics, UK. He has published two monographs (The Political Economy of Indigo in India, 1580-1930: A Global Perspective, Brill, 2016 and Eighteenth-Century Gujarat: The Dynamics of Its Political Economy, 1750-1800, Brill, 2009) and more than a dozen journal articles and book chapters on commodities, merchants, maritime labor market, economy, and trade in Gujarat and the western Indian Ocean. His current research project explores the dynamics of the economic and commercial enterprise of the Parsis (Zoroastrians) in western India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and investigates the role of political, socio-cultural, and institutional factors in their entrepreneurial accomplishments.
His other research interests include the study of global commodities (such as sugar, indigo, cotton, and textiles), maritime piracy in the western Indian Ocean, and social conflicts in historical and contemporary perspectives. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on the history of India/South Asia, the Indian Ocean world, Asia in the world economy, Asian Studies, and world history.
Research Interests
Economic and business history, merchant communities, commodity history, maritime trade, and labor history (17th-19th centuries)
- Publications
For all publications see Google Scholar
‘Transacting Business through/for Others in Early Colonial Western India: the Text, Context, and Meaning of a Mukhtār-nāma of 1821’, The Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 64, nos. 5-6 (2021), pp. 640-659.
‘Indian Seamen (lascars), Shipboard Labor Regime, and the East India Company in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, in Rila Mukherji and Radhika Seshan (eds.), Indian Ocean Histories: The Many Worlds of Michael Naylor Pearson (New Delhi: Routledge, 2020), pp. 156-71.
‘Indigo in Precolonial South Asia’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (New York: Oxford University Press), December 2020 (20 pages). https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.405
‘The English and Dutch East India Companies and Indian Merchants in Surat in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Interdependence, Competition, and Contestation’ in Adam Clulow and Tristan Mostert, eds., The Dutch and English East India Companies: Diplomacy, Trade and Violence in Early Modern Asia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), pp. 125-151.
The Political Economy of Indigo in India, 1580-1930: A Global Perspective (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016).
Eighteenth-Century Gujarat: the Dynamics of Its Political Economy, 1750-1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
‘Exploring the Gulf of Kachh: Regional Economy and Trade in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 51, no. 3, 2008, pp. 460-86.
‘The Dutch Intra-Asian Trade in Sugar in the Eighteenth Century’, International Journal of Maritime History, 20, no. 1, 2008, pp. 63-96.
‘The Maritime Merchants of Surat: a Long-term Perspective’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 50, no. 2, 2007, pp. 235-58.
‘Commercial World of Mancherji Khurshedji and the Dutch East India Company: A Study of Mutual Relationships’, Modern Asian Studies, 41, no. 2, 2007, pp. 315-42.