Jayita Sarkar

Invited researcher of the 2024 DEA Programme
Jayita Sarkar

Jayita Sarkar is Professor of Global History of Inequalities at the University of Glasgow's School of Social and Political Sciences.

She is a series editor at University of North Carolina Press for InterConnections: The Global Twentieth Century, a book series that is home to innovative global, international, and transregional histories of the long twentieth century.

Her first book, Ploughshares and Swords. India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022), was awarded the Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies and Honorable Mention for Global Development Studies Book Award from the International Studies Association.

The project

Title: Atomic Capitalism. A Global History (under contract with Princeton University Press, America in the World series) is a 100-year history of nuclear sites, from mining to energy to weapons-testing, retold through histories of capitalism, empire, and decolonisation.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki created, in the words of George Orwell, a world “horribly stable” and “a peace that is no peace,” increasing power of the state over the individual and of the United States over the world. Atomic Capitalism critically examines this view and assumptions about preponderance of the United States and the state itself by placing nuclear infrastructures in a global and transnational perspective. The discovery of nuclear things— radium, radioactivity, uranium’s properties of fission, and plutonium— powerfully linked nuclear infrastructures to corporate violence, colonialism (settler and non-settler), and genocide, which characterized late nineteenth and twentieth-century Euro-American empires. The uranium cycle and its material infrastructures thus both benefited from and bolstered an extractivist, surveillant, and inegalitarian global system through which capitalist actors and networks benefited by disenfranchising people in faraway colonies, dependent territories, and at home. The outcome has been a complex extractivist web of inequalities that is intrinsically linked to our economic and environmental crises today.

Host institution : Centre d'histoire de Sciences Po, Paris

Selective bibliography

  • Sarkar, J. Atomic Capitalism. A Global History, Under contract since 2022.(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, America in the World Series, 2026/7).
  • Sarkar, J. Ploughshares and Swords. India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War.(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2022).
  • Sarkar, J. “From the Dependable to the Demanding Partner: The Renegotiation of French Nuclear Cooperation with India, 1974-1980,” Cold War History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2021): 301-318.
  • Sarkar, J. “The Economic Strategies of U.S. Nonproliferation Policy during the Nixon-Ford Years,” Journal of Global Security Studies Vol. 6, No. 1 (2021): 1-6.
  • Sarkar, J. “U.S. Policy to Curb West European Nuclear Exports, 1974-1978,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Spring 2019): 110-149.

Activities

Chercheurs invités 2024 du programme DEA
Actualité

Associate Research Directors - 2024 invited researchers

Discover the invited researchers of the "Associate Research Directors" mobility programme
Published at 19 June 2024