Co-sponsored by the Chair in Feminist Studies
Within the British empire, Panjab has long been regarded as the quintessential agrarian province inhabited by a diligent, prosperous and “martial race” of peasants. Against such essentialist depictions, I explore the landowning peasant and landless laborer as novel subjects forged in the encounter between colonialism and struggles over culture and capital within Panjabi society. Company officials and ascendant Panjabis together disrupted existing forms of identity and activity to generate a new kind of hierarchy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through an interrogation of a disparate archive – settlement reports and legal judgments to labor contracts, vernacular poetry and family budgets – I challenge the givenness of the peasant by explicating the ideological and material divisions that transformed the equation of rural power, and thus reconfigured global capitalism. Weaving together economic logic with cultural difference, this presentation offers a way to re-think comparative political economy alongside alternative possibilities for emancipatory futures.
Navyug Gill is a historian of modern South Asia and global history. He is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy and Liberal Studies at William Paterson University. His research explores questions of agrarian change, labor politics, caste hierarchy, postcolonial critique and histories of capitalism. His first book, Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab, was published by Stanford University Press in 2024. A South Asia edition was released by Navayana in 2025. The book won the “Henry A. Wallace Award” for the best book on agricultural history outside the US from the AgriculturalHistory Society. Gill’s scholarly and public writings have appeared in venues such as Past and Present, the Journal of Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Al Jazeera, the Law and Political Economy Project and Trolley Times.
Date | Time
October 15, 2025 | 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public
Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz