Have a look at this website if you want to know more about my work. I am a researcher working in the fields of history, anthropology and sociology of Asia. I teach and do research at the University of Amsterdam (Chair in Modern Asian History) and at the International Institute of Social History.
My current research deals with (a) Borderlands and the social consequences of the mobility of people and goods. Borderlands are important sites for studying migrating people and moving commodities as well as the shifting networks of solidarity, remittances, knowledge, meaning and power that result from such practices. My main focus is on the borderlands of India, Bangladesh and Burma. (b) Mobile cash-crop production systems and trajectories of globalization. I am interested in the production of commodities for world markets, how production was embedded in agrarian societies, and under which circumstances these systems could be moved from one (colonial) society to another. Why were plans to establish a new cash-crop production system successful in one case but not another? How did different combinations of labour, land, water, capital and knowledge enable or disable such systems? My main focus is on the global movement of indigo production in the late 18th and 19th centuries, with special attention to British India (now India/Bangladesh) and the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia).
2015
The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India
(Delhi/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), with Joy L.K. Pachuau. http://www.cambridgeindia.org/showbookdetails.asp?ISBN=9781107073395 Read More...
2012
孟加拉国史 – Mèng Jiā Lā Guó Shĭ
(Beijing/Shanghai: Cambridge University Press and Orient Publishing Centre). (in Chinese) Read More...
2009
A History of Bangladesh
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) http://www.cambridge.org/asia/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521679749 Read More...