The Colonial Construction of Political Orders: Uneven State Formation and its Consequences in South Asia

CASI Seminar

 

Adnan Naseemullah
Lecturer in South Asia and International Relations, Department of War Studies & the India Institute, King’s College London
Center for the Advanced Study of India
3600 Market Street, Suite 560 (5th floor)
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104

About the Speaker:
Adnan A. Naseemullah is a Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of War Studies and the India Institute, King's College London, and the author of Development After Statism: Industrial Firms and the Political Economy of South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His research on comparative industrial development, state capacity, political violence, and electoral representation has appeared in Comparative Politics, Political Geography, Governance, Studies in Comparative International Development, Studies in Indian Politics, and India Review. Before King's, he held academic appointments at the London School of Economics and the Johns Hopkins University; he received a BA in political science and economics from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

About the Lecture:
The legacies of British imperial rule in South Asia have received renewed scrutiny, yet the causal linkages between the nature of colonial governance and contemporary political outcomes remain underdeveloped. Naseemullah will argue that the long-term effects of colonial rule was that of uneven state formation in the nineteenth century. He will present theoretical and empirical work from his current book project on the causes of such unevenness before independence, and how it was reproduced in the postcolonial states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. He will also demonstrate how uneven state-building has had enduring legacies in varieties of state-society relations in the contemporary South Asia, helping us understand aberrant outcomes in areas as diverse as structures of representation and patterns of political violence.  

Listen to podcast (in conversation with Bilal Baloch, CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow)

The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.