Automatic for the People? Labor, Machines, and Ecology in Modern India

CASI Seminar

in partnership with the South Asia Center, South Asia Studies Dept, Dept of History & Dept of History and Sociology of Science

Benjamin Siegel
Associate Department Chair; Associate Professor of History, Boston University
Center for the Advanced Study of India
Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science & Economics
133 South 36th Street, Suite 230
Philadelphia PA 19104-6215

About the Seminar:
For Indian economic thinkers at the dawn of the 20th century—and their sympathetic observers abroad—India's industrial ascendance seemed inevitable. The nation's textile workers operated the same spinning frames and mule spindles used in England, signaling what many believed would be India's imminent mechanized transformation. Yet India's "failure" to fully industrialize remains one of development economics' most perplexing puzzles. Postcolonial analyses have foregrounded managerial shortcomings, institutional constraints, and class dynamics, but have largely overlooked an equally crucial parallel discourse. In the same period, Indian thinkers were advancing profoundly new questions of ecology and population that pitched the promise of automation against an existential dilemma: if India indeed industrialized, what would become of human labor itself?

About the Speaker:
Benjamin Siegel is an Associate Department Chair; Associate Professor of History at Boston University. He is a scholar of transnational economic life, politics, agriculture, and the environment. His work examines how people in modern states conceptualize, debate, and leverage their material and non-material resources, returning frequently to a geographic focus on South Asia and its entanglements with the wider world. Professor Siegel’s latest book, The Ghost Ship: Pharmaceutical Opioids and Political Power in the Modern World, is forthcoming in 2025 from Oxford University Press. The book offers a new account of how opium, a quintessential colonial commodity, was remade into a twentieth-century resource for modern medicine in the global north and state-building and national development in the global south. His first book, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press, 2018), demonstrated how questions of food and scarcity structured Indian citizens’ understanding of welfare and citizenship in the twentieth century.

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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.