Titas Chakraborty

I am a historian of labor, gender and migration specifically studying eighteenth century South Asia. My major fields of training are South Asian history, Labor History and World History. At DKU I teach interdisciplinary courses on migration, inter-Asian connections, South Asia and World History. My book, Empire of Labor: Hired Workers, Mobility and the Rise of the East India Company State in Bengal, 1650-1817 (University of California Press, 2025) draws on the archives of the English and Dutch East India companies, and middle Bengali literary sources to chronicle the transformations in the structure and culture of hired work through closely studying the experience  of European sailors and soldiers, indigenous silk reelers and boatmen over the eighteenth century. It shows that the changing relationship between the English East India Company state and its workers from the late seventeenth until the early nineteenth century had set the premise for labor-employer relationship of the modern colonial British Indian state. I have also written articles on slavery, slave trade, and slave resistance in the making of family, class and gender in the East India Company settlements in the eighteenth century,

I received my doctoral degree from the University of Pittsburgh and I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2017-2018.