First posted June 02, 2016 Mike Davis: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (2002) Reviewed by: Sukhdev Sandhu Recording the past can be a tricky business for historians. Prophesying the future is even more hazardous. In 1901, shortly before the death of Queen Victoria, the radical writer William Digby looked… Read More Late Victorian Holocausts: the famines that fed the empire
NB: Congratulations to Bonojit, a former Ramjas College student; for his groundbreaking research and activism. DS The handbook casts the Northeast as a mineral-rich periphery, that is “underexplored” and ideal for private investment. Since March this year, around 55,000 bighas of land across Assam have either been cleared or marked for eviction. Of this, only… Read More GSI’s Handbook on Northeast India Masks Extraction Behind Technicalities
The World Bank says it can fight poverty through technical solutions. But poverty is inherently political Alf Gunvald Nilsen The future of work and the future of poverty are closely bound up with each other. Global value chains, those webs of firms criss-crossing the world that collectively bring products to market, have driven economic growth… Read More Global inequality is the World Bank’s elephant in the room
Clearly, India’s ‘strong leader’ is caught between his aspiration to emerge as national war hero and thus sweep the polls with a two-thirds majority on the one hand and be a trusted Trump buddy on the other. P. Raman The Wire had in these columns narrated how Narendra Modi had often lampooned his predecessor as ‘Maunmohan’ Singh… Read More How the Sudden Ceasefire Marred the Prime Minister’s PR Script
One of the revelations of this young Trump term has been the embarrassing servility of America’s European allies. It has fallen to China by a kind of default to restore geopolitical equilibrium Mukul Kesavan The economically illiterate reader (like me) browsing the headlines about Donald Trump’s tariffs looks to borrow the opinions of his betters.… Read More In China’s debt
It won’t matter how successful Starlink is in India, unless Donald Trump finds markets for agricultural exports in India and elsewhere, or creates millions of new jobs in manufacturing. Till then, the tariff pressure on India will continue. Bharat Bhushan To demonstrate their alignment with US geopolitical and economic interests many countries are hoping to… Read More Starlink Deal: India’s goodwill hunting may be completely off the mark
By Lewis Krauskopf and Saqib Iqbal Ahmed NEW YORK, March 10 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s tariffs have spooked investors, with fears of an economic downturn driving a stock market sell-off that has wiped out $4 trillion from the S&P 500’s peak last month, when Wall Street was cheering much of Trump’s agenda. A barrage of new Trump… Read More US stock market loses $4 trillion in value as Trump plows ahead on tariffs
Starts August 2025 – Apply by 30th April Today the way our knowledge system is set up, it is possible for a city bred person to go through school and then higher education followed by a doctorate in a subject like economics from the most reputable institutions in India and abroad and subsequently become influential… Read More Pagdandi Fellowship 2025-‘26
Costs of War Project at Brown University indicated that the “war on terror” persisted on several continents. “The war continues in over 80 countries,” said Catherine Lutz, the project’s co-director. The war’s cost to taxpayers, the project estimated, was already at least $8 trillion…. Supplementing the automatic $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel, special new… Read More Norman Solomon: How the Warfare State Paved the Way for a Trumpist Autocracy
Jairus Banaji I’ve divided this presentation into four distinct parts.[1] A shorthand description of these might be Imagine these themes as chapters to a book called Introduction to a History of Capitalism. So, what this talk sets out to do is simply construct a framework where we can think about capitalism historically. To start with the conventional narratives,… Read More Retotalising Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction to its History
After the truth-shower 