Andrew Stephen Sartori
New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)
FA-55026-10
Fellowships for University Teachers
Research Programs
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[Grant products]
Totals:
$50,400 (approved)
$50,400 (awarded)
Grant period:
6/1/2011 – 5/31/2012
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Political Economy and Social Science in Colonial Bengal
The project seeks to historicize the global dissemination of social science by focusing on the particular context of colonial Bengal. Rather than taking the epistemological status of social-scientific inquiry for granted, or focusing exclusively on the role of colonial domination in imposing forms of social-scientific rationality, the project more broadly explores the socio-historical conditions under which social science, and especially political economy, came to appear to provide the appropriate concepts with which to approach problems of human self-understanding. It is composed of three more specific studies: (1) the identification of Bengali "custom" as regulated by political-economic principles starting in the 1860s; (2) the development of a self-conscious social-scientific project in colonial civil society starting in the late 1860s; and (3) the role of political-economic and social-scientific concepts in the constitution of "Muslimness" in the early twentieth century.
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