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The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) presents a talk on:
From Muse to Machine: Rethinking India’s Role in British Industrialisation and Global Economic History
By Dr. Alka Raman, Hallsworth Fellow, History at the School of Arts, Languages, and Cultures, University of Manchester
Monday, 28 August 2023, 12 Noon IST at the CPR office conference room (Dharma Marg, New Delhi) and online via Zoom.
About the speaker:
Dr. Alka Raman is a historian of technological change in global economic history. Currently, she holds the Hallsworth Fellowship in History at the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at the University of Manchester. Alka’s work explores the transnational roots of technological evolution by examining the influence of pre-industrial Indian cotton textiles on industrialisation in the British and European cotton industries during the 18th and 19th centuries. She focuses on the materiality of technological change and the role of imitations in the evolution of technologies. Her doctoral thesis, Learning from the Muse: Indian cotton textiles and British industrialisation, explored the influence of Indian cotton textiles on the growth of the British cotton industry in the 18th and 19th centuries, leading to the first Industrial Revolution. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, provisionally titled, From Muse to Machine: Indian Cotton Textiles and British Industrialisation. Alka is also interested in textiles and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the impact of geography and natural materials on economic growth, as well as industrialisation and the environment.
Prior to Hallsworth Fellowship, Alka held the ESRC Fellowship at LSE in 2022 and the Economic History Society’s Postan Postdoctoral Fellowship, in affiliation with the Institute of Historical Research, at the Victoria and the Albert Museum in 2021-2022. She was also a guest lecturer at the Victoria and Albert Museum/Royal College of Art, London as well as the Department of Economic History, LSE in 2022.
Alka received her Ph.D. from the Department of Economic History, LSE, in 2021. She holds a BA (Honours) and MA in Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, and an M.Sc. in Research (with distinction) from the London School of Economics.
