Matthew B Shutzer | University of California, Berkeley (original) (raw)
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Papers by Matthew B Shutzer
History Compass, Sep 18, 2020
Energy history is a burgeoning sub-field focused on the role of a wide variety of prime movers-fr... more Energy history is a burgeoning sub-field focused on the role of a wide variety of prime movers-from solar energy, to animal labor, to water power, and diesel-fueled engines-in shaping human societies. Although some energy historians
Radical History Review
Does climate change pose a crisis for the concept of nation-state sovereignty? This article explo... more Does climate change pose a crisis for the concept of nation-state sovereignty? This article explores how contemporary debates about climate and sovereignty are connected to deeper histories of empire and capitalism in the global South. Arguing against recent critical appraisals of sovereignty that emphasize the elision of nature from formal political and legal theory, the article reconstructs a genealogy of sovereign power in the major fossil fuel-producing territories of India spanning the nineteenth century to the present day. It brings to light three historical articulations of sovereignty that undergird contemporary modes of extractive dispossession enforced by the Indian state: the discovery of fossil fuels as subjects of sovereign power during an early colonial project to build prison complexes in Indian coal mines; the juridical remaking of “land” under Benthamite-inspired laws of “real property;” and the politicization of fossil fuels as an underground commons belonging to t...
On 16 December 2012, a twenty-three year old physiotherapist was gangraped in Munirka, New Delhi ... more On 16 December 2012, a twenty-three year old physiotherapist was gangraped in Munirka, New Delhi by six men in a bus. Thirteen days later, she passed away in Singapore, having suffered serious brain and gastrointestinal injuries. This case snowballed into a nationwide wave of protests on not only the heinousness of this particular incident, but the widespread public patriarchy that afflicts the right of Indian women to freely access public domains. On the days following her death, angry mobs and teargassing police clashed at India Gate in New Delhi. Multiple social imaginaries around gender, public sphere, state-responsibility and civicness collided. Some defended the victim as their mother or sister, who could potentially have been in that same situation. Others disagreed fervently, and invoked the modern female citizen, whose rights to dignity, safety and security mandated defense without recasting her as the fragile beneficiary of patriarchal protection. The RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, analyzed the situation as telling of crucial Indian cultural divide-'Such crimes hardly take place in 'Bharat', but they occur frequently in 'India' (Times of India 2013). The India-Bharat divide was refashioned in this moment, as the product of conflict between the postliberalization onslaught of transnational capital flows and the resilience of 'traditional' communitarian social structures. Moreover, a vast, cacophonous, polarized democratic field revealed itself in the aftermath of the December 16 rape. A variegated collective, comprising feminists, college-student liberals, right-wing patriarchs, and cynics, inhabited this cacophonous stage and its virtual counterpart. Just as the stage for 19 th century social reform came to pivot itself around the figure of the sati (Mani 1998), a number of political selves crystallized earlier this year around competing representations of the rape victim who was described by the media as Nirbhaya ('fearless one'), Damini ('lightning'), Amaanat ('treasured possession'), and Delhi's braveheart (Roy 2012). 2 This interrogation of Indian state and society by the protesting publics on India gate illuminates commonplace binaries of state/society, tradition/modern, and liberal/ illiberal. Media narratives presented the Indian state as if it were under siege from
Past & Present, 2022
Why did oil become a privileged object for debating economic sovereignty during the Cold War? Rec... more Why did oil become a privileged object for debating economic sovereignty during the Cold War? Recent scholarship has attempted to answer this question by drawing attention to decolonizing struggles for oil nationalization across Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. At the core of these inquiries is the presumption that a global proliferation of oil production after 1945 — now referred to as ‘the great acceleration’ — reflected a growth in global demand for fossil fuels, and that oil’s economic significance thus motivated new political claims over national oil reserves. This article takes a different position by turning to one of the earliest projects to build a post-colonial national oil programme, India’s Oil and Natural Gas Commission, under the socialist politician K. D. Malaviya. Using Malaviya’s project to trace the international politicization of oil in the 1950s and 1960s, it demonstrates how sovereignty over oil was used to contest the structures of unequal currency va...
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2013
South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2013
Comparative Studies in Society and History
Scholars have long been attentive to the relationship between legal regimes and agrarian disposse... more Scholars have long been attentive to the relationship between legal regimes and agrarian dispossession in the resource frontiers of the postcolonial world. The analytical problem of identifying how private firms use legal regimes to take control of land—whether for mining, plantations, or Special Economic Zones—now animates a new body of research seeking the historical antecedents for contemporary land grabs. In the case of colonial South Asia, existing scholarship has often tended to suggest that the law precedes processes of capital accumulation, and that colonial capital operated within the confines of definable, even if legally plural, institutional regimes, such as property rights and commercial law. This perspective suggests, if only implicitly, that capitalist firms prefer to work within formal frameworks of legality. In this article, I outline a different understanding of the place of law in colonial South Asia, which follows the formation of property law for coal at the end...
History Compass, Sep 18, 2020
Energy history is a burgeoning sub-field focused on the role of a wide variety of prime movers-fr... more Energy history is a burgeoning sub-field focused on the role of a wide variety of prime movers-from solar energy, to animal labor, to water power, and diesel-fueled engines-in shaping human societies. Although some energy historians
Radical History Review
Does climate change pose a crisis for the concept of nation-state sovereignty? This article explo... more Does climate change pose a crisis for the concept of nation-state sovereignty? This article explores how contemporary debates about climate and sovereignty are connected to deeper histories of empire and capitalism in the global South. Arguing against recent critical appraisals of sovereignty that emphasize the elision of nature from formal political and legal theory, the article reconstructs a genealogy of sovereign power in the major fossil fuel-producing territories of India spanning the nineteenth century to the present day. It brings to light three historical articulations of sovereignty that undergird contemporary modes of extractive dispossession enforced by the Indian state: the discovery of fossil fuels as subjects of sovereign power during an early colonial project to build prison complexes in Indian coal mines; the juridical remaking of “land” under Benthamite-inspired laws of “real property;” and the politicization of fossil fuels as an underground commons belonging to t...
On 16 December 2012, a twenty-three year old physiotherapist was gangraped in Munirka, New Delhi ... more On 16 December 2012, a twenty-three year old physiotherapist was gangraped in Munirka, New Delhi by six men in a bus. Thirteen days later, she passed away in Singapore, having suffered serious brain and gastrointestinal injuries. This case snowballed into a nationwide wave of protests on not only the heinousness of this particular incident, but the widespread public patriarchy that afflicts the right of Indian women to freely access public domains. On the days following her death, angry mobs and teargassing police clashed at India Gate in New Delhi. Multiple social imaginaries around gender, public sphere, state-responsibility and civicness collided. Some defended the victim as their mother or sister, who could potentially have been in that same situation. Others disagreed fervently, and invoked the modern female citizen, whose rights to dignity, safety and security mandated defense without recasting her as the fragile beneficiary of patriarchal protection. The RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, analyzed the situation as telling of crucial Indian cultural divide-'Such crimes hardly take place in 'Bharat', but they occur frequently in 'India' (Times of India 2013). The India-Bharat divide was refashioned in this moment, as the product of conflict between the postliberalization onslaught of transnational capital flows and the resilience of 'traditional' communitarian social structures. Moreover, a vast, cacophonous, polarized democratic field revealed itself in the aftermath of the December 16 rape. A variegated collective, comprising feminists, college-student liberals, right-wing patriarchs, and cynics, inhabited this cacophonous stage and its virtual counterpart. Just as the stage for 19 th century social reform came to pivot itself around the figure of the sati (Mani 1998), a number of political selves crystallized earlier this year around competing representations of the rape victim who was described by the media as Nirbhaya ('fearless one'), Damini ('lightning'), Amaanat ('treasured possession'), and Delhi's braveheart (Roy 2012). 2 This interrogation of Indian state and society by the protesting publics on India gate illuminates commonplace binaries of state/society, tradition/modern, and liberal/ illiberal. Media narratives presented the Indian state as if it were under siege from
Past & Present, 2022
Why did oil become a privileged object for debating economic sovereignty during the Cold War? Rec... more Why did oil become a privileged object for debating economic sovereignty during the Cold War? Recent scholarship has attempted to answer this question by drawing attention to decolonizing struggles for oil nationalization across Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. At the core of these inquiries is the presumption that a global proliferation of oil production after 1945 — now referred to as ‘the great acceleration’ — reflected a growth in global demand for fossil fuels, and that oil’s economic significance thus motivated new political claims over national oil reserves. This article takes a different position by turning to one of the earliest projects to build a post-colonial national oil programme, India’s Oil and Natural Gas Commission, under the socialist politician K. D. Malaviya. Using Malaviya’s project to trace the international politicization of oil in the 1950s and 1960s, it demonstrates how sovereignty over oil was used to contest the structures of unequal currency va...
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2013
South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2013
Comparative Studies in Society and History
Scholars have long been attentive to the relationship between legal regimes and agrarian disposse... more Scholars have long been attentive to the relationship between legal regimes and agrarian dispossession in the resource frontiers of the postcolonial world. The analytical problem of identifying how private firms use legal regimes to take control of land—whether for mining, plantations, or Special Economic Zones—now animates a new body of research seeking the historical antecedents for contemporary land grabs. In the case of colonial South Asia, existing scholarship has often tended to suggest that the law precedes processes of capital accumulation, and that colonial capital operated within the confines of definable, even if legally plural, institutional regimes, such as property rights and commercial law. This perspective suggests, if only implicitly, that capitalist firms prefer to work within formal frameworks of legality. In this article, I outline a different understanding of the place of law in colonial South Asia, which follows the formation of property law for coal at the end...