Sheetal Chhabria

Sheetal Chhabria is Associate Professor of History at Connecticut College. She is a historian of South Asia whose research and teaching focus on the production of poverty and inequality.

Her first book, Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay (University of Washington, 2019), won the American Historical Association’s 2020 John F. Richards Prize for South Asian History. The book shows how the wellbeing of the city–rather than of its people–became an increasingly urgent goal of government, positioning agrarian distress, famished migrants, and the laboring poor as threats to be contained or excluded. Other publications have analyzed the politics of colonial knowledge and the production of the economy as social scientific fact.

Her current research is focused on the imbrications of caste and capital in the subcontinent’s long history and the failures of India’s decolonization.

As well as academic articles sampled below, she has written public pieces for The Nation, Jacobin, and The India Forum amongst others.

Each of her courses focuses on issues of power in the crafting of historical narratives and debates on the means and ends of justice.

Samples of courses taught:
Contesting India’s Past
Globalization of Urban Poverty
Race, Capitalism, Planet
South Asia in the Postcolonial World

Publications

• “Where Does Caste Fit in a Global History of Racial Capitalism?” in Historical Materialism, special issue 31 (2 & 3) on “Race and Capitalism.”
• “The Violence of Capitalist Relations,” in journal Storica, Rome, Vol. 83/84, (2022): 243-258,352. special issue on Jairus Banaji.
• “Where is the working class? It’s all over the world today”: Jairus Banaji in conversation with Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew Liu, in Borderlines, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME).
• “Shelter as Capital: The City as Prison/The Housing Question in Egypt” in Borderlines, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME).
• “Manufacturing Epidemics: Pathogens, Poverty, and Public Health Crises in India” in The India Forum, May 2020.
• Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay (Univ. of Washington Press, 2019)
• "The Aboriginal Alibi: Governing Dispossession in Colonial Bombay," Comparative Studies in Society and History, October 2018.
• “Citing the City’s Poor: Commercial Sovereignty & Capitalist Integration in Colonial Karachi,” Journal of Urban History, 2018. 
• “Capitalism in Muddy Waters: The Indian Ocean Economy in the 19th century” forthcoming, Journal of World History, 29, 3 & 4, October 2018.
• “Inequality in an Era of Convergence,” World History Connected, June 2016. (http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/13.2/chhabria.html)
• “Narendra Modi, Gender, and Governance,” in The Gendered Executive, Mary Anne Borelli & Janet Martin eds., Temple University Press, 2016.
• Review of Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City by Gyan Prakash, Journal of World History, December 2012.
• “Gujarat: Indian Imperialism on the Coast,” in The First Global Age, (1450 – 1770), World History Encyclopedia, by ABC – CLIO, February 2011.

Visit the history department website.