RHS Lecture, Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, UCL 10 May 2013

The concepts of ‘craft’ and ‘artisanship’ carry a particular political potency in colonial and modern India. This lecture follows the cycles of small scale industry and craft production in their early frameworks of colonial and global history and their current context of globalization. It draws on oral histories of craftspeople in Kachchh in Northern Gujurat, and addresses methodologies connecting investigations of present communities with our historical understandings of manufacturing in the past.

Maxine Berg is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. She was founding director of the Eighteenth-Century Centre (1998-2006) and the Global History and Culture Centre (2007- 2010) at Warwick, and now directs the ERC Project ‘Europe’s Asian Centuries: Trading Eurasia 1600-1830’ (2010-2014).