Tania Bhattacharyya- Assistant Professor of the History of Capitalism

Academic Profile

• Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Warwick (2026-)
• Smuts Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies, Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge (2022-2025)

• Visiting Research Associate, Makerere Institute of Social Studies, Makerere University (May-August 2022)

• Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows, Harvard University (2019-2022)
• PhD (History), Columbia University (2012-2019)
• Rhodes Scholar, Second BA with senior status (History), Christ Church, University of Oxford (2010-2012)
• BA (History), St. Stephen's College, Delhi University (2010-2012)

Research

I am a historian of migration, urbanity and labour in the British Empire. I study the production of space and collective belonging under capitalism by focusing on port cities of South Asia and the Indian Ocean. My first monograph (under review) Ocean Bombay: Space, Itinerancy and Community in a Colonial Port City, 1839-1945 tells the story of colonial Bombay as it transitioned from an ocean-facing port city to a nation-facing mill city. The book follows itinerants who traversed the routes between Zanzibar, Aden, Bushire and Bombay, to study the communities and neighbourhoods that formed at the interstices of these networks in Bombay. In doing so it explores the relationship between space, community and capital: the notions of space embedded in how different itinerant collectives conceived of themselves in an era of intensive and uneven capital accumulation, and how communities gave shape to the urban spaces that they inhabited. Ocean Bombay intervenes in histories of gender, capitalism, labour and displacement in the British Empire, the Indian Ocean and South Asia, while also illuminating pre-colonial conceptions of belonging-in-space not fully subsumed by capital.

My current research examines the role of fossil capital and Empire in shaping sanitation regimes in London, Calcutta, Bombay, Karachi and Zanzibar. In the era of steam travel port cities were nodes not only for the travel of capital, humans, goods and ideas but also germs, which imperial and colonial governments were anxious to control. I use cleanliness and public health as the conceptual tools with which to examine the relation between caste/race and health, capitalism and the environment, Empire and sanitation.

Publications

• Ocean Bombay: Space, Itinerancy and Community in a Colonial Port City, 1839-1945 (under review with Columbia University Press)
• "Steam and stokehold: steamship labour, colonial racecraft and Bombay’s Sidi jamāt." Historical Materialism 31/2 (2023): 161-196.
• "The Changing World of a Bombay Muslim Community, 1870-1945, by Salima Tyabji." The English Historical Review 140 (2025): 920-922.
• "Vidroh (revolution) to dhanda (deal/business): Mumbai of many faces, 1896-2016." Review of Juned Sheikh’s Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor and Lisa Björkman ed., Bombay Brokers in The Journal of Asian Studies 81/3 (2022): 606-609.