Political Economy and Social Science in Colonial Bengal
FAIN: FA-55026-10
Andrew Stephen Sartori
New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)
The project seeks to historicize the global dissemination of social science by focusing on the particular context of colonial Bengal. Rather than taking the epistemological status of social-scientific inquiry for granted, or focusing exclusively on the role of colonial domination in imposing forms of social-scientific rationality, the project more broadly explores the socio-historical conditions under which social science, and especially political economy, came to appear to provide the appropriate concepts with which to approach problems of human self-understanding. It is composed of three more specific studies: (1) the identification of Bengali "custom" as regulated by political-economic principles starting in the 1860s; (2) the development of a self-conscious social-scientific project in colonial civil society starting in the late 1860s; and (3) the role of political-economic and social-scientific concepts in the constitution of "Muslimness" in the early twentieth century.