| FA-55026-10 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Andrew Stephen Sartori | Political Economy and Social Science in Colonial Bengal | 6/1/2011 - 5/31/2012 | $50,400.00 | Andrew | Stephen | Sartori | | | | New York University | New York | NY | 10012-1019 | USA | 2009 | South Asian History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 |
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. |