Wednesday
04
November 2026
2:30 - 4:00 PM IST
Location
Room 209, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
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From Agents of Creative Destruction to Agents of Inertia: Business, Cities, and Urban Fortunes in Modern India
Arts and Sciences Research Seminar Series
Gaurav C Garg
Assistant Professor of History
Ashoka University
Speaker
In the first half of the twentieth century, Asia’s colonial trade, commerce, and enterprise pivoted on five cities—Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Calcutta, and Bombay. Today, among these, only Calcutta no longer plays a significant role in the Asian or global economy. Why? This talk will discuss how my book Agents of Inertia answered this question, ethical dilemmas of writing such a book, and the methodological challenges of place-based research and writing in the era of global history.
Speaker
Gaurav C Garg
Gaurav C Garg is an Assistant Professor of History at Ashoka University. He is the author of Agents of Inertia: Business Crisis, and Economic Decline in Twentieth-Century Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2026). He is now working on the history of Ford Foundation in India and on the global history of Indian Mountaineering.