Papers by Elizabeth Chatterjee
Journal of Historical Geography, 2025
Climate crisis has made the transition from carbon-rich to low-carbon energy systems an existenti... more Climate crisis has made the transition from carbon-rich to low-carbon energy systems an existential necessity for the future of our planet. This article sets out how greater attention to low-carbon energy history, currently a neglected component of modern energy development, should comprise an essential part of building a zero-carbon future. We argue for the usefulness of low-carbon as a capacious term that foregrounds the historic and ongoing relationality between low-and high-carbon energy, and set out the ways this has shaped energy infrastructures, practices, and imaginaries through the twentieth century to the present. We outline a range of analytics-materiality, scaling, community-around which critical understandings of low-carbon energy can be gained. And we show that decarbonization, while urgent, does not have to be speculative: the historical examples provided here offer valuable insights into the social and spatial impacts and temporal challenges of introducing new energy infrastructure and decommissioning old that can, and should, be paid more attention.
Past & Present, 2025
On 11 December 1967, a large earthquake devastated the village of Koynanagar in Maharashtra, west... more On 11 December 1967, a large earthquake devastated the village of Koynanagar in Maharashtra, western India. Many blamed the new Koyna hydroelectric dam nearby. Prompting international inquests, Koyna became perhaps the world’s most famous case of reservoir-induced seismicity, a novel type of earthquake triggered by human activities. We use the dam’s history to explore the emergent consciousness of human geophysical agency that characterizes the Anthropocene, the putative new epoch when humans have become a planetary-scale ‘force of Nature’. The dam was explicitly designed as a geotechnical assemblage, a blending of technology, mountain topography, monsoon waters and rock. Striking a supposedly stable region, the 1967 earthquake revealed the more-than-human unpredictability of this composite. Scientists began to trace a radically new form of human agency at work, which owed its effects to complex chains of causality that extended deep underground and backward into deep history. Yet there was remarkably little policy fallout. Dam construction only accelerated in seismically active areas. The debates over reservoir-induced seismicity showed that human geotechnical agency could be read in diametrically opposed ways: as a source of anxiety or hubris, or simply irrelevant to practical policy making, thereby presaging today’s debates over human planetary stewardship in the Anthropocene.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2024
From Iran and Mozambique to France's Gilets jaunes, consumer energy protests are ubiquitous today... more From Iran and Mozambique to France's Gilets jaunes, consumer energy protests are ubiquitous today. Little historical scholarship has so far explored such "fuel riots," the problematic moniker bestowed by contemporary policy scholars. This article argues for disaggregating the homogenous crowd of so-called rioters, instead analyzing why particular socioeconomic groups persistently take to the streets. To do this, it sketches an energy-centered approach to class with both structural and subjective axes. This analytic is applied to a comparative history of two of the best-documented energy protests of the last half-century. During the 1970s, independent truckers blocked American highways to protest the high price of motor fuel. A decade later, half a million North Indian farmers mobilized to demand cheaper and more reliable electricity. Half a world apart, the two movements shared key characteristics. They were the expression of specific class fractions whose material interests were conditioned by heavy dependence on state-mediated energy supplies. Awkwardly located between big capital and wage labor, both truckers and farmers owned stakes in the carbon-intensive means of production that left them exposed to volatility in energy quality and pricing. Both mobilized in reaction to perceived breaches of state-centered moral economies of energy which threatened this dependence, leveraging their power to interrupt supplies within the circulatory systems of fossil fuel society. Even as both movements failed in their own terms, their political resistance helped to lock in place consumer subsidies for cheap carbonintensive energy. Such energy protests deserve a central role in our environmental histories of fossil fuel society.
Journal of Global History, 2023
Solar energy often appears a resource without a history, perpetually novel and promising futurist... more Solar energy often appears a resource without a history, perpetually novel and promising futuristic abundance. This overlooks a long episode of 'low-modernist' solar research in and for the global South. Focusing especially on India and detouring through Mexico, two important arenas for early solar experimentation, this article traces an alternative history of solar technologies as austere everyday fixes for developing countries. In parallel with the well-known postcolonial focus on high-modernist energy mega-projects, the narrow transnational community of solar experts retained a competing tendency to think small. At its heart lay a dualistic conception of the modern energy economy: flexible and resource-intensive grid electricity for urban centres, inferior off-grid devices to meet the minimal and static needs of the rural poor. This impoverished, feminized Third World projected user base resulted in persistent underinvestment and failed commercialization, helping to explain why solar technologies did not take off earlier. While solar experts emphasized the regional exceptionalism of the arid tropics, the teleological linkage between modernity and ever-rising energy abundance was rejuvenated from below as rural communities began to imagine the high-energy good life as a universal aspiration.
Current History, 2023
Almost nine years into Narendra Modi’s premiership, there is little sign of an ideological commit... more Almost nine years into Narendra Modi’s premiership, there is little sign of an ideological commitment to the free market at the apex of the Indian state. Instead, this article characterizes India’s developmental model as a form of state capitalism, structured by the government’s direct influence on economic relationships. The Modi government took office in the midst of a legitimacy crisis generated by the state-dominated financial system. In response, it has fostered an increasingly oligarchic state capitalism, aiming to mobilize private resources through a narrow alliance of state and business interests. This strategy entails serious economic distortions and political risks.
Journal of Asian Studies, 2020
Much scholarship extrapolates global narratives of the Anthropocene from the “fossil capitalism” ... more Much scholarship extrapolates global narratives of the Anthropocene from the “fossil capitalism” of European imperial powers. This analysis deploys the alternative lens of grid electricity—the great macro-technology of the twentieth century—to reevaluate the dynamics of the Anthropocene outside the Anglozone. Histories of Asian electrification refute the notion of any simple relationship between colonialism and fossil capitalism. Instead, they point towards a postcolonial trend of fossil developmentalism. Especially in the context of late development, energy expansion became a state-led moral project. Cutting against fossil capitalism’s logic of commodification, electricity provision was increasingly conceptualized as a national good and an entitlement, even if one honored in the breach. This trend transcended the distinction between market and planned economies, and extended beyond formal democracies. The (partial) democratization of consumption brought by fossil developmentalism is the hallmark of the “Great Acceleration” in human impacts on the environment since 1950.
Development and Change, 2022
Regimes around the world are experimenting with combinations of economic liberalization and reviv... more Regimes around the world are experimenting with combinations of economic liberalization and revived state-activist strategies, producing 'new developmentalist' hybrids. This article suggests that a distinctive variant of new developmentalism is emerging in India. Its paradigmatic example crystallized in Gujarat, before and during Narendra Modi's tenure as chief minister (2001–14), and was taken national during Modi's first term as India's prime minister (2014–19). While scholars have highlighted the aggressively pro-business industrial policy of the 'Gujarat model', closer examination reveals that this state intervention was more direct and extensive than previously acknowledged. The state took on a diversity of functions, particularly focused on infrastructure. These included not only classic developmental activities such as midwifing new industries or supporting select private enterprises, but also corrective functions: disciplining consumers, compensating reform losers, and repairing the bureaucratic apparatus. Today, in the face of predictions of radical deregulation or corporate rule, this reinvented statism is visible at the all-India level. However, its history also illustrates the brittleness of India's new developmentalism, including its tendencies towards incumbency bias, resource misallocation, and debt. Political responses have often weakened accountability rather than tackling underlying problems. Both in India and elsewhere, the sustainability of new developmentalism appears uncertain.
Oxford Handbook of State Capitalism and the Firm, 2022
Despite three decades of gradual liberalization, state intervention in the Indian economy remains... more Despite three decades of gradual liberalization, state intervention in the Indian economy remains extensive but substantively different from the old central planning. The state has moved away from the direct ownership model in many industrial sectors. Nonetheless, large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) still dominate key sectors such as energy and infrastructure, and the state continues to intervene heavily in many other sectors using its control of credit, land, and natural resources. This chapter surveys these changes, examining the reinvention of SOEs in the liberalization era. It uses firm-level case studies from the electricity, coal, and aviation sectors to explain variation in SOE performance, showing this to be inextricable from the political economies in which individual firms are embedded. SOEs have thrived when entrepreneurial bureaucrats have been able to leverage their firms’ political influence and access to lucrative resources. They have fared much less well when managers lacked the resources to resist political pressures or the entry of privately-owned rivals. Finally, it assesses new tools of state intervention, especially the channelling of state resources to favoured private firms and the slow-burning economic crisis this has precipitated since 2012. Overall, the political and economic coherence of Indian state capitalism as a system should not be overstated, illustrating the difficulties of governing state capitalism in a fractious federal democracy.
World Development, 2018
Across many developing countries, the power sector persistently underperforms despite years of ma... more Across many developing countries, the power sector persistently underperforms despite years of market reform efforts. India, where de facto responsibility for the power sector rests with subnational (state) governments, provides a useful laboratory to examine why. The state of West Bengal provides an example of public sector reform as an alternative to the so-called " World Bank template " for electricity liberalization, and a lens on the political preconditions for reform success. Drawing on 30 elite interviews in 2016 alongside comparative evidence from other Indian states, this article documents the reform design and assesses its success. West Bengal's reforms aimed at internally strengthening the utility against political interference. The study finds that this reform model delivered initial performance among the best of any Indian utility, and that successful reforms in several other states were also more statist than often recognized. However, longer-term sustainability remains challenging. While weak rural lobbies had some effect, the study explains this trajectory as the result of the transition from one-party dominance to intensified party-political competition, a finding that resonates with evidence from other Indian states. In contrast to influential political theories developed in the Global North, this suggests that party-political competition does not make Indian politicians more likely to deliver public services, but rather leads to short-termism and political capture of utilities. Conversely, under some conditions one-party dominance can encourage longer-term reforms. The study thus assesses the promise and limits of public sector reforms as an alternative to liberalization, and suggests how electoral competition can influence development priorities in Indian states.
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2017
The foundation of history's recent ‘emotional turn’ is thatemotions matterin shaping individu... more The foundation of history's recent ‘emotional turn’ is thatemotions matterin shaping individual and social motivations. Their importance is not just instrumental: against the explanatory grain of much scholarship since the nineteenth century, the history of emotions recognises that humans are not purely rational “economic subjects in trousers and skirts”— or, as it may be,dhotis andsaris.
Contemporary South Asia, 2017
Despite three decades of liberalization, the public sector’s contribution to the Indian economy r... more Despite three decades of liberalization, the public sector’s contribution to the Indian economy remains crucial but underappreciated. Particularly striking is the resilience of central public sector enterprises. The best of these have been reinvented: retrofitted for the market era, exposed to competition and endowed with at least the trappings of corporate governance. Elsewhere in the world, such state-market hybrids have been seen as characteristic of a powerful new model: ‘state capitalism 2.0’. How, then, do these reinvented central enterprises fit within India’s contemporary liberalization process? From the vantage point of the energy sector, in which India’s largest state-owned enterprises predominantly lie, this article seeks to shed light on key continuities and changes in India’s underlying regime of state capitalism. It argues that state-owned enterprises continue to play a key role in contemporary Indian political economy—but not as part of a coherent or stable system. Central public sector enterprises are treated with an admixture of neglect and short-term exploitation, milked for resources to fund a wide system of subsidies. This second-generation state capitalism is distinguished from its older incarnation less by the declining role of the state than by this lack of vision, and the increasingly pro-business nature of these subsidies.
Class and Conflict: Revisiting Pranab Bardhan's Political Economy of India, 2020
This is the introduction to Elizabeth Chatterjee and Matthew McCartney (eds) Class and Conflict: ... more This is the introduction to Elizabeth Chatterjee and Matthew McCartney (eds) Class and Conflict: Revisiting Pranab Bardhan's Political Economy of India (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Class and Conflict: Revisiting Pranab Bardhan's Political Economy of India, 2020
Pranab Bardhan’s slim masterwork The Political Economy of Development in India (1984) is best rem... more Pranab Bardhan’s slim masterwork The Political Economy of Development in India (1984) is best remembered for its contention that by the early 1980s the Indian state’s room for manoeuvre was severely constrained by competition between three dominant classes: rich farmers, big business interests, and white-collar ‘professionals’. The core of the latter ‘third dominant class’ comprised skilled employees within the public sector itself, on whom the state elite had to rely to implement their policy decisions.
Even as the book was published, liberalization was beginning to reshape the country’s political economy. Three decades on, economic reforms have ostensibly undermined the economic, ideological, and policy dominance of the Indian state. This chapter uses Bardhan’s original analytical categories to examine the empirical basis for this assumption: has the public sector in India really undergone a reluctant sea-change since 1984?
A Climate of Scarcity: Electricity in India, 1899–2016
Scales of Scarcity in the Modern World, 1800–2075, ed. John Brewer, Neil Fromer, and Frank Trentmann
Contemporary discussions of climate change in the global North are rooted in a dilemma of abundan... more Contemporary discussions of climate change in the global North are rooted in a dilemma of abundance: the roots of economic development and democracy alike lie in plentiful fossil-fuel consumption. Against this Anthropocene orthodoxy, the history of electricity in India suggests that there is no simple relationship between energy abundance and 'fossil capitalism'. British colonialism in India was surprisingly indifferent to electrification. Grid electricity was installed only haphazardly, often relying on local entrepreneurship. The advent of formal democracy in independent India did not simply lead to fossil capitalism either, however: it both preceded abundant power and intersected with this scarcity in complex ways. A distinctive politics of elite democratic mobilization and power rationing emerged across many Indian states, to the detriment of industrial and commercial consumers, while the logic governing power policy frequently did not accord with conventional economic rationality. The result was a politically stable but economically and environmentally dysfunctional system—albeit one in which energy production and consumption was constrained. Defined by endemic scarcities, the history of electrification in India thus illustrates the complexity of the much-debated relationships between rising energy consumption and industrial capitalism, colonialism, and democracy outside the global North.
Changing Contexts and Shifting Roles: New Perspectives on the Indian State, ed. Anthony D'Costa and Achin Chakraborty
State intervention in India has persisted but has proved far from immune to critiques of traditio... more State intervention in India has persisted but has proved far from immune to critiques of traditional dirigisme. An examination of the power sector shows that waves of reforms since 1991 have together created a hybrid and regionally differentiated state-market system. Blurring the public-private boundary, this reinvented “state capitalism 2.0” displays both refurbished modes of intervention and new governance arrangements with private players. Nonetheless, as the power sector’s continually dismal condition suggests, this state-capitalist hybrid has not (yet) provided a coherent alternative to older dirigisme or the Anglo-American mode of “deregulatory” liberalization. Instead, between 1991 and 2014 its ad hoc, layered emergence generated distinctive forms of dysfunction. Coupled with competitive politics, its ever-increasing institutional complexity rendered it internally incoherent and vulnerable to rent seeking on multiple fronts. Power sector evidence suggests that state intervention in India has remained simultaneously indispensable and dogged by persistent administrative and financial difficulties. Examining its internal institutional transformations helps to explain the apparently contradictory nature of the contemporary Indian state: at once business-friendly, populist, and often underperforming.
For the complete volume, see https://www.springer.com/in/book/9789811368905
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2017
This is the introduction to a forthcoming special issue of the
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Socie... more This is the introduction to a forthcoming special issue of the
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society on 'Urban Emotions: Responses to the South Asian City, c. 1850-1950', provisionally scheduled for publication in October 2017.
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2017
The foundation of history’s recent ‘emotional turn’ is that emotions matter in shaping individual... more The foundation of history’s recent ‘emotional turn’ is that emotions matter in shaping individual and social motivations. Their importance is not just instrumental: against the explanatory grain of much scholarship since the nineteenth century, the history of emotions recognises that humans are not purely rational “economic subjects in trousers and skirts”— or, as it may be, dhotis and saris. The emotional histories of this last group are only just beginning to be written. From its roots in the study of Europe, the history of emotions spread to the United States in the 1980s, with its ascendancy overlapping with the rise of ‘history from below’. By the beginning of the twenty-first century it had birthed a rich and fully-fledged research agenda, complete with dedicated institutes, journals and graduate courses. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, it has made limited inroads into global studies of South Asia, at least explicitly;
a number of South Asianists have made valuable contributions to the subdiscipline Avant la lettre, while a collective of contemporary scholars is forging a nascent agenda for the subcontinent. Nevertheless, the history of emotions remains “overwhelmingly a European and North American history”, as a recent introduction noted. What, then, can historians bring to the study of the emotions—a field that, while
long dormant, is now rapidly expanding across multiple disciplines from neuroscience to philosophy and even economics?
Mapping Power: The Political Economy of Electricity in India’s States, 2018
This chapter will appear in Navroz Dubash, Sunila Kale, and Ranjit Bharvirkar (eds.), Mapping Pow... more This chapter will appear in Navroz Dubash, Sunila Kale, and Ranjit Bharvirkar (eds.), Mapping Power: The Political Economy of Electricity in India’s States (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 319–339. It analyzes the trajectory of the power sector in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, one of the most unusual and periodically encouraging of any Indian state between 2000 and 2010. It draws attention, first, to the distinctively statist mode of West Bengal's successful reform experiment. Second, it explains the rise and decline of this model as the result of a shift from one-party dominance (under a top-down, technocratic policy apex) to increasing electoral competition.
Working Paper, Mapping Power Project, 2017
The trajectory of Bengal’s power sector since 2000 has been one of the most unusual and periodica... more The trajectory of Bengal’s power sector since 2000 has been one of the most unusual and periodically encouraging of any Indian State. Under the centralized one-party dominance of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), it developed a technocratic, pragmatic and statist model of power reforms in the hope of incentivizing industrialization. Rather than relying on restructuring or civil society activism, this model focused on internal changes—corporate governance, capacity building, and technology-aided process streamlining—to bolster the independence of the utilities. Until around 2011 it enjoyed impressive successes. Yet, even while improved power performance was popular, the overall pro-industrial tilt came at the cost of public support. With the ensuing change of government, performance began to stagnate. Faced with fierce party-political competition for its non-elite voter base, and operating with a less cohesive organizational structure, in its first term (2011-16) the Trinamool Congress struggled to preserve the new norm of political non-interference in the sector. Nonetheless, Bengal continues to outperform many other States thanks to its innovative approach to building institutional resilience, and having been re-elected the government once again hopes that quality electricity will heighten its appeal to industrial investors. The Bengal power sector thus offers a lens on the promise and limits of the technocratic, internally focused model of power reform, as well as the effects of (the absence of) party-political competition on the power sector.
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Papers by Elizabeth Chatterjee
Even as the book was published, liberalization was beginning to reshape the country’s political economy. Three decades on, economic reforms have ostensibly undermined the economic, ideological, and policy dominance of the Indian state. This chapter uses Bardhan’s original analytical categories to examine the empirical basis for this assumption: has the public sector in India really undergone a reluctant sea-change since 1984?
For the complete volume, see https://www.springer.com/in/book/9789811368905
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society on 'Urban Emotions: Responses to the South Asian City, c. 1850-1950', provisionally scheduled for publication in October 2017.
a number of South Asianists have made valuable contributions to the subdiscipline Avant la lettre, while a collective of contemporary scholars is forging a nascent agenda for the subcontinent. Nevertheless, the history of emotions remains “overwhelmingly a European and North American history”, as a recent introduction noted. What, then, can historians bring to the study of the emotions—a field that, while
long dormant, is now rapidly expanding across multiple disciplines from neuroscience to philosophy and even economics?