April 2023
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Indian futures
Responding to Noah Smith’s bullish piece on India, the author takes agglomeration as the economist’s main lesson, argues that huge nations scale in ways small ones cannot, and flags human…
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Soldier Sahibs-Review
A review, written for Herald magazine and reposted unedited, calls Charles Allen’s Soldier Sahibs old-fashioned and unapologetically imperialist but accurate and readable on Nicholson, Lumsden and Edwardes, while noting it…
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Episode 22 – The British East India Company
Episode 22 of the BrownCast: Shrikant, Gaurav and Omar talk to Maneesh about the beginning, consolidation and end of British East India Company rule in India, ending with the 1857…
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The once and future India
The author compiled total fertility rates by administrative division across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, noting that India is a big country with, for example, Uttar Pradesh near 3.1 and West…
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Major Amin on the Current Crisis in Pakistan
A BrownCast in which Major Amin, at listeners’ request, gives a short summary of Pakistan’s political history, the current crisis, and especially the army’s role and the damage its mishandling…
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A Conversation on Caste with Dr. Prakash Shah
A BrownCast in which Dr Prakash Shah of Queen Mary University of London discusses with Omar Ali the framework for studying caste in India and its colonial antecedents, followed by…
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Perhaps the Indus Valley Civilization did descend from Zagrosian farmers?
A note quoting a paper on the limits of fitting complex population-history models, which questions whether the Indus Periphery lineage really split from Iranian farmers before the Ganj Dareh Neolithic,…
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Open Thread – 04/14/2023 – Brown Pundits
Open Thread, 14 April 2023: the host points to Iran pieces for readers asking whether they are Iranian, previews a long post on caste, the CISCO case and the US,…
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Conversation with Chitra Iyer: Founder- Space2Grow a Social Impact Firm
A BrownCast in which Chitra Iyer, co-founder and CEO of the social impact firm Space2Grow, talks to Maneesh about anti-child trafficking, digital safety and making Indians employable, with links to…
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On the Great Mughals: Indian or not?
Looking at portraits of Akbar and Shah Jahan, the author argues the Mughals were neither simply Indian nor simply colonisers: their ancestry was mixed, Sunni orthodoxy grew after Akbar, and…
