One of the most durable figures in modern history, the peasant has long been a site of intense intellectual and political debate. Yet underlying much of this literature is the assumption that peasants simply existed everywhere, a general if not generic group, traced backward from modernity to antiquity. In this talk, Navyug Gill explores the landowning peasant and landless laborer as novel political subjects forged in the encounter between colonialism and struggles over culture and capital within Panjabi society. Through a careful interrogation of a disparate archive – settlement reports and legal judgments to labor contracts, vernacular poetry, and family budgets – he challenges the givenness of the peasant by explicating the ideological and material divisions that transformed power in rural Panjabi society. By implicating economic logic with cultural difference, Gill re-thinks the itinerary of global political economy alongside alternative possibilities for emancipatory futures.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Navyug Gill is a historian specializing in modern South Asia and global history. He is an associate professor in the Department of History, Philosophy and Liberal Studies at William Paterson University. His research explores broad questions of agrarian change, labor politics, caste hierarchy, postcolonial critique and global capitalism. His first book, "Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab," was published by Stanford University Press in 2024. Gill’s scholarly and public writings have appeared in venues such as Past and Present, the Journal of Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Al Jazeera, the Law and Political Economy Project and Trolley Times.