Sanjay Seth
Biographic Data
| ID | 97566 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sanjay Seth |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sanjay |
| FAMILY NAME | Seth |
| SIGNATURE | SETH S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2591-6977 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 88 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 341 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 86 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The Oxford Handbook of Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism is one of those ubiquitous concerns which, while never going away entirely, seems to return regularly with a difference—with renewed urgency, novel ramifications, and new challenges. In the twenty-first century, we inhabit a world in which extractive capitalism has expanded to reach almost every corner of the earth and every aspect of our lives; in which the planetary environment is at risk, as evidenced by the loss of biodiversit…
Race, Medicine, and Causation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
In December 1753, the South Carolinian physician, John Lining, wrote a letter to Dr Robert Whytt, Professor of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, offering ‘A Description of the American Yellow fever’. ‘[T]his dreadful malady, which so frequently rages like the plague in the southern parts of America’, Lining observed, seemed to strike almost everyone: ‘both sexes of the white colour, especially strangers lately arrived from cold climates, I…
Heterogeneous Effect of the Indian Affirmative Action: The Role of Caste Certificates
Affirmative action policies, around the world, aim to provide preferential treatment to those that belong to underprivileged communities and have experienced historical social injustices and exploitations. Contemporary studies that examine the effect of Indian affirmative action policies do not explicitly consider that all intended beneficiaries are not eligible for targeted benefits. An intended beneficiary is unable to acquire the targeted bene…
Assessing inclusive well-being to leave no one behind
The world has continued to seek prosperity by reducing poverty and improving well-being, but it is vital to examine whether this improvement is inclusive. In this paper, we use a quantile-based assessment of trends based on absolute changes that allows robust examination of the inclusiveness of multidimensional well-being changes. We decompose the overall change in inclusive well-being levels into two components: (1) the change in the overall ave…
Corruption can cause healthcare deprivation: Evidence from 29 sub-Saharan African countries
The WHO estimates that nearly half of the world’s population lacks access to essential healthcare, and that the proportion of the population with catastrophic out-of-pocket health spending (10% or more of the household budget) is on the rise. Meanwhile, the United Nations’ General Assembly has recently identified corruption as a vital factor undermining efforts to accomplish universal health coverage. We examine how corruption may lead to healthc…
Beyond belief: Secularism, Religion and Our Muddled Modernity
This article argues that the very idea of religion, as the genus of which the various ‘world religions’ are the species, is a modern invention, and thus comparisons between religions - including those pertaining to their capacity to recognize and adapt to the necessary distinction between matters of religion and matters properly belonging to secular society and the state - rest upon a deep conceptual error. Religion is made or produced, it goes o…
A Decided Inaptitude in His Constitution: Race, Slavery, and Disability in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire
This chapter explores relationships between disability, race, slavery, medicine, and statistics in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. At its core are reports on military medical statistics, principally authored by Alexander Tulloch, that would become the backbone for subsequent claims about the reality and numerical value of race. Tulloch’s Statistical Reports drew on his earlier (1837) statistical defense of plantation owners’ treatment of the ensl…
Pluriversal Problems, Revolutionary Remedies
This article offers a description of and engagement with a number of arguments that have been framed around the notion of ‘ontological symmetry’ or the promotion of a ‘pluriverse’ over a universe. I seek, first, to explain what problems scholars are seeking to solve with these interventions; second, I point to certain missteps that have been made as part of these solutions, particularly in relation to human-centredness in conceptions of practice-…
Reconceiving the Practice of History: From Representation to Translation
Arguing that history is not the application of a rigorous method to sources bequeathed to us from the past but rather a practice of coding that constructs "the past" in particular ways, this article seeks to delineate the key elements of this coding. Modern history treats past objects and texts as the objectified remains of humans who endowed their world with meaning and purpose while constrained by the social circumstances characterizing their t…
Race, Seasoning, and Strangeness: The Problem of Mobility in Early Modern Science and Medicine
This essay takes up two problems evoked by the human mobilities of the early modern period, as these were found in texts concerned with medicine and science. The medical problem arose from observations noting differences in disease susceptibility and immunity between populations indigenous or habituated to a climate and those ‘newcomers’ more recently arrived. Why, did the latter suffer from debilitating illnesses and how might such illnesses be …
Race, Specificity, and Statistics in Victorian Medicine
This paper focuses on Edmund Parkes’ Manual of Practical Hygiene, Prepared Especially for Use in the Medical Service of the Army (1864), a text that would become the standard within British military medicine for decades to come. Within Parkes’ Manual, I argue, we can see the confluence of three streams of thinking – each beginning in the 1830s and 1840s – that led to a new orthodoxy on race-medicine in the Victorian period. The first flowed from …
Knowledge, progress and the knowledge of progress
Modern societies, and the modern knowledge that was seen to be both an emblem and a precipitating cause of their modernity, have long been seen as marking a great historical advance. Modernity, we have been assured, by the social sciences in general and sociology in particular, is not only different from premodernity and contemporary nonmodern societies, these differences are also signs of intellectual, moral and material progress. In recent time…
‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine
In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man , Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial t…
Descent of Darwin: Race, sex, and human nature
In 1871, Charles Darwin published Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex , a text that extended, elaborated and completed his On the Origin of Species (1859). When he had published Origin , Darwin sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to skirt controversy; in Descent he waded into the fray on near-innumerable issues. Readers could find explicit the claim that humans had descended from apes, in addition to explorations of the similarities and ap…
International relations: Plural or postcolonial
Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain's Long Eighteenth Century by Zachary Dorner
Beyond Reason: Postcolonial Theory and the Social Sciences
An ambitious and controversial argument that the social sciences do not transcend their modern and Western origins, and are thus a parochial, not a universal, form of knowledge. \n \nSince the social sciences are not explained and validated simply by the fact that they are "true," this book proceeds to inquire into what purpose they serve, what it is that they "do". \n \nAnatomizes the disciplines of history and political science to ask what repr…
Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India
Subject Lessons offers a fascinating account of how western knowledge "traveled" to India, changed that which it encountered, and was itself transformed in the process. Beginning in 1835, India's British rulers funded schools and universities to disseminate modern, western knowledge in the expectation that it would gradually replace indigenous ways of knowing. From the start, western education was endowed with great significance in India, not onl…
Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery by Jonathan Lamb
Review Article| January 01 2020 Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery by Jonathan Lamb Lamb, Jonathan, Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 328 pp. Suman Seth Suman Seth Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2020) 26 (1): 188–189. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-7899928 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Suman Seth; Scurvy: The …
A Roundtable Discussion on Collecting Demographics Data
Identifying this natal link between statistical identities and distanced control does not of course mean that we should reject statistically “enumerated identities” tout court in favor of some more “fuzzy identities.”62 To do so would be to lapse into an ahistorical fantasy of return. This is where our third key theme, difference, comes into play—difference not merely in the sense of something that is disciplined and contained but, rather, as an …
Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Global South: Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Perspectives, and the Anthropocene
Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840 by Rana A. Hogarth
Reviewed by: Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840 by Rana A. Hogarth Suman Seth Rana A. Hogarth. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 290 pp. Ill. $27.95 (978–1–4696–3287–2). In September 1793, as yellow fever gripped Philadelphia, the physician Benjamin Rush wrote a letter to Richard Allen, a preacher …
Book Forum
On the Interaction Between Focus and Distributional Properties in Multidimensional Poverty Measurement
In the multidimensional poverty measurement literature, most measures satisfy the deprivation focus property, which means that they disregard any improvement in non-deprived achievements. Such measures cannot satisfy strong distributional properties as traditionally defined, because the distributional transformations among the poor are allowed to take place among their non-deprived achievements. We formally address this incompatibility and propos…
Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire
Putting knowledge in its place: Science, Colonialism, and the Postcolonial
This special issue of Postcolonial Studies is divided into two parts. In the first, three leading scholars of postcolonial science studies-a philosopher, an anthropologist, and an historian (althou
Multidimensional Poverty Reduction in India between 1999 and 2006: Where and How
Postcolonial Theory and the Critique of International Relations
This article in three parts offers the beginnings of a postcolonial critique of mainstream International Relations (IR). The first part argues that IR, where it has been interested in history at all, has misdescribed the origins and character of the contemporary international order, and that an accurate understanding of the ‘expansion of the international system’ requires attention to its colonial origins. The second part suggests that IR is deep…
Selecting a Targeting Method to Identify BPL Households in India
Colonial History and Postcolonial Science Studies
It was once not uncommon for histories of colonial science and medicine to draw on postcolonial theory. Today one finds many fewer such histories, despite the growing popularity of postcolonial science studies. This essay seeks to understand why and to make the case for expanding postcolonial science studies to once again include the colonial within its remit. It offers a history of postcolonial approaches to science and medicine from the mid-198…
Historical Sociology and Postcolonial Theory: Two Strategies for Challenging Eurocentrism
Journal Article Historical Sociology and Postcolonial Theory: Two Strategies for Challenging Eurocentrism Get access Sanjay Seth Sanjay Seth Goldsmiths, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Political Sociology, Volume 3, Issue 3, September 2009, Pages 334–338, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2009.00079_4.x Published: 07 September 2009
Razão ou Raciocínio? Clio ou Shiva
Nós, modernos, estamos acostumados a acreditar que somente o Ocidente desenvolveu uma tradição de historiografia, enquanto que a maioria das culturas teria mitos, épicos e lendas no lugar da escrita da história. Assim, a despeito do fato de que cada pessoa tem uma história, essa história poderia ser narrada nos termos de uma historiografia racional capaz de redescrever o passado em termos alheios àqueles que estiveram presentes nesse passado, tra…
Once Was Blind but Now Can See: Modernity and the Social Sciences
This article asks a series of very direct, if not simple, questions. How, and why, is it that we assume that modern knowledge is universal, despite its European genealogy and its historically recent provenance? What warrant do we have for considering this knowledge superior to the premodern knowledges of the West and the autochthonous knowledges of the non-West? Are we, in short, right to assume that modern Western knowledge transcends the circum…
The Politics of Knowledge: Or, How to Stop Being Eurocentric
In the last 20 years or so, a significant and growing body of work has sought to unveil, challenge and displace the ‘Eurocentric’ biases of the human sciences. The arguments advanced in these works vary, and the aim of this essay is both to survey this literature and to point out the differences between different ‘kinds’ or ‘types’ of ‘anti‐Eurocentrism’
Nationalism, Modernity, and the “Woman Question” in India and China
The nationalist struggle to bring about the end of colonial rule in India, and the Republican and communist struggles to arrest and reverse the humiliation and the “carve-up” of China by foreign powers, were both closely allied to the struggle to become modern. Indeed, the two goals were usually seen to be so closely related as to be indistinguishable: a people had to start becoming modern if they were ever to be free of foreign domination, and t…
Rewriting Histories of Nationalism: The Politics of "Moderate Nationalism" in India, 1870-1905
Corruption can cause healthcare deprivation: Evidence from 29 sub-Saharan African countries
The WHO estimates that nearly half of the world’s population lacks access to essential healthcare, and that the proportion of the population with catastrophic out-of-pocket health spending (10% or more of the household budget) is on the rise. Meanwhile, the United Nations’ General Assembly has recently identified corruption as a vital factor undermining efforts to accomplish universal health coverage. We examine how corruption may lead to healthc…
From Maoism to postcolonialism? The Indian 'Sixties', and beyond
Critics of postcolonial theory have provided this theory with a genealogy in which it appears as the poisoned fruit of a period when revolutionary energies were ebbing and in retreat. This essay seeks to provide an alternative genealogy, suggesting that the Subaltern Studies project, and postcolonial theory more generally, were enabled and in important ways shaped by the Maoist upsurge in some parts of India in the latter 1960s and early 1970s. T…
Liberalism and the politics of (multi)culture: Or, plurality is not difference
Liberalism and culture are not normally words which one juxtaposes, for it is thought to be a hallmark of liberalism precisely that it is impervious to culture, just as it is blind to colour, sex and creed. Yet while it may be liberal to ‘bracket’ culture, to treat it as morally irrelevant, liberalism is itself a product of a time, place and culture. It was born in and of the West. For most of its history, the paradox that this gives rise to—name…
Rewriting Histories of Nationalism: The Politics of “Moderate Nationalism” in India, 1870–1905
Rewriting Histories of Nationalism: The Politics of “Moderate Nationalism” in India, 1870–1905 Get access Sanjay Seth Sanjay Seth teaches politics La Trobe University, Melbourne Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 104, Issue 1, February 1999, Pages 95–116, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/104.1.95 Published: 01 February 1999
Does It Matter How We Assess Standard of Living? Evidence from Indian Slums Comparing Monetary and Multidimensional Approaches
Materialism, Slavery, andThe History of Jamaica
This essay explores the racial theories of Edward Long, the West Indian planter and slave owner who published his History of Jamaica in 1774. Long's polygenism, it argues, looks strikingly different from that we are more familiar with from nineteenth-century sources. The reason for the difference is twofold. First, although Long was willing to buck biblical orthodoxy, he balked at materialism, a position that gained traction in racial studies fol…
Modernity without Prometheus: On re-reading Marshall Berman'sAll that is Solid Melts into Air
This essay revisits Marshall Berman's extremely influential book, All that is Solid Melts into Air, some thirty years after its first publication. Berman provided an analysis of modernity as something including, but not limited to, capitalism, and as something which encompassed not just `social processes' but also new subjectivities, not just new world(s) but new ways of inhabiting them. He also offered a passionate defense of modernity an its po…
Plumbing the depths: Toilets, transparency and modernity
(2002). Plumbing the depths: Toilets, transparency and modernity. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 137-142
Nehruvian Socialism/” 1927–1937: Nationalism, Marxism, and the Pursuit of Modernity
A Roundtable Discussion on Collecting Demographics Data
Identifying this natal link between statistical identities and distanced control does not of course mean that we should reject statistically “enumerated identities” tout court in favor of some more “fuzzy identities.”62 To do so would be to lapse into an ahistorical fantasy of return. This is where our third key theme, difference, comes into play—difference not merely in the sense of something that is disciplined and contained but, rather, as an …
Is Thinking with ‘Modernity’ Eurocentric
In recent times it has been argued that thinking with the concept of ‘modernity’ entails, or at least makes one prey to, Eurocentrism. Those who are troubled by this have sought to rethink the concept such that one can ‘think with’ modernity, while avoiding, or even challenging, Eurocentrism. This article surveys some such attempts, before moving on to argue that the question of whether modernity is principally a European phenomenon or not cannot…
A class of distribution and association sensitive multidimensional welfare indices
Crisis and the construction of modern theoretical physics
This paper takes up the concept of ‘crisis’ at both historical and historiographical levels. It proceeds through two examples of periods that have been described by historians of physics using a language of crisis. The first examines an incipient German theoretical-physics community around 1900 and the debates that concerned the so-called ‘failure’ of the mechanical world view. It is argued, largely on the basis of what is now an extensive body o…
Reason or Reasoning
Research Article| March 01 2004 Reason or Reasoning?: Clio or Siva Sanjay Seth Sanjay Seth Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2004) 22 (1 (78)): 85–101. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-1_78-85 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Sanjay Seth; Reason or Reasoning?: Clio or Siva. Social Text 1 March 2004; 22 (1 (78)): 85–101. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-1_78-8…
Brief report: Population dynamics of free‐ranging rhesus monkeys in different ecological conditions in India
Data are presented on group size, composition, and reproductive rates of nine free‐ranging rhesus monkey groups inhabiting different habitats in India, based on 7,300 observation hours spread over 1975–1980. Analysis suggests that groups increased in size irrespective of the habitat occupied
"Nationalism, National Identity and "History: Nehru's Search for India
Political Theory in the Age of Nationalism
In this essay Seth argues that it is not the case that international relations theory has suffered because domestic theory has prospered, but rather that both bear the marks of a signal failure to grasp the implications of, and to theorize adequately about, nationalism. She argues further that this failure is partly rooted in the phenomenon of nationalism itself, for it encapsulates many of the tensions and contradictions of modern thought. Final…
Nehruvian Socialism/” 1927–1937: Nationalism, Marxism, and the Pursuit of Modernity
Interpreting Revolutionary Excess: The Naxalite Movement in India, 1967–71
Research Article| May 01 1995 Interpreting Revolutionary Excess: The Naxalite Movement in India, 1967–71 Sanjay Seth Sanjay Seth Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (1995) 3 (2): 483–509. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-3-2-483 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite S…
Jive talking, or, how to have fun and influence people
Rewriting Histories of Nationalism: The Politics of "Moderate Nationalism" in India, 1870-1905
Rewriting Histories of Nationalism: The Politics of “Moderate Nationalism” in India, 1870–1905
Rewriting Histories of Nationalism: The Politics of “Moderate Nationalism” in India, 1870–1905 Get access Sanjay Seth Sanjay Seth teaches politics La Trobe University, Melbourne Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 104, Issue 1, February 1999, Pages 95–116, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/104.1.95 Published: 01 February 1999
Postcolonial discernment or was that deceit
Watch this space
The toolbox of postcolonialism
A ‘Postcolonial World’
The international environment changed decisively after the Second World War. Many processes served to reshape the political map of the world, but the most important, by far, was decolonization. From the 1940s through to the 1960s and beyond, there was a steady accession of new members to the world community of states, out of previous colonies — India and Pakistan, Indonesia, the two Vietnams, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda — the list goes on. Deco…
A Critique of Disciplinary Reason: The Limits of Political Theory
One of the gains of theoretical reflection in recent decades has been a growing recognition that we moderns have a tendency to project back into the past practices and ideas and categories that are in fact of recent provenance, and that this tendency needs to be guarded against. For instance, the religious belief we espy in another time or culture reflects the fact that for us moderns any sense of the sacred and supernatural can be understood onl…
Subliminal Charge: How Hindi-Language Newspaper Expansion Affects India
The expansion of newspapers in Indian languages over the past 20 years is unique in history. This paper seeks to examine the potential social and political consequences of that growth by focusing on two Hindi-language newspapers and their treatment of a few items of news and comment. Through such close analysis, the essay aims to show how McLuhan's 'subliminal charge' - the unconscious but overpowering effect of daily newspaper consumption - migh…
Liberalism and the politics of (multi)culture: Or, plurality is not difference
Liberalism and culture are not normally words which one juxtaposes, for it is thought to be a hallmark of liberalism precisely that it is impervious to culture, just as it is blind to colour, sex and creed. Yet while it may be liberal to ‘bracket’ culture, to treat it as morally irrelevant, liberalism is itself a product of a time, place and culture. It was born in and of the West. For most of its history, the paradox that this gives rise to—name…
Negotiating Difference
Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India
(2001). Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 383-387
Back to the future
Plumbing the depths: Toilets, transparency and modernity
(2002). Plumbing the depths: Toilets, transparency and modernity. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 137-142
Reason or Reasoning
Research Article| March 01 2004 Reason or Reasoning?: Clio or Siva Sanjay Seth Sanjay Seth Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2004) 22 (1 (78)): 85–101. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-1_78-85 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Sanjay Seth; Reason or Reasoning?: Clio or Siva. Social Text 1 March 2004; 22 (1 (78)): 85–101. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-1_78-8…
From Newton to Hawking: A History of Cambridge University’s Lucasian Professors of Mathematics , edited by Kevin C. Knox and Richard Noakes
From Maoism to postcolonialism? The Indian 'Sixties', and beyond
Critics of postcolonial theory have provided this theory with a genealogy in which it appears as the poisoned fruit of a period when revolutionary energies were ebbing and in retreat. This essay seeks to provide an alternative genealogy, suggesting that the Subaltern Studies project, and postcolonial theory more generally, were enabled and in important ways shaped by the Maoist upsurge in some parts of India in the latter 1960s and early 1970s. T…
The critique of renunciation: Bal Gangadhar Tilak's Hindu nationalism
In an introductory ‘appreciation’ to a collection of speeches and writings by the radical (the word often used at the time was ‘Extremist’) nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), Aurobindo Gh
Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness , by John S. Rigden
"Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness, by John S. Rigden." Canadian Journal of History, 42(2), pp. 390–391
Crisis and the construction of modern theoretical physics
This paper takes up the concept of ‘crisis’ at both historical and historiographical levels. It proceeds through two examples of periods that have been described by historians of physics using a language of crisis. The first examines an incipient German theoretical-physics community around 1900 and the debates that concerned the so-called ‘failure’ of the mechanical world view. It is argued, largely on the basis of what is now an extensive body o…
Sociology (52 works) · Philosophy (44 works) · Political science (39 works) · Law (34 works) · Epistemology (32 works) · History (27 works) · Politics (25 works) · Art (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works)