Dr Jagjeet Lally

Associate Professor of the History of Early Modern and Colonial India

Jagjeet Lally

I am Associate Professor of the History of Early Modern and Colonial India within the UCL History Department, where I am also Director of the Centre for Transnational and Global History, as well as the founding Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World, which is based in UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies. I read for a BA (Hons.) degree in PPE at Oxford (2004-7), studied for an MSc in Economic History at the LSE (2007-8), and then wrote my doctorate at Cambridge (2010-13), where I was a Prize Student at the Centre for History and Economics (2010-11). I was subsequently the Moses and Mary Finley Research Fellow at Darwin College (2013-14), and also taught at Imperial College London, prior to taking up my post at UCL (2014-).

Broadly, I am a historian of economic and material life, and much of my work and its sources/methods is interdisciplinary. My early work was on north India’s caravan trade with Afghanistan and central Asia from the Mughal period to the early twentieth century, and, through it, the larger global history of the Eurasian continental interior and its gradual transformation. My doctoral dissertation on this topic was awarded the Ellen McArthur Prize (2014) for the best dissertation on social or economic history at Cambridge. I expanded and rewrote this into India and the Silk Roads. The History of a Trading World (2021), which was published by Hurst, HarperCollins India, and the Oxford University Press. It was awarded the Economic History Society’s First Monograph Prize in 2022 for the best work of economic or social history published in the previous two years. It forms the centrepiece of a larger body of work that spearheads an ‘interior’ or ’terrestrial turn’ in South Asian and global history, which includes work on the Burma-China borderland, on the interest of Irish-American Republicans in the potential of Muslim revolt on the frontiers of the British Empire, on commodities like salt and opium as lenses to rethink the history of empires, and on mobile groups like long-distance traders/smugglers, meanwhile critically interrogating concepts like ‘Zomia’.

If my first book demonstrates the varied and steadily changing ways that trade mattered to a range of groups, it also raises questions about how South Asia’s deepening globalisation – and, with it, the wider and deeper creep of commercialisation and market relations – reshaped people’s beliefs, social lives, and livelihoods, as well as the reach of the state. India and the Early Modern World (Routledge, 2024), my second book, consistently returns to these issues in what is the first major, global historical survey of India during the period from c. 1400 to c. 1750, structured as ten thematic essays on such topics as ‘belief’, ‘urbanism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘violence’, ‘kingship’, and ‘knowledge’. Rather than focussing on a single kingdom or empire, or only on the Persianate sphere or the Indian Ocean world, it surveys the entire subcontinent, while consistently comparing or contrasting Indian developments to those elsewhere in the world. A key argument is that India and ‘Indians’ shaped – as much as they were shaped by – many of those experiences, processes, and phenomena that are the hallmarks of this period, to the extent that we can usefully speak of ‘global early modernity’ and thereby critically reframe what has for so long been a Eurocentric concept. 

Written for a broad audience, my third and most recent book, Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar. Commerce and Everyday Life in the Mughal World (Penguin India, 2025), strives to turn conventional wisdom about the relationship of imperial power and economic life in early modern India on its head. Rather than fixating on the Mughal state and imagining it as a leviathan, it looks through the eyes of numerous real-life characters to demonstrate the power of bankers, moneylenders, merchants, middlemen, artisans and all manner of ordinary folk in making – and eventually breaking – the might of the Mughal Empire. Globalisation and the spread of market relations was intensifying meanwhile, transforming everyday life and giving rise to a more consumer-oriented society, certainly by the eighteenth century. This forms the point of departure of my current research, which is sited in the marketplaces of Mughal cities and seeks to examine market exchange in relation to what we might call ‘shopping’ and ‘supply chains’, as well as how labour, property, and capital were changing in tandem with both global-level processes and more local ones.

Besides these projects, I have written about fashion and visual and material culture in early modern South Asia and on the non-human in the history of empire(s). Having developed a fascination for object-based histories in my past research, I maintain an interest in the work of museums and public institutions around more critically narrating South Asian history through their collections, having organised a conference on this theme in 2018 at the British Museum. I contributed to the development of the award-winning South Asia Gallery at Manchester Museum, which was curated by members of the city’s South Asian diaspora communities, and have worked with the British Museum and the Royal Collection Trust on community-led curating and education projects. Sparked by critical reflection upon this work, I have begun writing on the histories of South Asian migrant communities in modern Britain, on difficult pasts, and on the idea of ‘failure’.

Recent work with the media includes being a guest on Greg Jenner’s ‘You’re Dead to Me’ podcast (BBC Radio 4/BBC Sounds), where I talked about eighteenth-century India, and being the historical consultant on a two-part documentary on India for Channel 4. I joined the editorial board of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History in 2024, and the review board of the Royal Asiatic Society Monograph Series in 2025. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society, where I currently serve as a Trustee.

Major publications

For a list of Jagjeet’s publications please consult his UCL Profile.

Current PhD Students

Nalina Gopal, ‘Power on Paper: Petitions to the East India Company from Tamils in the Straits Settlements, 1786 – 1867’

Past PhD Students

Patcharaviral Charoenpacharaporn, ‘Circumventing the Cold War Divisions: the Indo-Thai Relations 1947-1960’

Teaching

Contact information

Email: jagjeet.lally@ucl.ac.uk

Telephone: 020 7679 3856

Office: 410, 25 Gordon Square

Student support & feedback hours: on research leave, 2025-26

Student support & feedback hours are an opportunity for students to chat with their module tutors about their ideas, any support they might need with the module, and to go through feedback from their assessments. 

Pronouns: he/him, or they/them

Departmental/university roles
Qualifications

PhD Cambridge, 2013