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SUMMARY:Neighbors Lecture Series vol. 5: Debjani Bhattacharyya / TPOD\, TH
 EMA\, HITAM
DTSTART:20250507T123000
DTEND:20250507T140000
DTSTAMP:20260502T082436Z
UID:1e83b52590d92692711b7d4ea561a0de81798e452f3d1bd76c831a1a
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Debjani Bhattacharyya\nThe paper brings together the intertwin
 ed histories of maritime insurance\, and the technical as well as vernacul
 ar representations of maritime storms in the late eighteenth century India
 n Ocean. The technical representation of storms became an urgent issue of 
 prediction as well as arbitrating legal questions around liability for ins
 urers\, underwriters in Britain and local courts in Calcutta\, Bombay and 
 Madras. The question of commodification drove both these issues\, as the p
 aper shows\, for climate and weather disturbance became the object of reve
 nue generation even as the uncertainty attached to it was precisely what d
 rove its commodification. Focusing on the process of double commodificatio
 n\, the paper reveals how the non-corporeal entity of the monsoon was encl
 osed as a commodity and its risk further priced and thus offloaded through
  the courts as well as other financial instruments. Ultimately the paper m
 akes a case for historicizing what is too often seen as the more contempor
 ary phenomenon of the financialization of the climate crisis.\n\nDebjani B
 hattacharyya holds the Chair for the History of the Anthropocene at the Un
 iversity of Zürich. Previously\, she was an Associate Professor of Histor
 y and Urban Studies at Drexel University. Her work lies at the intersectio
 n of legal and environmental history. Her research is driven by the desire
  to understand how legal and economic structures order our conceptualizati
 on of environmental transformations and shape how we respond to climate cr
 ises. Her book\, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Ca
 lcutta (Cambridge University Press\, 2018) won the 2019 honorable mention
  for the best book in Urban History.\n 
LOCATION:SG 1212 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==SG%201212
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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