Event Details

End: April 24, 2023
Contact: rwheatley@historians.org

This event is part of the Washington History Seminar series. It is cosponsored by the AHA and the Woodrow Wilson Center and features author Jayita Sarkar and commentators Tanvi Madan and David Holloway. Register here. 

India's nuclear program is often misunderstood as an inward-looking endeavor of secretive technocrats. In Ploughshares and Swords, Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom, narrating a global story of India's nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program's civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program to show how India's leaders concurrently served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries.

Jayita Sarkar is Associate Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. Her research and teaching areas are global and transnational histories of decolonisation, capitalism, nuclear infrastructures, and South Asia. Her book, Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022), is a finalist for the ISA Global Development Studies Book Award. She is currently writing, Atomic Capitalism: A Global History, for Princeton University Press.

David Holloway is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, a professor of political science at Stanford University, and an FSI senior fellow. He was co-director of CISAC from 1991 to 1997, and director of FSI from 1998 to 2003. His research focuses on the international history of nuclear weapons, on science and technology in the Soviet Union, and on the relationship between international history and international relations theory. His book Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 1994) was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 11 best books of 1994, and it won the Vucinich and Shulman prizes of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. 

Tanvi Madan is a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program, and director of The India Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Madan’s work explores India’s role in the world and its foreign policy, focusing in particular on India's relations with China and the United States. She also researches the U.S. and India’s approaches in the Indo-Pacific, as well as the development of interest-based coalitions, especially the Australia-India-Japan-U.S. Quad.