Murari Kumar Jha

About

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University, Gujarat, India, specializing in early modern (c. 1500–1800) South Asian history. I was trained in history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Leiden University, the Netherlands, and have held postdoctoral fellowships at the Department of History, National University of Singapore, and the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University.

My research adopts an interdisciplinary approach, integrating environmental factors to explain historical change. My forthcoming monograph, The Ganga River and Mughal India: Economy, Environment and Empire, c. 1500–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2026), analyses the commercial integration of eastern India with the Indian Ocean global economy and its implications for the Mughal Empire.

I am currently developing my next project on the Indian Ocean, focusing on the intersection of environment and economy during the so-called Little Ice Age (c. 1400–1850).

Employment

• Ahmedabad University Assistant Professor
  2019 - Present
• Harvard University Visiting Fellow
  2018 - 2019
• Nalanda University Assistant Professor
  2015 - 2018
• National University of Singapore Research Fellow
  2013 - 2014
• Leiden University Assistent in Opleiding (AIO)
  2009 - 2013

Education

• Universiteit Leiden MPhil
  2007 - 2009

Projects & Funding

Projects & funding information is unavailable.

Publications (7)

• Sugar in eastern India: Commercial agriculture and the Indian Ocean trade, c. 1600–1800
  The Indian Economic and Social History Review 2025 DOI: 10.1177/00194646251386190
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• Imagining Asia (s): Networks, Actors, Sites
  2019
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• In Pursuit of Knowledge from Asia: François Valentijn on the Hindu Social Divisions in the Coromandel Region, c. Seventeenth--Eighteenth Century
  Imagining Asia (s): Networks, Actors, Sites 2019
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• "South Asia, 1400 - 1800: The Mughal Empire and Turco-Persianate Imperial Tradition in the Indian Subcontinent"
  Empire in Asia: A New Global History 2018
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• Steamboats on the Indus: The Limits of Western Technological Superiority in South Asia, by Clive Dewey: New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2014, xvii+ 296 pp.(including maps, figures, 59 coloured and black and white plates, appendix and glossary), Rs2, …
  2016
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• Migration, settlement, and state formation in the Ganga plain: A historical geographic perspective
  Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 2014 DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341359
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• The social world of Gujarati merchants and their Indian Ocean networks in the seventeenth century
  The South Asian Diaspora: Transnational Networks and Changing Identities 2008 DOI: 10.4324/9780203892350
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