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Joshua Ehrlich is a historian of knowledge and political thought with interests in the British Empire, the East India Company, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean world. He is currently Associate Professor of History at the University of Macau. He received his PhD and MA from Harvard University and his BA from the University of Chicago.
Ehrlich’s first book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2023) reveals how the Company used its commitment to knowledge to justify its commercial and political power. It advances a new approach – the history of ideas of knowledge – to recover a world of debate among Indian and European thinkers on the political uses of knowledge. (For two interviews about the book, see here and here.)
His current book project, The Indian Ocean World in the First Global Age of Print, documents a flood of printed matter across the Indian Ocean prior to 1800. It argues that indigenous inhabitants engaged widely and deeply with this matter and did so largely on their own initiative. It uncovers crucial early modern influences on the region’s “modern” cultural, political, and intellectual movements. And it reconstructs an essential yet hitherto neglected chapter in the global history of print – one that is particularly instructive at the current moment of transition to a post-print age.
Ehrlich’s other research – on topics including the boundaries and boundedness of port cities, the making and unmaking of libraries through plunder, the crisis of liberal reform in India, and the origins of Indian print culture – has appeared in journals including Past & Present, The Historical Journal, Modern Asian Studies, and Modern Intellectual History.
Ehrlich welcomes applications from prospective PhD students who share any of the research interests listed below. |
