Oct 2, 2025, 12 pm CT
Imagining and Producing the Pakistani Economy in East Bengal, 1940-1950.
The talk examines the co-constitution of the Pakistani economy in partitioned East Bengal in the sphere of ideas and discourse, on the one hand, and in the material realm of production and labour, on the other. In the realm of discourse, I show how the Pakistani economy was imagined as a statistical entity by scholars and technocrats prior to partition, in debates on the future Muslim state’s economic viability and, after independence, during postcolonial Pakistan’s protracted application for membership in the IMF. In the material realm, I examine the division of river steamers and waterways that had constituted the colonial economy of Bengal and Assam between their national economies of India and Pakistan. I focus on how Bengali Muslim workers on steamers negotiated and resisted efforts to partition their workplaces.
Tariq Omar Ali is a historian and associate professor in the School of Foreign Services, Georgetown University. His first book, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta was published by Princeton University Press in 2018. He is currently working on a monograph on the formation of the Pakistani economy in East Bengal in the immediate aftermath of partition and independence.