Teaching the World with WIRC Webinar: India in the World: 1776 in a South Asian Context
Mou Banerjee, UW-Madison Associate Professor of History
Zoom
February 15, 2027 @ 10:00 am – 11:15 am
Teaching the World with WIRC is a new webinar series for K-14 educators interested in integrating global perspectives on a central theme in their curriculum. Presented by members of UW-Madison’s Wisconsin International Resource Consortium, the theme for 2026-2027 is The World in 1776.
About the webinar: Mou Banerjee, UW-Madison Associate Professor of History, will explain how India was at a crossroads in 1776. As the American War of Independence began and Britain’s First great Empire was on the verge of being lost, India was being bound tightly into a system of extractive colonization. It was emerging from a famine that had devastated its richest province, and was seeing the final decline of the post-Mughal Maratha powers and continental East India Companies. It was also being integrated into a land-revenue system devised by the English EIC that would lead to the invention of modern poverty for a nation which once commanded about a fourth of the world’s GDP. India therefore was well on its way towards becoming the second and greatest Second British Empire. Within another two decades, the independent US deputed Boston merchant Benjamin Joy to Calcutta as the first US Consul in India, and a relationship would develop that would lead to the rise of India’s first millionaire, Ramdulal Dey, in whose historic house, a portrait of Washington still hangs. The fates of India and the US were embraided very early on, and that relationship, of common origins as Britain’s colonies, also fostered hope in India about eventual emancipation. Her lecture will explore some of these linkages, from 1776 to India’s independence and beyond. Time will be reserved for Q&A and participant discussion of strategies for integrating the webinar information and recommended resources in their teaching.
About the speaker: Mou Banerjee, Harvard ’18, is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her first book, The Disinherited: Christianity and Conversion in Colonial India, 1813-1907, was published in January 2025 from Harvard University Press. The book-project is an intellectual and political history of the creation of the Indian political self – a self that emerged through an often-oppositional relationship with evangelical Christianity and the apologetic debates arising out of such engagements. Her research has appeared in multiple journals such as the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS), the journal Political Theology, Perspectives on History of the AHA, etc. She has also written for newspapers and periodicals such as The Telegraph and the Anandabazar Patrika of India and The Daily Star of Bangladesh. At UW-Madison, she runs the Nonviolence Project, which highlights student research on civil rights and nonviolent movements across the world. Her research was funded by the award of the 2013 SSRC-IDRF dissertation research fellowship which enabled me to conduct research at multiple archives in the UK, in India and in Bangladesh. Her dissertation received the Harold K. Gross award, which is granted annually by the faculty of the History Department at Harvard to the graduate student whose dissertation ‘gave greatest promise of a distinguished career of historical research.”
Her second book, under contract with Juggernaut Press, India, is an intellectual history of the life and times of the pioneering Indian social reformer Raja Rammohan Roy.
Her research interests include the religion and politics in India, the history of gender, hunger and food politics, and the history of borders and immigration in colonial South Asia. Prior to her appointment at UW-Madison, she was College fellow at the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard in 2018 and Assistant Professor of History at Clemson University in 2018-19.
Education Standards: This year’s Teaching the World with WIRC webinar series supports the America250 Wisconsin Commission and Act 95 requirements for educational programming commemorating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.
Accessibility Accommodations: If you have any questions about accessibility or wish to request accommodations, please contact wirc@iris.wisc.edu. Typically, a two weeks’ notice will allow us to provide access.