Isas Departmental's video: Matthew Shutzer Law Capital and Subterranean Property in India s Energy Frontier 1870 1975

October 20, 2020 Speaker: Matthew Shutzer, Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy, UC Berkeley. Moderator: Sharad Chari, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, UC Berkeley The Institute for South Asia Studies invites you to a talk by historian of modern South Asia and the Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy at UC Berkeley, Dr. Matthew Shutzer. _________________ Abstract: This talk will examine the mutations of “subterranean property” as a legal concept in colonial and postcolonial India, with specific attention to the grounded history of property in the coal formations of the Barakar and Damodar river valleys. I will argue that prior to the breakdown of the zamindari property system under India’s land reforms of the 1950s, claims to coal property were justified through an exceptional jurisprudence that allowed for the de facto displacement of adibasi (Indigenous) and lower-caste cultivating communities from the land. At variance with both institutionalist accounts of property rights and histories of legal pluralism, I show how this jurisprudence of subterranean right was not simply a discursive effect of colonial and early postcolonial law-making, but represented evolving normative claims associated with “customary” landed privileges that mining firms and large landowners used to control the resources of the region. This jurisprudential legacy shaped subsequent efforts by the postcolonial state in claiming India’s coal resources as the sovereign property of the nation-state, a project that accelerated with the nationalization of the coal mines by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during the global economic turbulence of the 1970s. Speaker Bio: Matthew Shutzer is an historian of modern South Asia. He researches and teaches on issues relating to the environment, science and technology, economic development, global Indigenous studies, and the politics of resource extraction. His current book project is focused on the interlocking histories of fossil fuels, capitalism, and state power in colonial and postcolonial India. At present, he is a Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Shutzer received his Ph.D. from New York University in 2019. Prior to his doctoral work, he was part of a land tenure titling project in the eastern Indian state of Odisha in partnership with governmental and civil society organizations in India and the United Kingdom. Portions of this research have been published as a chapter in Staking Claims: The Politics of Social Movements in Contemporary Rural India (Oxford University Press, 2016). Dr. Shutzer has published and presented on energy history and the contemporary geographies of fossil fuel value chains in a variety of outlets. Some of this writing can be found in the online magazine, Warscapes. He has also recently written on the archives of energy history for “The Archives of Economic Life in South and Southeast Asia,” hosted by Cambridge University’s Center for History and Economics, which can be found here.