Frank Perlin Virtual Memorial Meeting

You are cordially invited to an online meeting in memory of Prof. Frank Perlin (1939-2024) on 21 November 2024 at 4 pm CET (10 am EST ; 8.30 pm IST).

A specialist of the history of early modern South Asia, Frank Perlin’s work was at the intersection of social, economic and cultural history.  His research on state formation in western India, conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, was a unique contribution to the fundamental revision of the historiography of 17th and 18th century South Asia that was undertaken by a group of towering scholars including, apart from himself, Christopher Bayly, David Washbrook, Burton Stein, and others. Frank combined minute attention to the dynamics of village society with a painstaking examination of its multiple links to social “interfaces” at various levels even transcending the Indian subcontinent. His writings stood out in terms of theoretical ambition, were notorious as tough readings – an at times pained combination of empirical precision and philosophical musing that nevertheless has continued to inspire generations of South Asianists and historians. Collected under the title The invisible city (1993), his essays on state formation in early modern India did not require institutional propagation to become classic works of South Asian historiography. Frank Perlin also developed innovative perspectives on the seemingly well-explored histories of monetization and commodity exchange, which he approached both from a cultural and economic perspective in his book Unbroken Landscape (1994). He deepened his exploration of the history of commoditisation and commodity exchange prior to modern industrialisation in his last book, City Intelligible (2020), a thoroughgoing and profoundly original attempt to combine an empirical and historical anthropology with Kantian transcendental philosophy. Marshalling a diverse array of sources, the book made a case for the possibility of a universal – yet also irreducibly cultural – human nature that underlay dynamic processes of historical differentiation. As a philosophical treatment of empirical materials, City Intelligible marked an idiosyncratic yet highly creative attempt to conceptually reframe the ways in which we think about economic data. 

This memorial meeting brings together several generations of scholars, who will share their thoughts on Frank Perlin and his work.

Speakers: Prof. Ravi Ahuja, Prof. Jan Breman, Prof. Prachi Deshpande, Prof. Jan Lucassen, Prof. David Ludden and Nabhojeet Sen.

Moderation: Dr. Camille Buat and Dr. Anna Sailer.

Please register via labour_repository[at]cemis.uni-goettingen.de to receive the Zoom-Link.