Jute and Peasant Life in Colonial Bengal
An online seminar by Tariq Omar Ali
Wednesday, 17 September 2025, 6.30-8.30 pm
You are invited to participate in this interactive seminar on a largely neglected but vital topic. Until recent research by Tariq Omar Ali on the history of jute cultivation in rural Bengal, we knew very little about the place of Bengali peasants within the global jute trade of the British Empire and the impacts of that on them. His book, titled A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta, provides the first detailed accounts of the lives of Bengali peasant jute cultivators during the various phases of the worldwide jute trade of the British Empire spanning from the 19th century to the 20th century.
This event has been organised to complement the project completion celebration of ‘Jute, the golden fibre of Bengal and a British Empire Monopoly: how the sweat of Bengali cultivators facilitated the expansion of the trade of the British Empire (1840-1950)’ – an initiative by Stepney Community Trust and supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Tariq Omar Ali is a historian of South Asia, specialising in economic and agrarian history from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. He is an associate professor in the School of Foreign Services at Georgetown University. His first book, Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta, was published by Princeton University Press in 2018. He is currently working on a book about the formation of the postcolonial East Bengali economy in the aftermath of partition and independence, told through histories of river steamboats, agrarian homesteads, and the Tripura borderlands.
For further details and to book a place, please email heritageproject@stepney.org.uk
The event is free!
