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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History
Episode: William J. Glover, "Reformatting Agrararian Life: Urban History from the Countryside in Colonial India" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Description: Reformatting Agrarian Life presents a stealth urban history from the countryside that foregrounds the mutual entanglements of agrarian and urban expertise. William J. Glover traces an essential genealogy for understanding how urbanism unexpectedly left the city in late colonial India and began to settle in agrarian space, exploring how two milieus that were initially seen as distinct were gradually brought together both conceptually and in practices of ordinary life. He argues that rural change and the expert knowledge associated with managing the countryside in colonial India opened paths for urban concepts and forms to permeate agrarian settings where they w...