Dr Ritu Birla is tenured Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. Her research and writing brings expertise on modern India and colonialism, political and social theory, and legal and gender studies to questions in the global history of capitalism, the history of law and economy, and the cultural and intellectual history of modernity.
Birla holds a BA in History and South Asian Studies (summa cum laude) from Columbia College, Columbia University, a second BA and MA from Cambridge University, where she held a Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship and a PhD in History from Columbia University.
Professor Birla is currently involved in a range of conversations on law, economy and global culture, including the Asian Futures Group at the Munk School for Global Affairs, University of Toronto, the Harvard Workshop on the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism, and the Sister Cities Project of the award-winning journal Public Culture (Duke University Press). A special issue of that journal presenting new academic approaches to Gandhi's thought and global presence, co-edited by Dr Birla and Dr Faisal Devji of Oxford University, will appear in Spring/Summer 2011.
Her new book, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Duke University Press, 2009; Orient BlackSwan, December 2010), uncovers the workings of colonial market governance and its distinctly new vision of Indian society as a market--as a public of exchanging, contracting economic actors.
A history of the unprecedented colonial legal standardization of commercial and financial practice, and of the negotiations of indigenous or vernacular capitalists with this market governance, Stages of Capital unpacks the governmental reasoning that distinguished economic from cultural practice, speculation from gambling, and public investment from private interest.
Noted for its groundbreaking method and content, the book is the winner of the
2010 Albion Book Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies, and has been applauded in a wide range of journals, including the Institute for Historical Research's (University of London) Reviews in History, the Business History Review (Harvard University Press), the Journal of Interdisciplinary History (MIT Press), The Law and History Review (Cambridge University Press), the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History (Johns Hopkins University Press), Enterprise and Society (Oxford University Press), and the Italian journal Studi Culturali (Il Mulino), among others.
Her recent articles have addressed the emergence of “culture” and “economy” as gendered categories of modern governing; the formation of the economic subject as precursor to the citizen; legal history and theory, especially the legal fictions of contract, kinship and group life; and history as critical practice.