Research and Scholarly Work

Mircea Raianu's new book, "Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism," tells the story of a small business that, over 150 years, had both struggles and success as it grew to become one of the most powerful companies in India.

Nearly a century old, the grand façade of Bombay House is hard to miss in the historic business district of Mumbai. This is the iconic global headquarters of the Tata Group, a multinational corporation that produces everything from salt to software. After getting their start in the cotton and opium trades, the Tatas, a Parsi family from Navsari, Gujarat, ascended to commanding heights in the Indian economy by the time of independence in 1947. Over the course of its 150-year history Tata spun textiles, forged steel, generated hydroelectric power, and took to the skies. It also faced challenges from restive workers fighting for their rights and political leaders who sought to curb its power.

In this sweeping history, Mircea Raianu tracks the fortunes of a family-run business that was born during the high noon of the British Empire and went on to capture the world’s attention with the headline-making acquisition of luxury car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover. The growth of Tata was a complex process shaped by world historical forces: the eclipse of imperial free trade, the intertwined rise of nationalism and the developmental state, and finally the return of globalization and market liberalization. Today Tata is the leading light of one of the world’s major economies, selling steel, chemicals, food, financial services, and nearly everything else, while operating philanthropic institutions that channel expert knowledge in fields such as engineering and medicine.

Based on painstaking research in the company’s archive, Tata elucidates how a titan of industry was created and what lessons its story may hold for the future of global capitalism.

The book is available on Amazon here or on the publisher's website here.

By Piotr H. Kosicki

Are Roman Catholics seeking to bring down American democracy? This might seem a strange question to pose during the presidency of Joe Biden, only the second Roman Catholic ever to govern the United States. Yet, try counting the number of times in the course of this Supreme Court term that Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Amy Coney Barrett have clearly revealed themselves to be fundamentalist Catholics. Much ink was spilled during Barrett’s confirmation process over the likely consequences of the Catholic hyper-majority she would assure on SCOTUS. If we count the Catholic-baptized Gorsuch, the hyper-majority is undeniable: seven, in a court of nine. But the problem isn’t Catholicism itself (Sonia Sotomayor, after all, is one of those seven, and she practices the religion); it’s a nativist, nationalist, racist, sexist Catholic authoritarianism that now holds sway among the majority of lifetime appointees to the highest appellate authority in the republic.

Back in May, Justice Alito’s infamous leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health was already a moralistic, dangerous exercise in reactionary judicial activism. With the official decision striking down Roe v. Wade, Alito’s screed has become the law of the land. The final weeks of this last SCOTUS term represented one body blow after another to church/state separation in the United States: from Dobbs to the Kennedy v. Bremerton School District decision on prayer in public schools. This is a new era of judicial rollback, and if Clarence Thomas’s lone-wolf concurrent opinion from Dobbs is to be taken seriously—and clearly, it should be—the court is coming next for contraception, same-sex marriage, and a host of other social rights that we who thought we dwelled in the 21st century regarded as settled precedent. Unfortunately for democracy, SCOTUS seems most comfortable in the 19th century.

Understanding how Roe was overturned after nearly 50 years of dogged efforts by activists from Phyllis Schlafly to future justice Alito himself demands that we step back for a moment from our understandable outrage. This is not just about Alito, nor even just about the Supreme Court. For Catholic anti-liberals like Barrett or her Notre Dame colleague Patrick Deneen, it was wrong of George Washington not to be more like George III. The yeoman farmers of Andrew Jackson’s time should be the American gold standard—not 20th-century suburbanites, and certainly not 21st-century urban millennials. Tolerance is tantamount to sin, and pluralism is a betrayal of the model of authority handed down by God himself: rule by executive decree. After John F. Kennedy ran away from his Catholicism while president, a faction of Catholics looking for a starring role in American public life reinvented themselves and laid the foundation for what ultimately became known as the Reagan coalition. But four decades after that coalition was born, Donald Trump awakened its worst demons with his authoritarian impulses. What was once taboo in the United States—an elected executive aspiring to long-term autocratic rule—became an attractive opportunity.

Barrett’s appointment as associate justice may have, in practical terms, tipped the balance for generations to come against a woman’s right to choose, but the deeper story should not center on any one justice or politician but instead on the tide of Catholic anti-liberalism that has been rising for years. If we have any hope of restoring a woman’s right to choose or, more immediately, of protecting contraception and marriage equality, we need to expose the Catholic authoritarianism that now grips the reins of the republic.Questioning certain Catholics’ impact on American public life might smack of old-school anti-Catholicism in a country with a history of Protestant hegemony. Anti-Catholic prejudice kept Democratic candidate Al Smith from beating Herbert Hoover for the US presidency in 1928, and fueled many of the detractors of JFK in his ultimately successful bid in 1960. But, to be clear, anti-Catholicism in 19th- and 20th-century America was predicated on the suspicion that Catholics were serving a foreign power, the Vatican, whose interests would be at odds with our own—in other words, of being a fifth column within the US republic. It was nativism—anti-Irish, anti-Italian, anti-Polish, and later anti-Mexican sentiment—that drove these fears from the start, and that nativism still resonates loudly today, even among the progeny of some of those 19th- and 20th-century Catholic immigrants.

Anti-Catholic bias in the United States meant one thing in an era when the Vatican named an entire heresy—“Americanism” (1899)—after the country. But much has changed in the intervening century. One month before Biden won the presidency, Pope Francis published Fratelli tutti, a revolutionary document intended precisely as a defense of democracy. The aging pope’s moral authority has since taken one blow after another—on abuse of Indigenous children in Catholic residential schools across Canada, on his apparently neutral stance between Russia and Ukraine—but at least when it came to Donald Trump, Francis made clear where he stood. It stands to reason, then, that Roman Catholics who painted Trump during his presidency as the savior of the United States, and who decry “the steal” and herald his return to power in 2024, stand squarely opposed to the successor of Saint Peter. Politicians can now substantially boost their populist credentials by appealing to the Roman Catholic masses in a way that has never before been so split between left and right. As of June, President Biden faced a 53 percent disapproval rating among Catholics. And that disapproval cleaves even further along racial lines: Only 36 percent of self-identifying white Catholics approve of their Catholic president’s record. The result is a US Catholic demographic that, while split between parties, is shifting further to the right—a shift on which Trump is counting for 2024.

Of course, not all right-leaning Catholics would identify as “integralists,” the favored term of Harvard law professor (and fervent Trumpist) Adrian Vermeule. When Vermeule uses this word, he draws on a long line of anti-Enlightenment, anti-liberal Catholic thinkers, from Joseph de Maistre to Carl Schmitt. Integralists are wistful for a time when it was not just okay to be a monarchist but in fact all orthodox Catholics understood (per the 1864 Syllabus of Errors, if nothing else) that liberalism paved the road to Hell. Rome turned away from this kind of thinking already in the mid-20th century; in the 21st century, it seems downright heretical. After all, rejecting liberalism and multiculturalism also means rejecting the turn to freedom of conscience by the church itself, promulgated by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s (a massive ecumenical undertaking designed to update church practices for a newly secularized world, which, among other things, elevated the dignity of the laity and promoted interfaith dialogue).

In 21st-century Hungary and Poland, so-called “Christian nationalists” like Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński have become icons of Christian illiberalism, going so far as to insist that their brand of “illiberal” (their word) democracy is the wave of future, and the only brand of democracy reconcilable with salvation in Christ. It is no accident that, prior to the abrogation of Roe, Poland played host to the latest rollback of a woman’s right to choose, following a constitutional court decision in late 2020 eviscerating already-limited abortion protections. Poland’s was an important precedent, and one that has been lost in the more-than-justified outrage over Dobbs: Dobbs is not about the nine people who make up SCOTUS, nor even just about the United States, but instead about Americans leading a global stampede of Catholic authoritarians.

In the US midterm elections, the infamous J.D. Vance of Ohio now stands at the vanguard of Catholics who, in committing to a new brand of American fascism, are also choosing one of the most morally repugnant presidents in US history over the Roman Catholic pontiff. Ginni Thomas, wife of the presumptive mastermind of SCOTUS’s hard-right turn, has now famously been unmasked as another American Catholic trumpeter of the righteousness of Trumpist insurrection. For them, January 6 was not treason but a moral necessity. In other words, strongman tactics are justified because they are a more honest reflection of God-given values.

It is the project of restoring an American “people” in the sense akin to the German Volk—relentlessly discriminatory, with echoes of fascism that the Catholic authoritarians no longer bother to disguise—that drives the passion behind Alito’s angry opinion reversing Roe, and Vance’s toadying praise of Trump and the January 6 insurrectionists. Ending women’s right to choose is only the first step. Individual Supreme Court justices and Trumpist candidates for office matter, but they can be understood only as part of a tidal wave of Catholic authoritarianism sweeping 21st-century America. Anti-liberal Catholics with elite appointments are successfully harnessing the growing disaffection of—and promoting a revival of nativism and racism among—US Catholics who feel that pluralism has sold out their political and economic interests while leaving them morally compromised.

The goal is an American democracy that is Catholic, but not in the service of Rome (especially not Pope Francis’s Rome). Instead, the Catholicism of Clarence Thomas and of J.D. Vance is distinctly American. Theirs is a democracy without pluralism and without liberalism—a democracy more in tune with Poland or Hungary than with the majority of the American electorate. This is how Donald J. Trump became—counterintuitively, but certainly not inexplicably—the savior of “democracy” for a whole different coalition of American thinkers, public servants, and voters. This is how Roe v. Wade was doomed—and it is how Trump could become president once again in 2024.

Dr. Caroline Eades, an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies and French, has won the prestigious Residency Fellowship at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. Dr. Eades will spend time at the Camargo Foundation during the Spring 2023 semester. The residency will support her current research project, "Habib Benglia: An Invisible and Omnipresent Figure of the Other in French Cinema," which consists in examining the contributions of the first actor of African origin in French Cinema and puts Benglia's career in parallel with the history of live performance and modern theater on the French stage from 1912 to 1960.    

By Jessica Weiss ’05

University of Maryland Professor of History Sarah Cameron, an expert on Russia and the Soviet Union, has been awarded $200,000 as a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic organization, today announced the 28 fellows, who will use the funding to support significant research and writing in the social sciences and humanities that address important and enduring issues confronting society. Professor of Sociology Rashawn Ray, based in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, whose research focuses largely on police reform, is also among this year’s recipients. They are the second and third UMD faculty members to receive the honor since its 2015 launch, following History Professor Richard Bell in 2021.

Cameron’s stipend will support historical research on one of the 20th century’s gravest environmental catastrophes: the shrinking of the Aral Sea. Located between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south and once one of the world’s largest inland bodies of water, the sea began to decline dramatically in the late 1960s when Soviet officials directed large volumes of water toward cotton production, devastating communities in the region. Today, water levels in some parts of the sea are partially restored.

Cameron plans to publish the first complete book-length account of the causes and effects of the disaster based upon archival materials and oral history interviews.

“I am thrilled and very grateful for the support of the Carnegie Corporation,” Cameron said. “This gives me the time and resources to do justice to a significant, understudied history that offers important lessons both for policymakers and the broader public.”

Cameron also recently received fellowships for the same project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and Princeton University's Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, as well as a grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.

Her first book, “The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan,” won four book awards and two honorable mentions. “The Hungry Steppe” told the little-known story of one of the most abominable crimes of the Stalin years—between 1930 and 1933, more than 1.5 million people, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, perished due to a state-driven campaign that forced a rural, nomadic population into collective farms and factories and confiscated their livestock. The book, which was translated into Russian and Kazakh, was the top-selling history title in Kazakhstan in 2020 and prompted an outpouring of local debate about the country’s Soviet past; Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, now president of Kazakhstan, thanked Cameron for the book on Twitter.

Her research on the Aral Sea is a continuation of efforts to spotlight the stories of nomadic peoples, in their own voices, as many of the people who lived near the sea before the disaster—Turkic-speaking Kazakhs, Karakalpaks and others—were mobile. Cameron speaks Russian and several vernacular languages of the region.

After water levels declined, local populations saw a dramatic increase in health problems due to pesticides and toxins from the exposed seabed. Moscow recognized the scope of the crisis in 1989, declaring an area covering parts of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan with a population of more than 3.5 million people an “ecological disaster zone.”

Chemists, hydrologists, geographers and others have developed a body of scientific literature on the Aral Sea. In addition to sharing an in-depth history, Cameron plans to focus on the present-day implications of the disaster, including the need to find more sustainable methods to produce cotton.

“This is very much a story about climate change, about water use, about our relationship with cotton,” Cameron said. “As droughts and rising temperatures affect the globe, the Aral Sea crisis offers us a warning of what might occur elsewhere and the measures that we urgently need to take to avert that fate.”

Read more about the 2022 Carnegie Fellows in Maryland Today.

Photo courtesy of iStock.

By Rachael Grahame ’17 and Jessica Weiss ’05

Two University of Maryland professors are among 28 distinguished scholars and writers today named 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellows, an honor that comes with a $200,000 award.

The Carnegie Corporation, a philanthropic organization, provides each fellow with the funding to produce major works or studies over the next two years that contribute to the social sciences or humanities. Sociologist Rashawn Ray and historian Sarah Cameron are the second and third UMD faculty members to receive the honor since its 2015 launch, following history Professor Richard Bell last year.

“I am elated and deeply honored,” said Ray, who is also executive director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research at UMD. “But accordingly, I realize that this is just an additional step to keep doing the work.”

Much of Ray’s recent scholarship—from working with Google to develop virtual reality trainings for police officers to studying the impact of Black Lives Matter protests via a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation—concerns police reform; his research earned him an award earlier this year from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

With his Carnegie fellowship, he plans to develop a national database that grades states’ progress on introducing and passing police reform legislation in line with the yet-to-be-passed George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

His database will live on the website of the Brookings Institution, where he is a fellow and which nominated him for the Carnegie fellowship; it will be accompanied by a policy report, book and op-eds.

Cameron’s Carnegie stipend will support historical research on one of the 20th century’s gravest environmental catastrophes: the shrinking of the Aral Sea. Bisected by the border between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south and once one of the world’s largest inland bodies of water, the sea began to decline dramatically in the late 1960s when Soviet officials directed large volumes of water toward cotton production, devastating communities in the region. Today, water levels in some parts of the sea are partially restored.

Chemists, hydrologists, geographers and others have developed a body of scientific literature on the Aral Sea, but she plans to publish the first complete book-length account of the causes and effects of the disaster based upon archival materials and oral history interviews.

Cameron also recently received fellowships for the same project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and Princeton University's Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, as well as a grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Her first book, “The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan,” won four book awards and two honorable mentions.

“I am thrilled and very grateful for the support of the Carnegie Corporation,” Cameron said. “This gives me the time and resources to do justice to a significant, understudied history that offers important lessons both for policymakers and the broader public.”