Anand Yang

Anand Yang began his career specializing in South Asian History, specifically relating to colonial India. In recent years, Yang's interests have increasingly become more comparative and global, comparisons and connections involving India, China, and other world regions. 

Yang's early scholarship dealt with peasants and agrarian societies under British colonial rule. One outcome of that work, based on archival research and fieldwork conducted in the north Indian state of Bihar, was a book on The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India (UC Press, 1989). From the outset, Yang also sought to pursue social history through the study of law and criminality, his initial foray into that realm concentrating on the ways in which colonial states deployed legal and criminal justice systems to criminalize certain social groups.

Research/Teaching Areas: Comparative Colonialisms, Modern Asia, South Asia, World History, Global Poverty, Foreign Policy

Current Projects: Yang has recently completed two books. The first is a study entitled Empire of Convicts (UC Press, 2021) that narrates the laboring stories of Indians who were banished to penal colonies in Southeast Asia for their criminal and/or political activities. The second is an annotated translation (with Kamal and Ranjana Sheel) of Thirteen Months in China (OUP, 2017), a remarkable book written in Hindi by an Indian subaltern who helped suppress the Boxer Uprising in China in 1900-1901. Yang's next two book projects are on the north Indian labor diaspora across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and the Caribbean; and a memoir-cum-history of New Delhi in the early 1960s.