Dr Aditya Balasubramanian

Aditya Balasubramanian is a Senior Lecturer at ANU's School of History, in the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS). His research focuses on various aspects of the history of political economy and environment in modern India. 

Aditya's first book, Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), is a history of economic ideas and politics (UK/US link South Asia link). It was shortlisted for the 2022 Elder Prize in the Social Sciences of the American Institute of Indian Studies and the 2024 W.K. Hancock Prize for best first monograph of the Australian Historical Association, and longlisted for the 2024 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Prize of the New India Foundation. A suite of peer-reviewed articles published over the last several years have interrogated various aspects of Indian political economy between the 1940s and the 1970s. Topics range from famine in Travancore, to the early history of Hindu nationalist economic thought, to anticorruption.

He is currently working on two book projects. The first is an environmental and economic history of roadbuilding and transport in India. Initial thoughts appeared in this post for the CHE's "Visualizing Climate and Loss" blog in October 2023. For this project, he received an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) for 2025-2028. The second is a history of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy of 1984. Drawing on various hitherto unused sources and accounts, it focuses on four key issues: capitalist profitability, intergenerational health effects, environmental damage, and struggles for justice. It aims to offer a comprehensive, new account of the world's largest industrial disaster.

In addition to these projects, he is completing two articles. The first is an essay on the controversial history of eucalyptus and forest management in India which explores how postcolonial developmental aspirations have introduced a tension between fuelwood and industrial demands on the forest. It critiques the concept of the "environmentalism of the poor" and challenges dominant approaches to understanding expertise in development. The second offers a microhistorical critique of approaches to the study of the connected history of the Bay of Bengal. It draws from a personal collection of over 500 pages of letters in English and Malayalam exchanged between his maternal grandfather based in Batavia as a typist during the Great Depression, and extended family in Malabar.

Aditya teaches or has has taught courses on historical methods, environmental history, and the history of political economy at ANU.  His teaching has been recognized with nominations for College and University-wide prizes.  He is the Deputy Director of ANU's Center for Environmental History and founded the ANU Capitalism Studies Network  with Will Bateman (Law) and Melinda Cooper (Sociology). He is completing a second term as Board Member of the South Asia Research Institute (2020-2021, 2024-6). From 2018 to 2024, he created and coordinated the Archives of Economic Life in South and Southeast Asia website (you can learn more about it in this Toynbee Prize Blog interview).

AB (Harvard College), MPhil, PhD (Trinity College, Cambridge)

history of modern South and Southeast Asia; energy and environmental history; material histories of consumption and culture; history of ideas