Stanford Humanities Center
Eduardo Acosta received his PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2022. He is a historian of early modern South Asia, working at the intersection of conceptual and environmental history in Eastern India. His research and teaching focus on processes of temporalization and historical periodization, especially the coinage and use of the concept of the "medieval" outside Europe.
SHC Project
A River of Ruined Capitals: History and Environmental Change in Early Modern Bengal
Acostaʼs book project investigates how the rivers and the natural landscape of Bengal inflected the understanding of historical time in the early colonial period, by paying attention to the deep imbrication between human and riverine history in Bengal. This book seeks to historicize the convoluted and non-linear processes by which the natural and historical were conceived as different and separate orders of time. The book will show how this divide between natural and historical time stemmed not only from the Enlightenment quest to dominate nature, but also from the colonial endeavor to know, control and profit from foreign and alien lands. The book will ultimately argue that this division of temporal orders allowed the British colonial administration to justify the colonial enterprise, for the unwieldy nature of Bengal’s rivers in the past became a marker of the inadequacy and powerlessness of so-called “medieval” regimes in the region.
