India, the world’s most populous nation, stands at a crossroads.
With more than 1.4 billion people, the fifth-largest economy on the planet and geopolitics that make it potentially preferrable to China as a destination for investment, India has rarely faced such a confluence of opportunity and peril. A generation after liberalization transformed its economy, India is again confronting a turning point shaped by artificial intelligence, fractured globalization, climate risk, youth unemployment, rising inequality and a changing world order.
Kaushik Basu, the Carl Marks Professor of International Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) and the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, is a co-author of “The Indian Economy: Navigating a Global Turning Point,” released Aug. 27 (Simon & Schuster). Basu and co-authors offer an assessment of where India stands and what it must do next.
It is one of three new books from Cornell professors; other new offerings include “Heritage Forensics: Culture on the Front Lines of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict,” released July 15; and “Troop Movements: Labor, Race, and Global Freedom Struggles in America’s World War II,” set for release on Sept. 22.
“The Indian Economy” examines that nation’s development journey, from the early decades of planning and the commanding role of the state, through the liberalization of the 1990s, to the unresolved dilemmas of today’s lower-middle-income market economy.
Threading through contributions from leading economists, business leaders and policy thinkers is a single pressing question: Can India convert its demographic scale, technological capabilities, entrepreneurial energy and geopolitical opening into a model of development that creates good jobs, expands human capabilities, strengthens institutions and shares the gains of globalization and technology more widely?
Basu was chief economist of the World Bank from 2012-16; from 2009-12, during the United Progressive Alliance’s second term as India’s ruling party, he served as chief economic adviser to the government of India.
Co-authors include Sonalde Desai, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland; Ashwini Deshpande, professor and chair of economics at Ashoka University, India; and Nirvikar Singh, professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“Heritage Forensics”
Since 2021, Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) has used satellite technology and other forensic techniques to document past and ongoing abuses of cultural heritage in the South Caucasus region, where Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought for decades over territory.
Even with a 2020 ceasefire in place, the damage and destruction of cultural sites – churches, mosques, monasteries, cemeteries and other monuments spanning centuries – continues.
In “Heritage Forensics” (Cornell University Press), CHW researchers including Lori Khatchadourian, professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies (A&S), and Adam T. Smith, the Henry Scarborough Professor of Social Science in the Department of Anthropology (A&S), describe their new framework for studying cultural heritage in war zones, drawing on the investigative reports of the Nagorno-Karabakh wars CHW released between 2021 and 2025.
The book combines satellite-based spatial analysis with humanistic research and humanitarian concern to document the impact of the protracted conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan on the medieval and modern “heritagescape” of the South Caucasus.
According to Khatchadourian, their book creates “an authoritative record of what is known at a particular moment,” while also developing new methods and theories for addressing cultural heritage that is threatened by war, bigotry and secrecy.
Other co-authors are Ian Lindsay, associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University; and political geographer Husik Ghulyan, a research associate with the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies (A&S).
“Troop Movements”
World War II is perceived in the popular imagination as the last great moment of national consensus, when the United States was united around the collective purpose of battling a clear enemy whose aim was global dominance.
The government led an unprecedented mobilization, building an international military force through which the country soon became the preeminent world power. In the context of this mobilization, the military brought together disparate sectors of workers – all enmeshed in struggles over workers’ rights and civil rights in the wake of the Great Depression and New Deal.
In “Troop Movements” (University of Pennsylvania Press), Tejasvi Nagaraja, assistant professor of labor history in Cornell’s ILR School, explains how this mobilization for world war – involving soldiers and defense workers – provided an opportunity for entangled experiences and alliances across race, class and global concerns. In the process, this anti-fascist mobilization and the reactions to it catalyzed the national and international political movements and conflicts of the postwar period.
Nagaraja, whose research and teaching explore the intersections of U.S. labor and African American and foreign relations history, synthesizes diverse sources – from the U.S. Army and U.K. Colonial Office archives to records from labor unions and civil rights organizations – to reconstruct this story of top-down and bottom-up movements. To understand the entwined history of labor unions and big corporations, Jim Crow laws and civil rights, U.S. empire and the military industrial complex, he says, their entanglement during World War II must be accounted for.
“Troop Movements” traces the origins of postwar America’s domestic and foreign politics to this crucible of worldwide war, with a mass workforce at its heart.
