Dr Aditya Balasubramanian

Aditya Balasubramanian is a Senior Lecturer (equivalent of junior Associate Professor outside Australia) 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 and the world. 

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 India's role in the international economic order, famine in Travancore during World War II, Hindu nationalist economic thought and policy, and anticorruption.

He is currently working on two projects. The first is an environmental and economic history of roadbuilding and transport in India. Initial thoughts appeared in this post for the Harvard Center for History and Economics' "Visualizing Climate and Loss" blog in October 2023. During 2025-2028, he is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) for this project. 

The second is a synthetic history of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy of 1984, the world's largest industrial disaster. This project is especially concerned with failures of relief and rehabilitation, chronic illnesses, and ongoing environmental pollution.

He is also completing two article projects. The first is an essay on the controversial international history of eucalyptus and forest management in India. The second focuses on clerical migration during the Great Depression to offer a microhistorical critique of predominant approaches to the study of the Bay of Bengal.

At ANU, Aditya teaches or has taught historical methods, environmental history, the history of political economy, and South Asian history.  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).