Recruitment and literacy in World War I: evidence from colonial Punjab

Most Indian soldiers were volunteers who could not read or write before they were recruited by the British but serving in a professional army provided opportunities to acquire new skills. Here Oliver Vanden Eynde writes about his research which suggests higher post-war literacy rates in heavily recruited areas can be attributed to informal learning opportunities in the army

India’s Naxalite conflict: understanding targeting strategies

Oliver Vanden Eynde finds that the tax base of India’s Naxalites influences rebel targeting strategies

Mining Royalties and Incentives for Security Operations: Evidence from India's Red Corridor

Can tax regimes shape the incentives of governments to engage in or support counterinsurgency operations? India’s Maoist belt contains a large share of the country’s most valuable mineral deposits. Indian mining royalties benefit the States, but they are set by the central government. States are largely responsible for counter-insurgency operations within their territory. Therefore, the royalty regime could shape the incentive of states to support counter-insurgency efforts ien mining areas. This paper exploits the introduction of a 10% ad valorem tax on iron ore that was responsible for a 10-fold increase in royalty collections by the affected State governments. In a panel of district-level violence outcomes between 2007 and 2011, I find that the royalty hike was followed by a significant intensification of State violence in those districts that contain deposits of iron ore. There is no such impact for the deposits of other key minerals that were not subject to the royalty hike: bauxite and coal. These results are consistent with states taking the fiscal value of districts into account when they decide on the intensity of security operations

Three essays on political economy and economic development

This thesis consists of three independent chapters. The first chapter examines the strategic choices of the targets and the intensity of violence by rebel groups. The chapter presents a theoretical framework that links a rebel group’s targeting decisions to income shocks. It highlights that this relationship depends on the structure of the rebels’ tax base. The hypotheses from the model are tested in the context of India’s Naxalite conflict. The second chapter estimates the impact of military recruitment on human capital accumulation in colonial Punjab. In this context, I find that higher military recruitment was associated with increased literacy at the district-religion level. The final chapter presents a model that describes the optimal design of civil-military institutions in a setting where some control of the military over domestic politics is deemed desirable

Bodies of the Weak: The Circulation of the Indigenous Dead in the British World, 1780-1880

Bodies of the Weak tells the intimate history of the encounter between British collectors, indigenous bodies, and the people to whom they belonged in the British World between 1780 and 1880. It traces the movement of indigenous bodies as scientific objects across the globe. A reconstruction of their histories within the decentralized framework of their circulation, rather than the centralized framework of their accumulation in Europe’s museums, reveals that these indigenous remains embodied several worlds simultaneously. The fragmentation of these indigenous bodies, the circulation of their parts and their transformation into the raw materials of European classifications, I suggest, do not only reflect difference, but also reveal what is shared in the history of colonial entanglement. Examining accession records, letter books, museum catalogues, and travel narratives, I trace how British collecting of indigenous bodies emerges as a constitutive, though at times silenced, element in the history of British colonialism in the nineteenth century. The extension and extent of British power depended on the ability of collectors to mobilize and reassemble the remains of the indigenous dead. Nevertheless, the acquisition and circulation of indigenous remains only rarely make it into the historiography of empire. In the nineteenth century, empirical evidence that indigenous peoples were rapidly vanishing from the face of the globe quickly became widespread and invigorated attempts to collect and record their passing. Observers soon understood that these were the bodies of the weak. The remains of the indigenous dead became “contact bodies,” objects around which collectors and indigenous men, women and children formed unsettled relationships and articulated unsettling meanings. The act of collecting was thus not only accumulative but also transgressive. Seen through the eyes of collectors of the indigenous dead and their indigenous interlocutors, the regime of classification British collectors carried with them on board Her Majesty’s men of war, survey vessels and steam ships appears not so much as a paragon of Britain’s hegemony in the world, but rather, and more importantly, as a testimony to the unsettled nature of the social categories upon which her power depended. Collectors of indigenous remains, rambling, ransacking and rummaging through human debris in search of the raw materials from which to construct elaborate natural classifications, ended up confusing the very boundaries they were trying to delineate. In the space between British dominance and open indigenous resistance, alternative forms of power and appropriation developed. Borrowing, confiscating, purchasing, stealing, conquering, bone collectors found that easy oppositions between “colonizer” and “colonized,” “powerful” and “powerless,” could not survive in the nineteenth-century drive to acquire indigenous body parts. Indigenous men, women and children did not surrender the remains of their loved ones without a fight. Nor did they blindly collaborate with European collectors. They often withheld crucial information, showed indifference to the objects for which British collectors were risking their lives, and ridiculed these visitors and their curious obsession with the remains of the indigenous dead. The bodies of the weak presented indigenous men and women with exceptional as well as everyday opportunities to challenge the social categories they were meant to embody, to resist the extension of British power and influence, and to articulate alternative meanings of these remains.PHDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147520/1/joostve_1.pd

Modelling of a stand alone photovoltaic system with dedicated hybrid battery energy storage system

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.The purpose of this thesis project was to model and simulate a stand-alone photovoltaic (PV) plant that utilized the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique and included a hybrid battery energy storage system (BESS). The model consisted of five main components namely; the photovoltaic module, maximum power point tracking technique, hybrid battery energy storage system, controller and load