Prof. Prasannan Parthasarathi

Prasannan Parthasarathi received a PhD in economics from Harvard and is Professor of South Asian History at Boston College.

He is the author of The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720-1800 (Cambridge, 2001), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles (Oxford, 2009), and Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence 1600-1850 (Cambridge, 2011), which received the Jerry Bentley Book Prize of the World History Association. He is now working on a study of environmental change in nineteenth-century South India and its impact on agriculture and livelihoods as well as exploring the implications of the Anthropocene for the writing of history.