Ankit Chowdhury

Cold-War Dependencies: Labour, Technology and Ecology in Postcolonial Global South

The project aims to investigate how postcolonial industrialization can generate strong asymmetrical dependencies (SAD) through the entanglement of labour, technology, and ecology in the Global South. In particular, the research will ask how the transfer of technological knowledge, machinery, and capital have shaped the labour hierarchies and uneven access to resources and social mobility. While it will also examine how toxic residues, mineral extractions, and deforestation have reshaped health, mortality, and livelihoods by producing long-term vulnerabilities beyond factory floor. After that, the research will focus on two steel towns from India and Brazil, which were flagship public sector projects constructed and benefited through Cold War era collaboration. Hence, by locating these two towns, the study intends to show how the Cold War was materially mediated in the industrial Global South and how these processes have created enduring asymmetries that continue to shape present inequalities in those regions, especially under the framework of BRICS. Therefore, through a comparative and historically grounded approach, the study aims to analyse these steel towns at three interconnected loci: the local (workplace and neighbourhood), the regional (labour mobility, infrastructural integration, resource extraction), and the global (geopolitics, developmental models and shifting industrial alliances). 

Finally, within the emerging political economy of BRICS, the project intends to showcase that many contemporary forms of South–South cooperation are built upon the infrastructural, technological, and ecological legacies of mid-20th-century industrial collaboration. Meanwhile these continuities reveal how postcolonial developmental projects, rather than overcoming earlier colonial extraction, often re-inscribe new forms of dependency that persist into the present. Ultimately, by anchoring on these two towns, the research aims to contribute to debates on postcolonial development, political ecology and comparative labour histories by demonstrating how the material and ecological afterlives of steel production continue to shape inequality and geopolitical alignments in the Global South.

2022–2025
MA in Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn, German

2018–2021
BA in History, Scottish Church College (affiliated to the University of Calcutta), India

• 2023. "Breaking the Silence: Uncovering the Voices of Indian Indenture Labourers in Trinidad & Tobago and British Guyana." Journal for People's History and Culture 9(1): 121–130. 

• 2023. With Sofia Buitrago. "Competing Memories: The Politics of Remembering Enslavement, Emancipation, and Indentureship in the Caribbean." Dependent (Magazine of the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies) 7: 85–87. 

• 2024. "Whose Global History? Reflections on the 'Writing India into Global History' Workshop at MWF-Delhi." Dependency Blog (BCDSS).