On this episode of the In Theory podcast, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Mélanie Lamotte about her recent book "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (2026). Lamotte's work presents a globe-spanning account of how a shared set of racially based policies wedded together various French colonies and outposts in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In turn, Lamotte responds to questions about composing a history at such a transoceanic scale, reading against the archival grain to uncover the voices of the enslaved and free people of color who struggled against this emergent legal order, and reckoning with what these struggles mean for our understanding of the history of rights and revolution in this period.

For this episode of the In Theory podcast, Navyug Gill speaks with Disha Karnad Jani about his book Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab (Stanford University Press, 2024) and how it critically reexamines the history of the category of “the peasant” vis-à-vis the political, economic, and social transformations that occurred in colonial Panjab during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, their conversation touches on a variety of questions relevant not only to scholars of South Asian or British colonial history, but to all those invested in histories of capitalism and comparative intellectual history writ large. How, for instance, do different kinds of categories become commensurable across wide-ranging contexts and histories? How and why does attending to the historical division of labor and agriculture help us better understand forms of social difference that emerge out of, say, religion and caste? How might one continue to ask new and “defamiliarizing” questions of a familiar set of archives?

How did a pan-continental vision of “Latin America” emerge and intersect with changing ideas of the nation-state among leftists in Latin America in the interwar years? What impact did the Mexican Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution have on the aspirational visions and political projects of social transformation within the region? How does one conceptualize and, subsequently, write a transnational history about a category like the “radical”? Tony Wood addresses these questions, and others, in this conversation with Disha Karnad Jani about his latest book Radical Sovereignty: Debating Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America (University of California Press, 2025), which examines the history of ideas about race, anti-imperialism, indigeneity, the state, and sovereignty in Latin America during the early twentieth century.

Samuel Rutherford—a Lecturer in LGBTQ+ History and the History of Sexuality at the University of Glasgow and a founding editor of the JHI Blog—returns to the Blog to speak with Disha Karnad Jani about his book Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860–1939 (2025). In this conversation, Rutherford discusses how English and Scottish colleges and universities from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century contributed to the construction of gender and sexual identities in modern Britain. And, in discussing this history, Rutherford also addresses attendant questions about the “theoretical imperatives” that undergird this work, the disciplinary flexibility required for such a study, and more.

In this interview with Disha Karnad Jani for the In Theory podcast, Edward Baring returns to the JHI Blog to offer another discussion of his most recent work, Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891–1931 (2025). Their conversation covers the book’s main focus on “vulgar Marxism” and how this idea serves as a unique entry point into understanding the relationship between Marxist theory and the practice of worker education throughout the early-to-mid twentieth century. This conversation also provides a new perspective on, and further texture to, the numerous questions and critical insights raised by the book (from whether this story might serve as a pre-history of the Cold War to what bearing this history of worker education has on thinking about mass politics today).

On this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Tejas Parasher about his first book, Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In this work, Parasher incorporates, but also looks beyond, the conventional cast of activists and thinkers who proved pivotal to the anticolonial struggle in India during the twentieth century. And, in so doing, he uncovers a set of alternative visions of a post-colonial future, informed by a radical investment in participatory popular sovereignty and less beholden to the boundaries of the nation-state. While their conversation focuses on "this counter-tradition of democratic politics," Karnad Jani and Parasher also discuss other elements of the book, from how some of these Indian thinkers appropriated the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the importance of accounting for historical shifts in problem-spaces.

On this episode of In Theory, Durba Mitra returns to the podcast to talk with Disha Karnad Jani about her new book, The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism (Princeton University Press, 2026). In this canon-expanding study, Mitra explores the writings and work of women in the decolonizing world during the mid-to-late twentieth century, and how these women sought to forge "a new internationalism" following the formal end of empire. This conversation ranges from the attendant politics of knowledge production to the insights of Toni Morrison to the nature of post-colonial yearning.

On this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Isadora Moura Mota about her recent book, "Freedom's Horizon: Black Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). In shifting the periodization of the history of abolition in Brazil from the 1870s and 1880s to the 1840s and 1860s, Mota recenters the intellectual contributions of the enslaved in this transnational story. This conversation, as a result, touches upon some of the critical implications of this recentering—or, taking these enslaved actors seriously as thinkers in their own right—on the history of political thought and social movements in Brazil and writ large.

For this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Esmat Elhalaby about his first book, "Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization" (University of California Press, 2025), which offers a pathbreaking perspective on the under-explored relationship between Arab and Indian intellectuals throughout the twentieth century and the era of decolonization. Their conversation charts the various forms of knowledge production that arose from these two regions and their shared experiences of imperialism, contemporary critiques of cosmopolitanism, and how else scholars might write global intellectual histories in the present.

On this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Ahmad Shokr about his monograph, "Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt" (Stanford University Press, 2025). In "Harvests of Liberation," Shokr examines Egyptian decolonization through one of the nation’s most valuable commodities: cotton. In so doing, he weaves a history comprised of various strands and passed through numerous hands—from colonial advisors and nationalist leaders, to agrarian reformers and rural workers—to demonstrate how changes in the cotton economy ultimately led Egyptian nationalists to “embrace policies of land reform and industrialization and adopt a new conception of history.”