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A new “bulldozer politics” has taken hold in many Indian cities, destroying neighborhoods and displacing city residents as it pursues a global city aesthetic. Presentist accounts might explain these evictions as emergent modes of capital accumulation, but Logics of Dispossession challenges that story and situates these acts in a longer historical durée.
Employing a comparative genealogical approach to historical analysis, Liza Weinstein traces the Indian government’s power to evict—from its beginnings in the colonial capitals of the British Raj, to developmental state-building projects and the rise of ethnonationalist politics, up to the present neoliberal conjuncture. Drawing on multicity fieldwork, archival research, and a database of more than a thousand eviction cases, Weinstein argues that evictions constitute a historically entrenched tool of city governance, motivated by a shifting set of intersecting, often contradictory logics that have accumulated over time and in locally specific ways across Indian cities aspiring to be world-class.
Liza Weinstein is Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University and editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR). She is also author of The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai.
"Liza Weinstein’s eye-opening book reveals the coloniality of dispossession in India once and for all. Not just a recent outcome of neoliberal land grabbing, India’s so-called slums can be understood only by reckoning with the deeper colonial past. Exemplifying the best kind of historical social science, this book will resonate with scholars as well as students of India, colonialism, and urbanity.”—Julian Go, author of Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US
“Logics of Dispossession situates the neoliberal, capitalist‑driven displacement of informal urban settlements in India within a broad historical and global frame. Drawing on rich empirical evidence and employing sharp theoretical analysis, the book reveals how colonial and postcolonial technologies of power have sustained the economic logic of evictions. We learn how political sovereignty is performed on the bare bodies of subaltern groups that repeatedly bear the costs of what is called development or progress. A brilliantly researched and argued account.”—Gyan Prakash, author of Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point
“This book is a masterpiece. By excavating colonial and national histories of class and ethnonationalist dispossession across four Indian cities, Liza Weinstein shows how eviction has been a governing logic in India well before the neoliberal era. In doing so, she refutes the presentism of critical urban studies and gives us a methodological guide for the historical analysis of state power. The study of Indian urbanism will not be the same after this book, nor will the conceptual framework of eviction, which for too long has been lodged in North Atlantic urbanism. At a time of expanding state violence, this rich and rigorous book is essential for a renewed understanding of dispossession and for the multiple histories of resistance.”—Ananya Roy, coeditor of Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion