Jakob Burnham
My research broadly questions the relationship between imperial goals and colonial social realities in the seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century French empire.
It attempts to integrate the history of early modern French India with the more developed historiographies of the French Atlantic and metropolitan France.
My dissertation, "Producing Pondichéry: Social Lives and Urban Development in French India, 1699-1757”, considers how new constructions of race, gender, and class by French agents-colonizers and South Asian resident emerged in the contexts of developing urban space. Considering the contexts of the French State's financial agendas, I explore how negotiations over the definitions and control of colonial space contributed to the unique socio-urban development of Pondichéry. Analyzing notarial records, correspondence, court records, and other archival documents in France, India, and the United Kingdom, my research studies Pondichéry’s development into a global nexus for South Asian communities, French agent-colonizers, and other world travelers in India as a socially based process as much as an economically based one. In doing so, I explore an alternate viewpoint to analyze the French colonial entrenchment on the Indian sub-continent aside from the more traditional focus on eighteenth-century trading companies.