The project brings together Professor Sud’s training in history and the interdisciplinary social sciences to understand the making of the Global South through flows, and contests, around energy. This includes the colonial quest for timber, flora and fauna; trade in humans, extending to indenture and slavery; and only later the fossilised energy, in the form of coal and oil, that has shaped the modern world.

The Leverhulme Research Fellowship will allow Professor Sud to delve into the contemporary parts of her project, tracing the dynamics of green energy transition, which are impacting economy, society, and polity in many parts of the world, in addition to having positive and negative environmental impacts. Fieldwork for the project has, so far, taken Professor Sud to some of the world’s most coal-dependent countries, currently undergoing rapid energy transition.