Sarkar Presents Research at Sydney Workshop on International History
Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, recently presented her new research at the University of Sydney’s state-of-the-field weeklong workshop, “What is International History Now?” on July 23-27, 2018.
The workshop was organized by Professor Glenda Sluga, Professor of International History at the University of Sydney, and was attended by a select group of 50 historians from all over the world, which included David Armitage, Matthew Connelly, David Engerman, Vanessa Ogle, Madeleine Herren, Sandrine Kott, Naoko Shimazu, Peter Jackson and others.
Sarkar’s research presentation on July 24, 2018 was part of the panel, “Mapping the Terrain,” where she was joined by renowned Harvard historian, Erez Manela. Sarkar’s talk entitled, “US Global Capitalism & Nuclear Nonproliferation during the Eisenhower and Nixon/Ford Administrations,” is based on her second book project. The abstract is below:
Conventional wisdom attributes U.S. commitment to prevent the global spread of nuclear weapons as a consequence of American national security interests. Yet, a closer look at U.S. nonproliferation policy reveals a compelling economic logic. Without incorporating economic factors and their convergence with the Cold War American national security state, the understanding of U.S. nonproliferation policy remains incomplete. This study examines how the overlap of economic and
security factors played out in U.S. nuclear assistance to allies, friends and sometimes, near adversaries, thus creating techno-economic dependence on the United States. Beginning with President Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ proposal and its consequences, U.S. policymakers generated a complex web of techno-economic dependence for reactor models, fuel, spare parts, expertise and knowhow, which in turn served the purpose of nonproliferation. American monopoly as a nuclear supplier from the 1950s onward became a deliberate tool for nonproliferation abundantly applied by policymakers in Washington. By the 1970s, as American postwar economic preeminence shattered with the ‘Nixon shock’— the end of dollar convertibility to gold of the Bretton Woods system— and the 1973 oil price shock, U.S. market share in terms of global nuclear reactor sales had also declined, while those of West European suppliers like France and West Germany had increased. With American monopoly as the world’s nuclear supplier over, the web of techno-economic dependence on the United States needed readjustment in order retain U.S. leverage. In the Nixon/Ford era, this took the form of developing the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) after India’s 1974 nuclear explosion, which was guided as much by Washington’s economic goals to reclaim its market share and protect U.S. nuclear industry against West European competition as by security risks from nuclear proliferation.
Jayita Sarkar, an historian by training, is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. Her expertise is in the history of U.S. foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, the global Cold War, South Asia and Western Europe. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Cold War History, International History Review, and elsewhere. Dr. Sarkar has held fellowships at MIT, Harvard, Columbia and Yale universities, and obtained a doctorate in International History from the Graduate Institute Geneva in Switzerland.