Priya Satia

Priya Satia specializes in modern British and British empire history, especially in the Middle East and South Asia.

Prof. Satia is a cultural historian of the material and intellectual infrastructure of the modern world in the age of empire. Her work examines the origins of state institutions, military technologies, and ideas and practices of development in order to understand how the imperial past has shaped the present and how the ethical dilemmas it posed were understood and managed.

Prof. Satia has explored these questions in studies of British policing of the Middle East in the era of World War One, the invention of radio during the Boer War, the British Indian development of Iraq, state secrecy in mass-democratic Britain, the gun-making exploits of a Quaker family during the industrial revolution, and other projects. Her work on aerial policing has also informed her analysis of American drone use in the Middle East. Prof. Satia also works on the Partition of British India in 1947. An essay on her formation as a historian is available here in the H-Diplo series "Learning the Scholar's Craft." 

Her first book Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (OUP, 2008) won the 2009 AHA-Herbert Baxter Adams Book Prize, the 2009 AHA-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, and the 2010 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize.

Her second book, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Penguin Press/Duckworth, 2018) won the 2019 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize, the Wadsworth Prize in Business History, and the AHA's Jerry Bentley Prize in world history. It was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in History and shortlisted for the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.

Prof. Satia's third book, Time's Monster: How History Makes History (Belknap HUP/Penguin Allen Lane, 2020), focuses on the role of the modern historical imagination in the history of the British empire, while also recovering alternative ethical visions embraced by anticolonial thinkers. 

Her work has also appeared in the American Historical Review, Past and Present, Technology and Culture, Humanity, Annales, History Workshop Journal, edited volumes across a range of fields (e.g. environmental history, Middle Eastern history, the Indian Ocean world, British politics, aerospatial theory, humanitarianism), and mainstream media (the Financial Times, the Nation, Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Aeon, the Tribune, Slate.com, CNN.com, and other sites).

Prof. Satia is working on two new book projects: a collection of essays on history, writing, and selfhood and a history of colonialism in Punjab.