Rajat Datta is a professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The main areas of his research and teaching are: economic history of medieval and early modern India, particularly the18^th century and problems of the transition to the early-colonial in India; the British Empire in India, ca.1750 to 1830; ecology, subsistence, and crises in early modern India; comparative trajectories of early modern economic development in an Asian perspective; and the nature of globalization in the early modern world with special reference to India in the world economy. He is the author of Society, Economy and the Market. Commercialization in Rural Bengal (New Delhi, 2000) and has edited Rethinking a  Millennium. Perspectives on Indian History from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century (New Delhi, 2008). His new book Market,  Subsistence and Transition in Early Modern India. Perspectives from Eighteenth Century Bengal (New Delhi, Primus) is forthcoming in 2016.