Crispin Bates completed his Ph.D. in Indian history at Cambridge University and is presently a Reader in the School of History, Classics & Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, where he teaches modern South Asian history from early modern times to the present day. He has also been Director of Edinburgh University's Centre for South Asian studies. A former Research Fellow of Churchill College Cambridge, he has also been a visiting Professor at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, a Visiting Fellow at the Netaji Asian Studies Institute in Calcutta, a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Oriental Culture in the University of Tokyo, and Visiting Professorships at the National Museum of Ethnology, Kyoto University, and Hitotsubashi University in Japan. He has published widely on various aspects of Indian social and economic history, but mostly concerning rural Indian (and tribal) labour and labour migration. He has also lectured and written extensively on contemporary aspects of Indian social and political development. Between 2006-2008 he was the Principal Investigator in a major AHRC-funded project entitled 'Mutiny at the Margins' - which concerned the Indian Uprising of 1857. The product of this was a series of seven edited and co-edited volumes (including a source book) published by Sage, New Delhi, in 2013-17. His strongest research interest is in the social and economic history of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh (central India), a region he continues to visit regularly whenever the opportunity arises. At Edinburgh he has taught a course on Gandhi and the Indian nationalist movement for the past twenty years - a complex understanding of which, he argues, is essential for anyone with a serious interest in the global history of the 20th century. Most recently he has been leading a new AHRC research project ('Becoming "Coolies"') concerning the history of South Asian overseas labour migration in the colonial era, on which a new book series with Oxford University Press is forthcoming.
