I am a historian and legal scholar interested in early modern and modern South Asia. To date, my main focus has been on the economic and political history of the 18th and 19th centuries. Tentatively entitled Globalizing Classical Legal Thought: India in the Age of British Colonialism, 1757-c.1920 the book project that has grown out of my PhD dissertation is a legal history of Britain's India, broadly conceived, that also develops a new theoretical approach to understanding the nature of juridical discourse, the normativity of law, and legal modernity more generally. By tracing the development of the differing legal and political economic idioms underlying the concepts of property, contract, and status the book shows that the ‘modernization’ of law and legal system in a place like Britain’s India has too long been understood either as a compromise, typical of 19th century colonial Africa and Asia, born from the unyielding ‘legal pluralism’ of native society or an aborted effort at creating a ‘liberal’ rule of law. At present, I am also researching a next book focusing on the different streams of economic thought that informed nationalists, intellectuals, and the larger culture of public debate in Britain’s India in the period after 1860, following the ‘discovery’ of the principle of marginal utility and the beginning of a scientized tradition of economics in the West. In the longer-term, I hope to write a work examining anew the relationship between law, normativity and administration in early modern Mughal India and the larger Persephone Islamic world. As a legal academician, my main interests are in property theory and questions surrounding patent rights on pharmaceuticals, WTO-promoted intellectual property regime harmonization, and the ongoing debate around access to essential medicines by the poor in the global south versus the incentivization of research and development by rich country multinationals.