Dr Alka Raman

Alka Raman is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor (Research and Teaching) in Economic and Social History. She is a historian of technological change in global economic history with particular interest in import substitution and changing technologies in cotton manufacturing. Alka empirically examines historic materials and extracts data from them to inform our understanding of the early modern global past.

Alka joined UCL from the University of Manchester where she held the Hallsworth Fellowship in History. Prior to that, she held the ESRC Fellowship at LSE and the Economic History Society’s Postan Postdoctoral Fellowship, in affiliation with the Institute of Historical Research, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She was guest lecturer at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London as well as at the Department of Economic History, LSE and Department of History, University of Manchester.

Alka’s current book project, provisionally titled ‘From Muse to Machine: How Indian Cottons led to British Industrialisation’ explores the impact of Indian cotton textiles on stimulating technological change in the British cotton industry, by unpacking the process of import substitution through empirical investigations of historic Indian and British cotton textiles.

Alka received her PhD from the Department of Economic History, LSE, in 2021. She holds a BA (Honours) and MA in Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, and an MSc Research in Economic History (with Distinction) from the LSE. 

Major publications

• 'From Hand to Machine: How Indian Cloth Quality Shaped British Cotton Spinning Technology', Technology and Culture 64(3):707-736 Jul 2023
• 'Indian cotton textiles and British industrialization: Evidence of comparative learning in the British cotton industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries', The Economic History Review 75(2):447-474 May 2022

Media appearances/public engagement

Alka regularly engages the public with her research, with events including What Happens in a Humanities Lab, where she demonstrated historic indigo dyeing techniques for participants via an experiential learning-based event.

Alka’s historical reconstruction of Indian chintz making techniques, called ‘Charting Chintz: Knowledge Transfer from India to Europe,’ recreates historic Indian cotton printing, dyeing and painting techniques and charts their impact on the development of printing and dyeing techniques in Europe. This work is currently being exhibited at the Transformations Exhibition at Winterthur Museum in Delaware, USA.

Alka is a strong advocate for decolonising the history curriculum and has been invited to speak at various events/conferences, including as keynote speaker at De Montfort University, Leicester, Centre for Policy Research and South Asian University, New Delhi. She works closely with the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum Group and the National Archives in London.

Teaching

• British History 1689-1860
• History that Counts

For more information, visit Alka's RPS profile.