Ashutosh Kumar is a historian of ‘Global South’ and Director of Centre for Alternative Studies in Social Sciences (CASSS), New Delhi. He has been a fellow at various prestigious institutions of the world including Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, the Centre for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University and Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. He has published many books, and articles in international peer reviewed journals including, Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830-1920’, 2017.

Claude Markovits is Senior Research Fellow Emeritus at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. A historian of modern India, with a particular interest in the economic and social history of the colonial era, he authored many books and articles in English and in French. Amongst his English publications are Indian Business and Nationalist Politics 1931-39: the indigenous capitalist class and the rise of the Congress Party (1985), The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (2000) , The Un-Gandhian Gandhi: The Life and Afterlife of the Mahatma (2003), Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs : Indian Business in the Colonial Era (2008) and India and the World : A History of Connections c. 1750-c. 2000 (forthcoming). His French publications include a history of the Indian Expeditionary Force in France during World War I entitled De l’Indus à la Somme: les Indiens en France pendant la Grande Guerre (2018).