Contact

Office: G.56, 13 Woodland Road

Email: Daniel.Haines@bristol.ac.uk

Between 2021-2023 I am a knowledge exchange fellow at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. My working days at the University of Bristol are Wednesday mornings and Fridays. 

I work on modern environmental history, focusing on South Asia. Recently I was principal investigator on the project 'Broken Ground: Earthquakes, Colonialism and Nationalism in South Asia, c. 1900-1960', funded by the AHRC (AH/P014577/1). Our team researched the political impacts of major earthquakes in several parts of India, Pakistan, Myanmar and Nepal in the early twentieth century. 

I was also co-investigator on two Global Challenges Research Fund Building Resilience seed projects:

• BRACE ('Building Bhutanese Resilience Against Cataclysmic Events’) (NERC NE/P016219/1) - on historical earthquakes in Bhutan
• HARVEST ('High-mountain Asia - building Resilience to water Variability using Experiments, Surveys and accounts of Tradition’) (NERC NE/P016146/1) - on water use and sustainability in eastern Nepal

My previous major projects focused on rivers in Pakistan and India - whether damming them (my first book) or struggles between nations and political groupings to control them (my new, second book; US edition here).

Through these and other projects I have interests in spatial history, colonialism and decolonisation, international relations, and interdisciplinary links with political geography.

I co-founded and co-directed the Arts Faculty Centre for Environmental Humanities from 2017-2021, and was a managing member of the AHRC Research Network on 'Risk, Hazards, Disasters and Cultures: Exploring an Integrated Humanities, Natural Sciences and Disaster Studies Approach' (AH/N009436/1; network blog here).

Research Supervision

I welcome research students working on colonial and post-colonial history, especially of South Asia; decolonization history; natural disasters; and environmental history more broadly. Current and recent postgraduate research students' topics include mountaineering in colonial India, the Catholic community in Shanghai, the East India Company's role in China, taxidermy in Bristol Museum, and missionaries in Qing China.

Teaching

I teach on undergraduate and MA units including natural diaster history, environmental histories of empire, and global history. 

Selected Publications

(Please click on Research Outputs, above, for a full list)

Books:

• Rivers Divided: Indus Basin Waters in the Making of India and Pakistan, UK edition: Hurst & Co. (London); US edition: Oxford University Press (New York) South Asian edition: Penguin (New Delhi) (2017)
• Building the Empire, Building the Nation: Development, legitimacy, and hydro-politics in Sind, 1919-1969, Oxford University Press (2013)

Articles and chapters:

• Development, Citizenship, and the Bhakra–Nangal Dams in Postcolonial India, 1948–1952, The Historical Journal (online ahead of print publication, 2021)
• Topography and the Hydraulic Mission: Water Management, River Control and State Power in Nepal (with Matthew I. England), International Journal of Water Resources 37 (2021)
• Lines of (In)Convenience: Sovereignty and Border-Making in Postcolonial South Asia, 1947–1965 (with Elisabeth Leake), Journal of Asian Studies 76 (2017), 
• Constructing State Power: Internal and external frontiers in colonial North India, 1850s-1900s, Environmental History 20 (2015), 645-670
• Disputed Rivers: Sovereignty, territory and state-making in South Asia, 1948-1951, Geopolitics 19:3 (2014), 632-655
• (Inter)Nationalist Rivers?: Cooperative development in David Lilienthal's plan for the Indus Basin, 1951, Water History 6:2 (2014). An open access, read-only version is available here.
• A 'Commonwealth Moment' in South Asian Decolonization, in Leslie James and Elisabeth Leake (eds), Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating independence, Bloomsbury (2015)
• Concrete 'progress': irrigation, development and modernity in mid-twentieth century Sind, Modern Asian Studies 45:1 (2011)

Other:

• Historical Case Study: India 1935/Earthquake. Shelter Projects 2017-18  (Global Shelter Cluster).
• Edited, with Elisabeth Leake, 'Annual Conference Edition of the British Association for South Asian Studies', Contemporary South Asia 32:1 (2015), including a co-authored 'Introduction'.