Jakob Burnham

Jakob Burnham

Writer in Residence

Jakob Burnham is a PhD candidate at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. His dissertation, “Producing Pondichéry: Notaries, Social Lives, and Urban Development in French India, 1699-1757,” examines the history of French settlements on the Indian subcontinent. By analyzing the social practices of daily life in French India using archives in France, England, India, the US, and Réunion, he argues for the centrality of domestic economies to French colonization across the Indian Ocean. While Writer-in-residence, he will continue to explore how these same archives can uncover dynamic questions about the histories of race, gender, and medicine in the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean World.

History

A Tale of Two Deaths: Chronic Illness, Race, and the Medicalization of Suicide

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On a Thursday morning in 1726, French colonial officials in Pondichéry – France’s principal colonial holding on India’s southeastern coast – received word that a dead body had been discovered at the bottom of a well. The governor of Pondichéry dispatched three officials to investigate the report. The officials quickly located the body and identified… Read more →

History

Healing on Credit: Medical Bills and the Politics of Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Pondichéry

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Jacques Albert, the surgeon-major of Pondichéry, India, probably thought that Marie Cuperly was “good for it” when it came to paying her outstanding medical bill. He put that belief to the test in 1711 when Cuperly, his patient of more than five years, died. Just hours after she passed away, Albert submitted a petition to… Read more →