Ben Jacob

I am a writer, researcher and historian based in London. I write about the politics of labour, technology and the environment, past and present. I studied at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where I researched Indian indentureship, tracing the relationship between global histories of colonialism, capitalism and climate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

My essays and articles have appeared in various places, including Tribune, The New Internationalist, Wisden, South Asian Avant-Garde and Byline Times. I’ve also worked as a writer, writing assistant, researcher and composer on feature film, documentary and podcast projects. I am the Academic Adviser on Emerging Research at the Ameena Gafoor Institute for Indentureship Studies, and co-founder of Wings, a food delivery platform co-operative in North London.

Bad Romance: how inevitable is the green energy transition? | It’s Freezing in LA!, 06.2025 [essay] | on liberal climate politics and the need for a new political story for decarbonisation.

Gardening at the End of the World | South Asian Avant-Garde, 02.2025 [feature article] | on market gardeners and environmental crisis in nineteenth-century Mauritius.

Forever Oil | New Internationalist, 01.2025 [feature article] | on Guyana’s oil boom and the shadows of its colonial past.

How to Lose a River | Happened Here, 10.2024 [podcast] | on the life and times of a buried river in North London.

‘What Sort of Example is the World Setting Us?’ | Byline Supplement, 12.2023 [feature article] | on reparations activism in Guyana.

The Generation Game | The Nightwatchman: Wisden Cricket Quarterly 11.2023 [feature article] | on South African cricket’s post-apartheid generation.

Platforms for the People | Tribune, 10.2022 [opinion article] | on the contradictions of platform economics.

Artwashing the University | Oxford Review of Books, 03.2020 [feature article] | on universities and artwashing, past and present.

Too Close for Comfort | Isis Magazine, 09.2019 [feature article] | on Oxford University’s latest source of dirty money, the private equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman.

‘All you have to do is be your freest self on the field’: in conversation with Keshav Maharaj | Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies, 06.2024 [interview, co-authored with David Dabydeen] | interview with Keshav Maharaj, South African cricket’s premier spin bowler.

‘Worthy of Freedom’: An Interview With Jonathan Connolly | Ameena Gafoor Institute for Indentureship Studies, 02.2024 [interview] | interview with historian Jonathan Connolly on indentured labour and emancipation.

Co-operation Nation | Voices Media, 05.2023 [documentary appearance] | documentary appearance with Jeremy Corbyn, discussing food delivery co-operative Wings.

Planting in the Ruins: Climate, Indentureship and the Cultivation of Freedom in British Guiana and Mauritius | Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Volume 26, Number 2 [forthcoming], 07.2025] | on Indian indentured workers and their political and ecological struggle against the plantation economies of Mauritius and British Guiana.

Of Settlers and ‘Native Labour’: Race and the Value of Labour in the Origins of the Settler State | SASE Annual Conference, Montreal, 04.2025 [paper, co-authored with Danielle Twiss] | on the relationship between race and labour in shaping histories of dispossession, segregation and expulsion in South Africa and Palestine.

Voices from the Rose Hall Uprising, 1913 | Ameena Gafoor Institute for Indentureship Studies, 04.2025 | on testimony from a colonial police massacre in British Guiana, unearthed in the UK’s National Archives.

Planting in the Ruins: Sugar, Indian Indentureship and Plantation Worlds in British Guiana and Mauritius, 1834-1920 | Ameena Gafoor Institute for Indentureship Studies, 12.2024 | on the environmental history of sugar plantations in British Guiana and Mauritius.

Escaping the Enumerators: An Intimate History of Indentureship | Ameena Gafoor Institute for Indentureship Studies, 12.2021 | on the colonial archive and the possibility of an intimate history of Indian indentureship.