Cecilia Giancola is a graduate of Bard College, where she majored in historical studies and minored in economics. She has worked as a research assistant to Professor Karen Barkey, a historical sociologist of empires, with whom she has co-authored a forthcoming chapter on states and empires for the Encyclopedia of Global Social Theory. Through Bard College’s senior-to-senior grant, Cecilia conducted archival research at the British Library in London in January 2025, which contributed to her senior project, a thesis-length work entitled “‘An Engagement of Extraordinary Nature:’ Baroda, the Bankers’ Army, and the British Bahendari, 1800–1833”. The project won the Marc Bloch Prize for the best Senior Project in History. Cecilia is also a recipient of Bard’s Li-hua Ying Fund for Asian Studies. In her junior year, she had won the Margaret and John Bard award for excellence in social studies.
Cecilia is interested in the processes of state formation and consolidation, with special attention on colonial states. This led Cecilia to explore the British East India Company, a corporation which managed the first century of British colonial rule in India. She is particularly interested in how Indian bankers and other financial agents clashed (and meshed) with the Company in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her other interests include the political and social mechanisms of debt in India, the role of tax revenues in facilitating the drain of wealth from India, and the social culture of India’s early colonial society.
Cecilia’s Fulbright-Nehru project is conducting archival research focusing on the operations of the Baroda (Gaikwad) state in western India during the 19th century, narrowing in on its interactions with the British Raj under the context of “smuggling” and illicit trade policies. Specifically, she is examining the role of the Malwa opium trade, an indigenously controlled trade which rivaled the East India Company’s Bengal opium monopoly. Cecilia is exploring to what extent opium trade and “smuggling” was utilized by the British as a pretext for the expansion of the colonial state and the elimination of powerful indigenous capital in Baroda and western India.