Jayita Sarkar's "Ploughshares and Swords"

Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War, and reported the following:

Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War passes the Page 99 Test surprisingly well. The page is the conclusion at the end of Chapter 4, “Plutonium and Power Reactors, 1962-1964.” It is also one of the few longer conclusions in the book, thereby allowing the readers to get a more in-depth sense of what the chapter and the book are about.

Those reading page 99 of my book will be immediately introduced to some of the core themes of the book— freedom of action, hyperdiversification, unintended consequences, borderlands, and technopolitics, to name a few. The readers might also recognize that Indian policymakers’ responses to the Chinese nuclear weapons program is an important dimension of the book.

The fascinating part is page 99 does more “showing” than “telling.” The readers will watch the book’s many themes in action on page 99. As a result, if readers searched textual keywords corresponding to the book’s aforementioned themes, they might be disappointed. Instead, if after reading page 99, they decided to give the introduction a go, then most mysteries might be at least partially resolved.

Visit Jayita Sarkar's website.

--Marshal Zeringue