Nicolas Martin

Professor Nicolas Martin obtained both his BA and his PhD in social anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). After completing his PhD in 2009— based on 18 months ethnographic fieldwork in rural Pakistan and entitled ‘Politics, Patronage and Debt Bondage in the Pakistani Punjab’— and until 2012 he was a teaching fellow at the LSE Anthropology Department. Based on his PhD, he produced academic articles on agrarian change, the evolving nature of patron-client ties and debt bondage, and a book entitled Politics, Landlords and Islam in Pakistan published by Routledge in 2015. The book explores the above themes in greater detail, but also examines electoral politics, factionalism, violence and electoral fraud, as well as the relationship between Sufi Islam and landed power.

In 2012 Professor Martin became a Senior Research Fellow at the University College London Department of Anthropology after he and a team of researchers obtained research grants from both the European Research Council (ERC) and Economic and Social Research (ESRC) to study the tightening nexus between politics, crime and business across South Asia. In 2013 he embarked upon fifteen months of fieldwork in an agrarian region of the Indian Punjab. Building on his previous research interests, Professor Martin has been examining the relationships between clientelistic politics, violence and social inequality in rural Punjab. Most recently, Professor Martin obtained a four-year SNSF grant for a project entitled 'The Reproduction of Caste? Economic, political and kinship strategies among Jats in Punjab'.

Research Interests

Political and economic anthropology of India/Pakistan, democracy and authoritarianism, clientelism, elections, violence, agrarian change, debt bondage, Islam.