Stages of Capital

Stages of Capital PDF Author: Ritu Birla
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082239247X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
In Stages of Capital, Ritu Birla brings research on nonwestern capitalisms into conversation with postcolonial studies to illuminate the historical roots of India’s market society. Between 1870 and 1930, the British regime in India implemented a barrage of commercial and contract laws directed at the “free” circulation of capital, including measures regulating companies, income tax, charitable gifting, and pension funds, and procedures distinguishing gambling from speculation and futures trading. Birla argues that this understudied legal infrastructure institutionalized a new object of sovereign management, the market, and along with it, a colonial concept of the public. In jurisprudence, case law, and statutes, colonial market governance enforced an abstract vision of modern society as a public of exchanging, contracting actors free from the anachronistic constraints of indigenous culture. Birla reveals how the categories of public and private infiltrated colonial commercial law, establishing distinct worlds for economic and cultural practice. This bifurcation was especially apparent in legal dilemmas concerning indigenous or “vernacular” capitalists, crucial engines of credit and production that operated through networks of extended kinship. Focusing on the story of the Marwaris, a powerful business group renowned as a key sector of India’s capitalist class, Birla demonstrates how colonial law governed vernacular capitalists as rarefied cultural actors, so rendering them illegitimate as economic agents. Birla’s innovative attention to the negotiations between vernacular and colonial systems of valuation illustrates how kinship-based commercial groups asserted their legitimacy by challenging and inhabiting the public/private mapping. Highlighting the cultural politics of market governance, Stages of Capital is an unprecedented history of colonial commercial law, its legal fictions, and the formation of the modern economic subject in India.

Stages of Capital

Stages of Capital PDF Author: Ritu Birla
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082239247X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Stages of Capital, Ritu Birla brings research on nonwestern capitalisms into conversation with postcolonial studies to illuminate the historical roots of India’s market society. Between 1870 and 1930, the British regime in India implemented a barrage of commercial and contract laws directed at the “free” circulation of capital, including measures regulating companies, income tax, charitable gifting, and pension funds, and procedures distinguishing gambling from speculation and futures trading. Birla argues that this understudied legal infrastructure institutionalized a new object of sovereign management, the market, and along with it, a colonial concept of the public. In jurisprudence, case law, and statutes, colonial market governance enforced an abstract vision of modern society as a public of exchanging, contracting actors free from the anachronistic constraints of indigenous culture. Birla reveals how the categories of public and private infiltrated colonial commercial law, establishing distinct worlds for economic and cultural practice. This bifurcation was especially apparent in legal dilemmas concerning indigenous or “vernacular” capitalists, crucial engines of credit and production that operated through networks of extended kinship. Focusing on the story of the Marwaris, a powerful business group renowned as a key sector of India’s capitalist class, Birla demonstrates how colonial law governed vernacular capitalists as rarefied cultural actors, so rendering them illegitimate as economic agents. Birla’s innovative attention to the negotiations between vernacular and colonial systems of valuation illustrates how kinship-based commercial groups asserted their legitimacy by challenging and inhabiting the public/private mapping. Highlighting the cultural politics of market governance, Stages of Capital is an unprecedented history of colonial commercial law, its legal fictions, and the formation of the modern economic subject in India.

State and Capital in Post-Colonial India

State and Capital in Post-Colonial India PDF Author: Chirashree Das Gupta
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107102243
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
""Discusses the specific relationship between state and capital in forging the dynamic role of institutions of the state and market that form the basis of capital accumulation in economies undergoing transition"--Provided by publisher"--

Constructing Post-Colonial India

Constructing Post-Colonial India PDF Author: Sanjay Srivastava
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134683588
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
An interdisciplinary and engaging book which looks at the nature of Indian society since Independence and unpacks what post-colonialism means to Indian citizens. Using the case study of the Doon School, a famous boarding school for boys, and one of the leading educational institutions in India, the author argues that to be post-colonial in India is to be modern, rational, secular and urban. In placing post-colonialism in this concrete social context, and analysing how it is constructed, the author renders a complex and often rather abstract subject accessible.

Rethinking Capitalist Development

Rethinking Capitalist Development PDF Author: Kalyan Sanyal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317809505
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
In this book, Kalyan Sanyal reviews the traditional notion of capitalism and propounds an original theory of capitalist development in the post-colonial context. In order to substantiate his theory, concepts such as primitive accumulation, governmentality and post-colonial capitalist formation are discussed in detail. Analyzing critical questions from a third world perspective such as: Will the integration into the global capitalist network bring to the third world new economic opportunities? Will this capitalist network make the third world countries an easy prey for predatory multinational corporations? The end result is a discourse, drawing on Marx and Foucault, which envisages the post-colonial capitalist formation, albeit in an entirely different light, in the era of globalization.

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital PDF Author: Vivek Chibber
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844679764
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Postcolonial theory has become enormously influential as a framework for understanding the Global South. It is also a school of thought popular because of its rejection of the supposedly universalizing categories of the Enlightenment. In this devastating critique, mounted on behalf of the radical Enlightenment tradition, Vivek Chibber offers the most comprehensive response yet to postcolonial theory. Focusing on the hugely popular Subaltern Studies project, Chibber shows that its foundational arguments are based on a series of analytical and historical misapprehensions. He demonstrates that it is possible to affirm a universalizing theory without succumbing to Eurocentrism or reductionism. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital promises to be a historical milestone in contemporary social theory.

Accumulation in Post-Colonial Capitalism

Accumulation in Post-Colonial Capitalism PDF Author: Iman Kumar Mitra
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811010374
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This volume looks at how accumulation in postcolonial capitalism blurs the boundaries of space, institutions, forms, financial regimes, labour processes, and economic segments on one hand, and creates zones and corridors on the other. It draws our attention to the peculiar but structurally necessary coexistence of both primitive and virtual modes of accumulation in the postcolony. From these two major inquiries it develops a new understanding of postcolonial capitalism. The case studies in this volume discuss the production of urban spaces of capital extraction, institutionalization of postcolonial finance capital, gendering of work forms, establishment of new forms of labour, formation of and changes in caste and racial identities and networks, and securitization—and thereby confirm that no study of contemporary capitalism is complete without thoroughly addressing the postcolonial condition. By challenging the established dualities between citizenship-based civil society and welfare-based political society, exploring critically the question of colonial and postcolonial difference, and foregrounding the material processes of accumulation against the culturalism of postcolonial studies, this volume redefines postcolonial studies in South Asia and beyond. It is invaluable reading for students and scholars of South Asian studies, sociology, cultural and critical anthropology, critical and praxis studies, and political science.

Colonial and Post-Colonial Geographies of India

Colonial and Post-Colonial Geographies of India PDF Author: Saraswati Raju
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761934363
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
This collection of original essays by scholars of geography from India, Western Europe, and the USA provides important insights into the way contemporary geographers are engaging with India. The earlier narrow colonial focus that saw India as a country of resources and "peoples" (tribes and castes) has now been discarded for a broader view located in mainstream intellectual frameworks and informed by a public policy perspective. This volume highlights how contemporary geographers see and write on topics such as the state, nation, community, environment, and division of labor, while keeping in mind issues of spatiality and territoriality.

The Post-Colonial State in the Era of Capitalist Globalization

The Post-Colonial State in the Era of Capitalist Globalization PDF Author: Tariq Amin-Khan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136461736
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
State formation in post-colonial societies differed greatly from the formation of the Western capitalist state. The latter has been extensively studied, while a coherent grasp of the post-colonial state has remained elusive. Amin-Khan provides a critical historical and contemporary understanding of post-colonial state formations in Asia and Africa, and suggests how this process differed from the formation of states in Latin America. In distinguishing between the post-colonial state and the Western capitalist state, the author argues that the unitary colonial state left a strong legacy on the decolonized states of Asia and Africa, reinscribing their subordination vis-à-vis Western states, transnational corporations and multilateral institutions. The indigenous elites' decision at the time of decolonization to retain colonial state structures meant the readaptation of capitalism-imperialism nexus to suit new post-colonial realities, which enabled the formation of clientelist relationships. This post-colonial reality and exploration of the contemporary context provides the basis of analyzing two post-colonial state forms, the capitalist and proto-capitalist varieties, which are examined using the case studies of India and Pakistan.

Governance, Resistance and the Post-Colonial State

Governance, Resistance and the Post-Colonial State PDF Author: Jonathan Murphy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134842198
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
The manifestation of the colonial nation-state as a legal-bureaucratic-police structure – an exploitation tool – undermined customary modes of governance in colonies. When post-World War II independence of colonies transferred ownership of the state structure to the colonized elite, electoral and civil society politics battled for capture of this post-colonial state. Meanwhile, the state was also forced to build its legitimacy in the face of customary governance practices seeking rehabilitation and decolonization in the midst of civil wars and strife. This "state-building social movement" was further complicated with the global spread of neoliberalism and neocolonialism, and herein lies the significant difference between the post-colonial nation-state and the Western nation-states. This book fills the gap in literature and argues that it is necessary to foreground discussions of the nature of the post-colonial nation-state in examining resistance and provides a window into the dynamics of the post-colonial state and its implication in everyday organizing and resistance.

Locked in Place

Locked in Place PDF Author: Vivek Chibber
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400840775
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
Why were some countries able to build "developmental states" in the decades after World War II while others were not? Through a richly detailed examination of India's experience, Locked in Place argues that the critical factor was the reaction of domestic capitalists to the state-building project. During the 1950s and 1960s, India launched an extremely ambitious and highly regarded program of state-led development. But it soon became clear that the Indian state lacked the institutional capacity to carry out rapid industrialization. Drawing on newly available archival sources, Vivek Chibber mounts a forceful challenge to conventional arguments by showing that the insufficient state capacity stemmed mainly from Indian industrialists' massive campaign, in the years after Independence, against a strong developmental state. Chibber contrasts India's experience with the success of a similar program of state-building in South Korea, where political elites managed to harness domestic capitalists to their agenda. He then develops a theory of the structural conditions that can account for the different reactions of Indian and Korean capitalists as rational responses to the distinct development models adopted in each country. Provocative and marked by clarity of prose, this book is also the first historical study of India's post-colonial industrial strategy. Emphasizing the central role of capital in the state-building process, and restoring class analysis to the core of the political economy of development, Locked in Place is an innovative work of theoretical power that will interest development specialists, political scientists, and historians of the subcontinent.