Caste And Capitalism In Colonial India

Author : David West Rudner
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9788121506816
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India written by David West Rudner and published by . This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illustrations: 22 B/w Illustrations & 4 Maps Description: Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India presents an anthropological and historical challenge to the traditional assumptions about kinship, caste, and commercial organizations in South Asia. Focusing on the Nattukotai Chettiars, a merchant-banking caste that played a central role in South Indian banking and trade in the period from 1870 to 1930, Rudner explores the nature of non-capitalist economic formations and the impact of colonial rule on indigenous commercial systems, as well as variety and change among India's caste and ethnic groups. Regardless of theoretical perspectives adopted by anthropologists and historians studying social organization in South Asia, certain assumptions have remained unchallenged: that all castes are organized either by marriage alliance or status hierarchy and that caste structures are incompatible with the rational conduct of business. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, Rudner argues against such monolithic characterizations. He demonstrates that in the case of the Nattukotai Chettiars, caste and commerce are inextricably linked through formal and informal alliance, institutions, and practices crucial to the formation and distribution of capital. Rudner traces the growth of these structures over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exploring the ways in which Indian merchant-bankers used indigenous social structures to profit from colonial rule. Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India is the first comprehensive analysis of the interdependence among Indian business practice, social organization, and religion. Rudner's findings have significant implications for scholars of Asian history and anthropology.

Author : David West Rudner
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520376536
Total Pages : 390 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India written by David West Rudner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Rudner's richly detailed ethnographic and historical analysis of a South Indian merchant-banking caste provides the first comprehensive analysis of the interdependence among Indian business practice, social organization, and religion. Exploring noncapitalist economic formations and the impact of colonial rule on indigenous commercial systems, Rudner argues that caste and commerce are inextricably linked through formal and informal institutions. The practices crucial to the formation and distribution of capital are also a part of this linkage. Rudner challenges the widely held assumptions that all castes are organized either by marriage alliance or status hierarchy and that caste structures are incompatible with the "rational" conduct of business. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Author : Salim Lakha
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Capitalism and Class in Colonial India written by Salim Lakha and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Nicholas B. Dirks
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400840945
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Castes of Mind written by Nicholas B. Dirks and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-09 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

Author : Ritu Birla
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 082239247X
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stages of Capital written by Ritu Birla and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Tirthankar Roy
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316953262
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Business History of India written by Tirthankar Roy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, private investment has led to an economic resurgence in India. But this is not the first time the region has witnessed impressive business growth. There have been many similar stories over the past 300 years. India's economic history shows that capital was relatively expensive. How, then, did capitalism flourish in the region? How did companies and entrepreneurs deal with the shortage of key resources? Has there been a common pattern in responses to these issues over the centuries? Through detailed case studies of firms, entrepreneurs, and business commodities, Tirthankar Roy answers these questions. Roy bridges the approaches of business and economic history, illustrating the development of a distinctive regional capitalism. On each occasion of growth, connections with the global economy helped firms and entrepreneurs better manage risks. Making these deep connections between India's economic past and present shows why history matters in its remaking of capitalism today.

Author : Harish Damodaran
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book India's New Capitalists written by Harish Damodaran and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Jan Breman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108482414
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Capitalism, Inequality and Labour in India written by Jan Breman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jan Breman analyses labour bondage in India's changing political economy from 1962 to 2017. Focusing on what has happened since Independence, he argues that colonial rule changed the country's agrarian economy. Capitalism has led to progressive inequality, lack of welfare and the exclusion of the dispossessed from mainstream society.

Author : Raju J. Das
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004415564
Total Pages : 672 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Critical Reflections on Economy and Politics in India written by Raju J. Das and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Das deploys class theory to decipher India’s economic and political situation. It deals with the specificities of India’s capitalism and neoliberalism, and their economic consequences. It critically examines lower-class struggles led by the Left, and the fascistic politics of the Right.

Author : Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0593230272
Total Pages : 545 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Caste written by Isabel Wilkerson and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Award Longlist • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist • Kirkus Prize Finalist “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.