Birla Ritu Birla

Stages of Capital (eBook, PDF)

Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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 "e;free"e; 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 "e;vernacular"e; 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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 359
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. Januar 2009
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780822392477
• Artikelnr.: 54910040

Autorenporträt

Ritu Birla

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part 1. A Non-Negotiable Sovereignty?
1. The Proper Swindle: Commercial and Financial Legislation of the 1880s 33
2. Capitalism's Idolatry: The Law of Charitable Trusts, Mortmain, and the
Firm as Family, c. 1870-1920 67
3. For General Public Utility: Sovereignty, Philanthropy, and Market
Governance, 1890-1920 103
Part 2. Negotiating Subjects
4. Hedging Bets: Speculation, Gambling, and Market Ethics, 1890-1930 143
5. Economic Agents, Cultural Subjects: Gender, the Joint Family, and the
Making of Capitalist Subjects, 1900-1940 199
Conclusion: Colonial Modernity and the Social Worlds of Capital 232
Notes 239
References 307
Index 329