Stages of capital : law, culture, and market governance in late colonial India / Ritu Birla.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Birla, Ritu, 1965-

Series:

e-Duke books scholarly collection.

e-Duke books scholarly collection

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rule of law--India.

Rule of law.

India--Politics and government--1857-1919.

India.

India--Politics and government--1919-1947.

India--Economic policy.

Great Britain--Colonies--Economic policy.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (360 p.)

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

The proper swindle : commercial and financial legislation of the 1880s

Capitalism's idolatry : the law of charitable trusts, mortmain, and the firm as

Family, c. 1870/1920

For general public utility : sovereignty, philanthropy, and market governance

1890/1920

Hedging bets : speculation, gambling, and market ethics, 1890/1930

Economic agents, cultural subjects : gender, the joint family, and the making of

Capitalist subjects, 1900/1940

Conclusion : colonial modernity and the social worlds of capital.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [307]-328) and index.

ISBN:

9786613036575

9781283036573

1283036576

9780822392477

082239247X

OCLC:

317317399