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Tirthankar
Roy
.
A Business History of India: Enterprise and the Emergence of Capitalism from 1700
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 298. Paper $31.99.
Ghulam A. Nadri Georgia State University Email: gnadri@gsu.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic
The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 634–635, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz1326
Published:
13 April 2020
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Ghulam A. Nadri, Tirthankar Roy. A Business History of India: Enterprise and the Emergence of Capitalism from 1700., The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 634–635, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz1326
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Business history as a subfield of economic history has relatively recently begun to attract scholarly attention. Tirthankar Roy’s A Business History of India: Enterprise and the Emergence of Capitalism from 1700 is a first major attempt to write a business history of the Indian subcontinent from the eighteenth century to the present. In the past, economic and trade historians wrote extensively about merchants, merchant and business communities, and their enterprise. But their narrative was mainly informed by questions and considerations of the region’s transition to a colonial economy and its impact on merchants and their businesses. The book under review makes a significant departure from this tradition and raises and addresses several new and interesting questions. The central question that Roy investigates in the book is how businesspeople and firms acquired capital in an economy where capital was scarce and expensive. He also explores why capital was consistently costly in India compared with Western Europe and, more importantly, how capitalism flourished despite the scarcity of capital. His answer is the openness to the world economy, high global demand for agricultural products like indigo, opium, and cotton, and the ability to import technology and technical and managerial skills from abroad. He argues that actions of merchants and bankers and not of governments caused capitalism to flourish throughout the colonial period and again since the 1990s. This is an evidence-based history of the development of business and capitalism in India at its best. Spread over ten chronologically arranged chapters, the data and historical evidence, including business profiles of numerous merchants and firms, demonstrate both the opportunities that were available to businesses and merchants and the challenges they faced in colonial and postcolonial India.
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