The first major study of the relationship between labour and capital in India's economic development in the early twentieth-century. The author considers the spread of capitalism and the growth of the cotton textile industry.

In this series of interconnected essays, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar offers a powerful revisionist analysis of the relationship between class and politics in India between the Mutiny and Independence. Dr Chandavarkar rejects the 'Orientalist' view of Indian social and economic development as exceptional and somehow distinct from that prevailing in capitalist societies elsewhere, and reasserts the critical role of the working classes in shaping the pattern of Indian capitalist development. Sustained in argument and elegant in exposition, these essays represent a major contribution not only to the history of the Indian working classes, but to the history of industrial capitalism and colonialism as a whole. Imperial Power and Popular Politics will be essential reading for all scholars and students of recent political, economic, and social history, social theory, and cultural and colonial studies.--Publisher description.

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.

The author captures the evolution of Indian industrial capitalism by extending the 'models of capitalism' and 'regulation framework'. Using principally the auto industry and anchoring the analysis to the expansion of markets, he demonstrates that the Indian state and businesses have been important institutions for creating markets. He acknowledges significant market growth, but also underscores several contradictions arising from such capitalist development. There is a wealth of data, which scholars, policymakers, and businesses will find very useful.

A history of capitalism in nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century China and India that explores the competition between their tea industries “Tea War is not only a detailed comparative history of the transformation of tea production in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it also intervenes in larger debates about the nature of capitalism, global modernity, and global history.”— Alexander F. Day, Occidental College Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.

Lost Glory: India's Capitalism Story deconstructs India's industrialization story, challenging contemporary ideas about her economy. Based on careful and detailed empirical analyses of India's industrialization, for a period of almost seven decades, the book provides deeply-nuanced depictions of the history of political economy, that have affected India's industrialization over the course of a century. These dimensions of India's economic history have never before been collated and presented. The presentation takes readers on a definitive evidence-based survey of India's industrial landscape. It includes a detailed historical description of the intellectual origins of India's modern industrialization, anchored in a privileged view of economic policy making. Grounded in deep historical and political analyses, that account for the variations, continuities, and changes in institutional contingencies, the facts derived on India's long-term economic performance are used to put the record straight. The findings of the book will transform debate, and set the agenda for thoughtfully assessing what course the Indian economy needs to follow.

In theories of development, public infrastructure serves as one of the myriad mediums through which the state seeks validation. In the modern period, infrastructure has often served as the symbol of state led progress. Infrastructure is thus a project of endorsement and justification of state's intervention. It is superfluous to say that infrastructure is a contested terrain within which the political economy of development unfolds. However, this thesis argues that it is through this iteration of infrastructure's intricate ways of creation and functioning that private capital begins to accumulate in post-colonial India. The project looks at the discourse of industrial development and planning in late and post-colonial India, investigating the manner in which infrastructure appears as a trope not only for state's validation but also for aggregation of the Indian industrialist class. How are the modernizing technopolitical state and infrastructure entangled? The thesis attempts to answer this question by studying closely the iconic Howrah Bridge, a cast iron structure which opened to the public in 1943 forever transforming the urbanscape of the erstwhile British capital in the east, the city of Calcutta. The Howrah Bridge project allows entrance to the broader realm of public infrastructure and tests the boundary between 'public' and 'private' in development projects. Along with other engineering consultants the Tata group, a burgeoning industrial giant in the early 1900s took a pioneering role in this project by supplying almost singlehandedly the steel required to construct the bridge. On the one hand, Tata Company's involvement underscores how the corporate house was mediating questions of economic sovereignty parallel to their negotiation with the British colonial market; on the other hand, like other native capitalists of the time, the Tata group was simultaneously deeply implicated in nationalist arguments for sovereignty of the nation-state, involving debates around tariffs, rights recovery and the like. This thesis untangles the relationship between private capital and its implications in the institutional development of national planning in post-colonial India. The thesis highlights the ways in which late colonial strategies negotiated questions of foreign and native enterprise by constructing what would become the largest bridge in India in 1943. I argue that the construction history of Howrah Bridge offers an alternate, albeit subverted history of infrastructure in which the infrastructural object backgrounds the functioning of capital, thus establishing infrastructure as the fulcrum around which to pivot reading the history of state and capital.