At this western corner of the confluence of the Bay of Bengal and the busy river Hooghly, West Bengal in eastern India lies a geography that has hosted many outsiders – traders, merchants, colonial masters, missionaries and wanderers. This book is fundamentally concerned with the relations among the theoretical categories of time, space and capital in India and shows registers of temporality and spatiality generated by historical phases of interaction with industrial capital. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Howrah, the author examines the form of urbanism that is not linked to the city-form of spatial organization, a "hinterland urbanism". The book brings out the theoretical implications by showing the relations among time, space and capital. Through a series of encounters and interceptions with a number of voices arising, the book sheds light on the issue and identifies the state of an ethnographer who is ensconced in the field – in wonder, conceit and sometimes physical discomfort. This book is, thus, an exploration of such historical layering of space by forces of time and speed afforded by the logics of capital, through limited acts of witnessing of production and access of historical sensation. An invitation to scholars and students of cultural anthropology to consider the question of scale in the making of ethical, political, and aesthetic selves, this book is an intervention in political anthropology that connects aesthetics, desire, and emotion to political imagination and action. The book makes a significant contribution in anthropology of space, urban anthropology and anthropology of capital as well as urban studies.

In this challenging book, the authors demonstrate that economists tend to misunderstand capital. Frank Knight was an exception, as he argued that because all resources are more or less durable and have uncertain future uses they can consequently be classed as capital. Thus, capital rather than labor is the real source of creativity, innovation, and accumulation. But capital is also a phenomenon in time and in space. Offering a new and path-breaking theory, they show how durable capital with large spatial domains — infrastructural capital such as institutions, public knowledge, and networks — can help explain the long-term development of cities and nations.

This book is fundamentally concerned with the relations among the theoretical categories of time, space and capital in India and shows registers of temporality and spatiality generated by historical phases of interaction with industrial capital.

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.

Explores globalization, its opportunities for individual empowerment, its achievements at lifting millions out of poverty, and its drawbacks--environmental, social, and political.

When did categories such as a national space and economy acquire self-evident meaning and a global reach? Why do nationalist movements demand a territorial fix between a particular space, economy, culture, and people? Producing India mounts a formidable challenge to the entrenched practice of methodological nationalism that has accorded an exaggerated privilege to the nation-state as a dominant unit of historical and political analysis. Manu Goswami locates the origins and contradictions of Indian nationalism in the convergence of the lived experience of colonial space, the expansive logic of capital, and interstate dynamics. Building on and critically extending subaltern and postcolonial perspectives, her study shows how nineteenth-century conceptions of India as a bounded national space and economy bequeathed an enduring tension between a universalistic political economy of nationhood and a nativist project that continues to haunt the present moment. Elegantly conceived and judiciously argued, Producing India will be invaluable to students of history, political economy, geography, and Asian studies.

This book looks at the ecological stress on cities and engages with challenges of reducing vulnerabilities and risks of pollution on the health, well-being and livelihoods of people living in developing countries. Cities are the world’s highest energy consumers and the biggest producers of toxic wastes and pollutants. With an emphasis on the environmental issues facing the city of Delhi, the volume focuses on steps to preserve and manage the city’s urban green spaces. It explores the concept of urban green spaces and their economic, social, health, and psychological significance in cities. Drawing from their fieldwork and research in Delhi, the authors identify the sources of pollution in the city and access the role of urban green spaces in countering adverse effects. They further examine the relationship between green spaces and social and economic development, urban health, and urban governance. They highlight the good practices followed by other global cities. The volume also offers suggestions and policy recommendations to reverse and recover ecological balance in cities. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of environment and ecology, public health, urban planning and governance, development studies, urban geography, urban sociology, resource management and health economics. It will also be useful for policy makers, and NGOs working in the areas of sustainability, urban planning and management and environmental preservation.