State and Capital in Post-Colonial India

State and Capital in Post-Colonial India PDF

Author: Chirashree Das Gupta

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-11-02

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1107102243

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""Discusses the specific relationship between state and capital in forging the dynamic role of institutions of the state and market that form the basis of capital accumulation in economies undergoing transition"--Provided by publisher"--

Stages of Capital

Stages of Capital PDF

Author: Ritu Birla

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2009-01-14

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 082239247X

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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.

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital PDF

Author: Vivek Chibber

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2013-03-12

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1781684626

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Postcolonial theory has become enormously influential as a framework for understanding the Global South. It is also a school of thought popular because of its rejection of the supposedly universalizing categories of the Enlightenment. In this devastating critique, mounted on behalf of the radical Enlightenment tradition, Vivek Chibber offers the most comprehensive response yet to postcolonial theory. Focusing on the hugely popular Subaltern Studies project, Chibber shows that its foundational arguments are based on a series of analytical and historical misapprehensions. He demonstrates that it is possible to affirm a universalizing theory without succumbing to Eurocentrism or reductionism. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital promises to be a historical milestone in contemporary social theory.

Beyond Belief

Beyond Belief PDF

Author: Srirupa Roy

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2007-05-28

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0822389916

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Beyond Belief is a bold rethinking of the formation and consolidation of nation-state ideologies. Analyzing India during the first two decades following its foundation as a sovereign nation-state in 1947, Srirupa Roy explores how nationalists are turned into nationals, subjects into citizens, and the colonial state into a sovereign nation-state. Roy argues that the postcolonial nation-state is consolidated not, as many have asserted, by efforts to imagine a shared cultural community, but rather by the production of a recognizable and authoritative identity for the state. This project—of making the state the entity identified as the nation’s authoritative representative—emphasizes the natural cultural diversity of the nation and upholds the state as the sole unifier or manager of the “naturally” fragmented nation; the state is unified through diversity. Roy considers several different ways that identification with the Indian nation-state was produced and consolidated during the 1950s and 1960s. She looks at how the Films Division of India, a state-owned documentary and newsreel production agency, allowed national audiences to “see the state”; how the “unity in diversity” formation of nationhood was reinforced in commemorations of India’s annual Republic Day; and how the government produced a policy discourse claiming that scientific development was the ultimate national need and the most pressing priority for the state to address. She also analyzes the fate of the steel towns—industrial townships built to house the workers of nationalized steel plants—which were upheld as the exemplary national spaces of the new India. By prioritizing the role of actual manifestations of and encounters with the state, Roy moves beyond theories of nationalism and state formation based on collective belief.

The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital PDF

Author: Rosie Warren

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2016-12-13

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1784786977

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Leading thinkers’ critiques of award-winning Postcolonial Theory, as well as the author’s responses and reformulations Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital was hailed on publication as “without any doubt … a bomb,” and “the most substantive effort to dismantle the field through historical reasoning published to date.” It immediately unleashed one of the most important recent debates in social theory, ranging across the humanities and social sciences, on the status of postcolonial studies, modernity, and much else. This book brings together major critics of Chibber’s work to assess the efficacy of his argument from differing perspectives. Included are Chibber’s own spirited responses and reformulations in light of these criticisms. With contributions by Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Bruce Robbins, Ho-fung Hung, William H. Sewell, Jr., Bruce Cumings, George Steinmetz, Michael Schwartz, David Pederson, Stein Sundstøl Eriksen, and Achin Vanaik.

Rethinking Capitalist Development

Rethinking Capitalist Development PDF

Author: Kalyan Sanyal

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-30

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1317809513

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In this book, Kalyan Sanyal reviews the traditional notion of capitalism and propounds an original theory of capitalist development in the post-colonial context. In order to substantiate his theory, concepts such as primitive accumulation, governmentality and post-colonial capitalist formation are discussed in detail. Analyzing critical questions from a third world perspective such as: Will the integration into the global capitalist network bring to the third world new economic opportunities? Will this capitalist network make the third world countries an easy prey for predatory multinational corporations? The end result is a discourse, drawing on Marx and Foucault, which envisages the post-colonial capitalist formation, albeit in an entirely different light, in the era of globalization.

State and Capital in Independent India

State and Capital in Independent India PDF

Author: Chirashree Das Gupta

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-11-02

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1316758958

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This book presents a historical account of the relationship between state and capital from independence to the liberalization episodes of the 1980s and after. It provides a focused analysis of the organization of business houses, corporate governance structures, labour laws, and the institution of the family and personal laws, and explains the institutional basis of regional differences in accumulation and uneven development in independent India. By addressing questions of agrarian, capital, technology and fiscal constraints which were characteristic of the economy at independence, this book provides an insightful study of the political economy of the role of changing social relations in India after independence.

The Post-Colonial State in the Era of Capitalist Globalization

The Post-Colonial State in the Era of Capitalist Globalization PDF

Author: Tariq Amin-Khan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-03-12

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1136461744

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State formation in post-colonial societies differed greatly from the formation of the Western capitalist state. The latter has been extensively studied, while a coherent grasp of the post-colonial state has remained elusive. Amin-Khan provides a critical historical and contemporary understanding of post-colonial state formations in Asia and Africa, and suggests how this process differed from the formation of states in Latin America. In distinguishing between the post-colonial state and the Western capitalist state, the author argues that the unitary colonial state left a strong legacy on the decolonized states of Asia and Africa, reinscribing their subordination vis-à-vis Western states, transnational corporations and multilateral institutions. The indigenous elites' decision at the time of decolonization to retain colonial state structures meant the readaptation of capitalism-imperialism nexus to suit new post-colonial realities, which enabled the formation of clientelist relationships. This post-colonial reality and exploration of the contemporary context provides the basis of analyzing two post-colonial state forms, the capitalist and proto-capitalist varieties, which are examined using the case studies of India and Pakistan.

Postcolonial India

Postcolonial India PDF

Author: Vinita Damodaran

Publisher: Manohar Publishers and Distributors

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13:

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This book surveys and analyses the economic, political and cultural changes which have taken place in India since its Independence. It explores some of the defining moments in the history of post-colonial India, and brings together recent works of scholars of different disciplines to provide dynamic new insights into the half-century since Independence. The effects of decolonisation, modernisation, and industrialisation are given special attention, particularly in relation to the impacts felt by women and minorities both in the country and the city. The colossal effects of state projects on the environment are also considered. An important focus of the papers is examining the discourses of modernity and the state and the effects they have had on shifting notions of identity. India is today faced with a crisis in the attempts made by the government to accommodate global capitalism in a highly traditional society. Papers in this volume underline two aspects of the current crisis; the deeply worrying failure of liberalisation to stem poverty, and the equally dangerous climate of hostility to secularism. However, the work presented here tries to suggest some possible paths away from the predicaments of communalism and mass poverty.