Ritu Birla . Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India . Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press . 2009 . Pp. xi, 346. Cloth $84.95, paper $23.95.

Abstract

The typical subject, in colonial studies in general and in studies on colonial India in particular, tends to be the middle-class intelligentsia. Ritu Birla's ambitious monograph places Indian capitalists—specifically, Marwari capitalists—squarely at the center of her study and uses them to study the formation of the modern Indian economic subject. In Birla's analysis, the world of India's “vernacular capitalism” was characterized by family firms that functioned within the “negotiable” spheres of personalized kinship and communal ties on the one hand and the material values of credit, trade, and investment on the other. The book explores the tensions inherent in colonial efforts to create a standardized, rational market through the formulation and implementation of laws relating to companies law, negotiable instruments, income tax, charitable giving, and pension funds, while at the same time pursuing a policy (particularly since 1858) of non-intervention in the cultural conventions and practices of their Indian subjects. The paradox of the Indian/Marwari family firm, which was an important player in the colonial economy and yet did not meet colonial/metropolitan standards of a rational, modern business organization free from ties of caste, community, and communal-corporate conventions, resulted in such entities being categorized as a familial institution. This categorization gave rise to the concept of the “Undivided Hindu Family” (UHF) which, as Birla shows, sat uneasily upon firms that straddled the spheres of business and family/community. This move, in Birla's analysis, created the blending of the public sphere—associated with the economy—and the private sphere—representing cultural matters—from which the colonial regime had announced its intention of staying away.