Editorial
Editors' Note Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 1 – 1 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001384 Published Online on 10th April 2014
Introduction
Introduction Dwijendra Tripathi Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 3 – 8 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001396 Published Online on 10th April 2014
Research Articles
Trading Firms in Colonial India Tirthankar Roy Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 9 – 42 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001402 Published Online on 08th April 2014
The aim of this article is to develop a general narrative of the firms that led the growth of trade in nineteenth-century India, and thus to supply a missing piece in modern Indian business history. The trading firms had several features in common with trading firms globally, especially, a high degree of mobility, institutional adaptation, and occasionally, diversification into banking and manufacturing. But certain aspects of the process were specific to the regions where they operated, such as differences between the ports and the interior trading orders, between cities, and between expatriate and indigenous firms. The article reconsiders these features.
The Emergence of Indigenous Industrialists in Calcutta, Bombay, and Ahmedabad, 1850–1947 Gijsbert Oonk Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 43 – 71 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001414 Published Online on 10th April 2014
This article describes and explains three patterns in the entry of Indian entrepreneurs in large-scale industries in South Asia, 1850–1947. It begins with Marwari businessmen in the jute industry in Calcutta. Then I discuss the success of the Parsi community in the Bombay cotton industries, and, finally, Gujarati (mainly Hindu) industrialists in Ahmedabad. I focus on three variables that might explain the timing, degree, and social and cultural variations in the emergence of indigenous industrialists in these cities. These variables concern: first, the colonial attitude towards indigenous industrialists in this field; second, whether or not these men belonged to a (religious) middleman minority; and, finally, their social and, in particular, occupational background.
Business, Ethnicity, Politics, and Imperial Interests: The United Planters' Association of Southern India, 1893–1950 K. Ravi Raman Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 73 – 95 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001438 Published Online on 10th April 2014
The United Planters' Association of South India (UPASI), formed in 1893 at the zenith of British colonial rule in India, was an organization dedicated to the interests of British planters, mainly tea planters, of South India. In the first half century of its history, UPASI enjoyed an unusual degree of effectiveness and control. Its authority and reach owed to the fact that, unlike many other planters' organizations of the time, such as the Ceylon Planters' Association and the Planters' Association of Malay, UPASI was an “association of associations,” a cartel of cartels, its members being district associations. But its power also derived from the homogeneous ethnic composition of the firms that constituted and managed this body, making it an exclusive association of Europeans in an Indian world. In this article, I show how this combination of ethnicity and cooperation, dynamics that manifested across the entire range of modern businesses started in colonial India, proved to be both a source of strength and a point of weakness.
“The Promise of Partnership”: Indian Business, the State, and the Bombay Plan of 1944 Medha Kudaisya Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 97 – 131 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001426 Published Online on 10th April 2014
This article recounts the story of the Bombay Plan of 1944, a bold vision of economic transformation for postwar India put forth by business leaders. The Plan represented a turning point in the history of Indian business. It marked the institutionalization of a long relationship between business and nationalist leadership as well as a historic moment when business groups, for the first time, unhesitatingly aligned themselves with nationalist aspirations. Underlying the Bombay Plan was the idea of a close partnership between business and the state. Yet, within a decade, this optimism died out as the autarchic features of economic policy became increasingly pronounced in independent India. The story of the Bombay Plan provides an insight into the relations between business and state in the context of development planning in India.
Charting Dynamic Trajectories: Multinational Enterprises in India Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 133 – 169 doi: 10.1017/S000768051300144X Published Online on 10th April 2014
In this article, we provide a synthesizing framework that we call the “dynamic trajectories” framework to study the evolution of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in host countries over time. We argue that a change in the policy environment in a host country presents an MNE with two sets of interrelated decisions. First, the MNE has to decide whether to enter, exit, or stay in the host country at the onset of each policy epoch; second, conditional on the first choice, it has to decide on its local responsiveness strategy at the onset of each policy epoch. India, which experienced two policy shocks—shutting down to MNEs in 1970 and then opening up again in 1991—offers an interesting laboratory to explore the “dynamic trajectories” perspective. We collect and analyze a unique dataset of all entry and exit events for Fortune 50 and FTSE 50 firms (as of 1991) in India in the period from 1858 to 2013 and, additionally, we document detailed case studies of four MNEs (that arguably represent outliers in our sample).
Announcement
Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 171 – 176 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001451 Published Online on 10th April 2014
Books That Made A Difference
Beyond Racism: The Story of Prakash Tandon and Unilever India Jaithirth Rao Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 177 – 185 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001463 Published Online on 10th April 2014
The noted British historian G. M. Trevelyan observed that “without social history, economic history is barren and political history is unintelligible.” The autobiographical volumes of Prakash Tandon, one of twentieth-century India's great business leaders, have been hailed as extremely important works of social history. The Times Literary Supplement had this to say about Tandon's Beyond Punjab (1971): “Everyone who is interested in factors which have shaped India today should read this book.” But business historians have rarely cited Tandon's work. This is not entirely surprising, given the state of business history in India. Apart from a few scholars, including Dwijendra Tripathi and the authors in this special issue of Business History Review, research on business history has been limited. To some extent, politics has been the all-consuming passion in India. Yet Tandon's work contains remarkable insights into important aspects of business history, both in India and globally.
Review Essay
David R. Farber, Everybody Ought to Be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist; and Susie Pak, Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J. P. Morgan Noam Maggor Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 187 – 194 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001475 Published Online on 10th April 2014
When business historians discarded the melodramatic mode of analysis more than a half century ago, transcending a stale debate over whether business leaders were “heroes” or “villains,” they also shifted emphatically away from finance as a topic of inquiry. A generation of muckraking accounts, culminating in Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons, had dramatized American industrialization as a story of stock market manipulation and abuse of power. These narratives featured financiers, not as full participants in the formation of the new industrial system, but as an external and almost entirely disruptive force. They attached a stigma to finance that prompted scholars, inspired by the work of Alfred Chandler, to turn elsewhere for insights about the rise of modern business. More recently, a new cohort of historians—Stephen Mihm, Julia Ott, Jonathan Levy, Louis Hyman, and Richard White, to name a few of the more prominent names—has rediscovered finance as an analytical perspective and subject of immense significance. With a more subtle and nuanced approach than their Progressive-era forebears, they have moved bankers, investors, and stockbrokers from the margins and positioned them at the very core of American capitalism.
Book Reviews
Financing the Raj: The City of London and Colonial India, 1858–1940. By David Sunderland. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2013. viii + 240 pp. Figures, tables, appendices, bibliography, index. Cloth, $130.00. ISBN: 978-1-84383-795-4. Ranald Michie Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 195 – 197 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001645 Published Online on 10th April 2014
Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth-Century India. By Howard Spodek. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. xvi + 330 pp. Illustrations, maps, glossary, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $49.95. ISBN: 978-0-253-35587-4. Douglas E. Haynes Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 197 – 199 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001633 Published Online on 10th April 2014
Biographies of the Financial World. Edited by Anders Perlinge and Hans Sjögren. Möklinta, Sweden: Gidlunds Förlag, 2012. Illustrations, references, tables. Cloth, kr221. ISBN: 978-91-7844-852-4. Maury Klein Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 200 – 202 doi: 10.1017/S000768051300158X Published Online on 10th April 2014
Men, Women, and Money: Perspectives on Gender, Wealth, and Investment, 1850–1930. Edited by David R. Green, Alastair Owens, Josephine Maltby, and Janette Rutterford. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xvi + 308 pp. Maps, figures, tables, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $99.00. ISBN: 978-0-19-959376-7. Janice Traflet Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 202 – 205 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001542 Published Online on 10th April 2014
Money over Two Centuries: Selected Topics in British Monetary History. By Forrest Capie and Geoffrey Wood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. x + 367 pp. Figures, tables, references, notes, index. Cloth, $125.00. ISBN: 978-0-19-965512-0. John A. James Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 205 – 207 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001499 Published Online on 10th April 2014
Prometheus Shackled: Goldsmith Banks and England's Financial Revolution after 1700. By Peter Temin and Hans-Joachim Voth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. ix + 214 pp. Tables, figures, references, notes, index. Cloth, $39.95. ISBN: 978-0-19-994427-9. Robert E. Wright Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 207 – 209 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001657 Published Online on 10th April 2014
“Merely for Money”? Business Culture in the British Atlantic, 1750–1815. By Sheryllynne Haggerty. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012. xiv + 287 pp. Tables, figures, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $99.95; £65.00. ISBN: 978-1-84631-817-7. Simon D. Smith Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 210 – 212 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001554 Published Online on 10th April 2014
British Lions and Mexican Eagles: Business, Politics, and Empire in the Career of Weetman Pearson in Mexico, 1899–1919. By Paul Garner. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. xi + 319 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, appendix, notes, index. Cloth, $65.00. ISBN: 978-0-8047-7445-1. Marcelo Bucheli Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 212 – 215 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001529 Published Online on 10th April 2014
Salt and the Colombian State: Local Society and Regional Monopoly in Boyacá, 1821–1900. By Joshua M. Rosenthal. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. xii + 222 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, bibliography, notes, index. Paper, $27.95. ISBN: 978-0-8229-6180-2. Carlos Dávila Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 215 – 217 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001621 Published Online on 10th April 2014
The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920. By David Hochfelder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. viii + 250 pp. Illustrations, photographs, tables, notes, index. Cloth, $55.00. ISBN: 978-1-4214-0747-0. Benjamin Schwantes Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 217 – 220 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001566 Published Online on 10th April 2014
America's Economic Way of War: War and the U.S. Economy from the Spanish-American War to the Persian Gulf War. By Hugh Rockoff. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xii + 357 pp. Tables, figures, appendices, references, index. Paper, $26.99. ISBN: 978-0-521-67673-1. Mark R. Wilson Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 220 – 222 doi: 10.1017/S000768051300161X Published Online on 10th April 2014
The Political Economy of Pipelines: A Century of Comparative Institutional Development. By Jeff D. Makholm. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. xii + 270 pp. Photographs, maps, illustrations, figures, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $60.00. ISBN: 978-0-226-50210-6. Ray Stokes Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 222 – 225 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001578 Published Online on 10th April 2014
The People's Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle. By Bernhard Rieger. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. 406 pp. Illustrations, photographs, notes, index. Cloth, $28.95. ISBN: 978-0-674-05091-4. Corinna Ludwig Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 225 – 227 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001608 Published Online on 10th April 2014
The Cooperative Business Movement, 1950 to the Present. Edited by Patrizia Battilani and Harm G. Schröter. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xi + 238 pp. Figures, tables, appendices, notes, index. Cloth, $95.00. ISBN: 978-1-107-02898-2. Benjamin C. Waterhouse Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 227 – 230 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001487 Published Online on 10th April 2014
Radio's Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s. By David Goodman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xx + 337 pp. Illustrations, photographs, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $49.95. ISBN: 978-0-19-539408-5. David Suisman Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 230 – 232 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001530 Published Online on 10th April 2014
Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West. By John M. Findlay and Bruce Hevly. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011. xv + 368 pp. Maps, illustrations, photographs, appendices, bibliography, notes, index. Paper, $24.95. ISBN: 978-0-295-99097-2. John Wills Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 232 – 234 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001517 Published Online on 10th April 2014
Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. By Robert N. Proctor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. x + 737 pp. Illustrations, appendix, figures, tables, notes, index. Cloth, $49.95. ISBN: 978-0-520-27016-9. Christian Warren Business History Review , Volume 88 , Special Issue 01 – Business, Networks, and the State in India , March 2014, pp 235 – 237 doi: 10.1017/S0007680513001591 Published Online on 10th April 2014