Download or read book Law and the Economy in Colonial India written by Tirthankar Roy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the economic reforms of the 1990s, India’s economy has grown rapidly. To sustain growth and foreign investment over the long run requires a well-developed legal infrastructure for conducting business, including cheap and reliable contract enforcement and secure property rights. But it’s widely acknowledged that India’s legal infrastructure is in urgent need of reform, plagued by problems, including slow enforcement of contracts and land laws that differ from state to state. How has this situation arisen, and what can boost business confidence and encourage long-run economic growth? Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy trace the beginnings of the current Indian legal system to the years of British colonial rule. They show how India inherited an elaborate legal system from the British colonial administration, which incorporated elements from both British Common Law and indigenous institutions. In the case of property law, especially as it applied to agricultural land, indigenous laws and local political expediency were more influential in law-making than concepts borrowed from European legal theory. Conversely, with commercial law, there was considerable borrowing from Europe. In all cases, the British struggled with limited capacity to enforce their laws and an insufficient knowledge of the enormous diversity and differentiation within Indian society. A disorderly body of laws, not conducive to production and trade, evolved over time. Roy and Swamy’s careful analysis not only sheds new light on the development of legal institutions in India, but also offers insights for India and other emerging countries through a look at what fosters the types of institutions that are key to economic growth.

Download or read book Law and the Economy in India written by Tirthankar Roy and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2024-07-25 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law matters for economic development, but where does it come from? And through what mechanisms does it affect different parts of the economy? In this insightful volume Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy start in the late eighteenth century, tracing the evolution of the British-Indian legal system as it emerged in the service of a cautious and self-serving colonial regime. They show that British-Indian law was designed to facilitate tax collection, permit international trade, and, above all, keep the regime in place. Since independence the Indian state has been much more confident and ambitious, seeking economic growth, equity, and poverty reduction. Therefore, it has also been far more interventionist, in policy and in law. Roy and Swamy have put together this entire two-hundred-fifty-year legal and economic history in a single narrative, for the first time, offering a unique perspective on the challenges of today.

Download or read book Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy written by Tirthankar Roy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy trace India's economic growth since 1947 and the legal reforms that have allowed it to settle in, however unevenly and tenuously, in the shadow of the stagnating effects of colonial rule. Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy portrays a long shadow of Indian "path dependence"-the persistence of colonial-era legal practices and institutions-interrupted by a series of reactive, dramatic departures from colonial inertia aimed at achieving quick or corrective growth and regulation. Roy and Swamy address five principal questions: How have new laws emerged in India? Does the explanation lie with colonialism or with post-independence politics and economic change? How were laws shaped by egalitarian goals in the Indian democracy with its universal adult suffrage? When did laws constrain economic growth? And to what extent did case law and legislation affect the evolution of law, which was also shaped by politics and the quality of legal infrastructure? Each of these questions brings together different threads of India's economic transformation and social/political history, and the format allows the authors to go deep on the country's most important market sectors and their surrounding economic and political histories. These sections include: colonialist influences on laws governing land and natural resources; politics and labor; and the alternating stifling effects of the country's economic policies and legal systems. In Roy and Swamy's telling, inadequate legal infrastructure has often been the country's primary impediment to economic growth during the last century, and it remains a primary reason that India's future may not be as bright as advertised"--

Download or read book Stages of Capital written by Ritu Birla and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Law and Imperialism written by Preeti Nijhar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-30 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laws that were imposed by colonizers were as much an attempt to confirm their own identity as to control the more dangerous elements of a potentially unruly populace. This title uses material from both British Parliamentary Papers and colonial archive material to provide evidence of legal change and response.

Download or read book Indigenous and Colonial Origins of Comparative Economic Development The Case of Colonial India and Africa written by Christopher Alan Bayly and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2012 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: This paper concerns the institutional origins of economic development, emphasizing the cases of nineteenth-century India and Africa. Colonial institutions-the law, western style property rights, newspapers and statistical analysis-played an important part in the emergence of Indian public and commercial life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These institutions existed in the context of a state that was extractive and yet dependent on indigenous cooperation in many areas, especially in the case of the business class. In such conditions, Indian elites were critical in creating informal systems of peer-group education, enhancing aspiration through the use of historicist and religious themes and in creating a "benign sociology" of India as a prelude to development. Indigenous ideologies and practices were as significant in this slow enhancement of Indian capabilities as transplanted colonial ones. Contemporary development specialists would do well to consider the merits of indigenous forms of association and public debate, religious movements and entrepreneurial classes. Over much of Asia and Africa, the most successful enhancement of people's capabilities has come through the action of hybrid institutions of this type.

Download or read book The Rule of Law and Emergency in Colonial India written by Haruki Inagaki and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Britain's empire did not arrive fully formed in India. Haruki Inagaki's superbly-researched, well-argued book traces its emergence in a proliferating set of arguments...[and] offers a compelling account of the real life of empire in motion. A vital contribution to the burgeoning field of imperial legal history, it speaks well beyond narrow thematic categories, and is vital reading for anyone interested in the history of empire more broadly and the Indian subcontinent." - Jon Wilson, Professor, King's College London, UK This book takes a closer look at colonial despotism in early nineteenth-century India and argues that it resulted from Indians' 'forum shopping,' the legal practice which resulted in jurisdictional jockeying between an executive, the East India Company, and a judiciary, the King's Court. Focusing on the collisions that took place in Bombay during the 1820s, the book analyses how Indians of various descriptions-peasants, revenue defaulters, government employees, merchants, chiefs, and princes-used the court to challenge the government (and vice versa) and demonstrates the mechanism through which the lawcourt hindered the government's indirect rule, which relied on local Indian rulers in newly conquered territories. The author concludes that existing political anxiety justified the East India Company's attempt to curtail the power of the court and strengthen their own power to intervene in emergencies through the renewal of the company's charter in 1834. An insightful read for those researching Indian history and judicial politics, this book engages with an understudied period of British rule in India, where the royal courts emerged as sites of conflict between the East India Company and a variety of Indian powers. Haruki Inagaki is Associate Professor at Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan, having previously studied at King's College London, UK. His research focuses on the history of British colonial rule in India. He is also interested in the comparative history of British and Japanese empires.

Download or read book The Government of Social Life in Colonial India written by Rachel Sturman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses religious law in colonial India, exploring how it encouraged gender equality and a rethinking of the relationship between state and society.

Download or read book The Economic History of Colonialism written by Leigh Gardner and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debates about the origins and effects of European rule in the non-European world have animated the field of economic history since the 1850s. This pioneering text provides a concise and accessible resource that introduces key readings, builds connections between ideas and helps students to develop informed views of colonialism as a force in shaping the modern world. With special reference to European colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in both Asia and Africa, this book: • critically reviews the literature on colonialism and economic growth; • covers a range of different methods of analysis; • offers a comparative approach, as opposed to a collection of regional histories, deftly weaving together different themes. With debates around globalization, migration, global finance and environmental change intensifying, this authoritative account of the relationship between colonialism and economic development makes an invaluable contribution to several distinct literatures in economic history.

Download or read book A New Economic History of Colonial India written by Latika Chaudhary and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-20 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Economic History of Colonial India provides a new perspective on Indian economic history. Using economic theory and quantitative methods, it shows how the discipline is being redefined and how new scholarship on India is beginning to embrace and make use of concepts from the larger field of global economic history and economics. The book discusses the impact of property rights, the standard of living, the labour market and the aftermath of the Partition. It also addresses how education and work changed, and provides a rethinking of traditional topics including de-industrialization, industrialization, railways, balance of payments, and the East India Company. Written in an accessible way, the contributors – all leading experts in their fields – firmly place Indian history in the context of world history. An up-to-date critical survey and novel resource on Indian Economic History, this book will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Economic History, Indian and South Asian Studies, Economics and Comparative and Global History.

Download or read book Peasants Political Economy and Law written by Peter G. Robb and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection written over a period of almost two decades, Peter Robb, an important historian of the Empire, explores the connections between agrarian policy, revenue, property law, and commercial production; and the emergence of political identities. He investigates issues like economic development, tenancy acts, peasant stratification, "capitalist" agriculture, and definitions of labor in relation to the British Empire.

Download or read book Indigenous and Colonial Origins of Comparative Economic Development written by C. A. Bayly and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper concerns the institutional origins of economic development, emphasising the cases of 19th-century India and Africa. Colonial institutions - the law, western style property rights, newspapers and statistical analysis - played an important part in the emergence of Indian public and commercial life in the 19th and 20th centuries. These institutions existed in the context of a state that was extractive and yet dependent on indigenous cooperation in many areas, especially in the case of the business class. In such conditions, Indian elites were critical in creating informal systems of peer-group education, enhancing aspiration through the use of historicist and religious themes, and in creating a 'benign sociology' of India as a prelude to development. Indigenous ideologies and practices were as significant in this slow enhancement of Indian capabilities as transplanted colonial ones. Contemporary development specialists would do well to consider the merits of indigenous forms of association and public debate, religious movements and entrepreneurial classes. Over much of Asia and Africa, the most successful enhancement of people's capabilities has come through the action of hybrid institutions of this type.

Download or read book Producing India written by Manu Goswami and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-01-26 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Bazaar India written by Anand A. Yang and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-02-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of markets in linking local communities to larger networks of commerce, culture, and political power is the central element in Anand A. Yang's provocative and original study. Yang uses bazaars in the northeast Indian state of Bihar during the colonial period as the site of his investigation. The bazaar provides a distinctive locale for posing fundamental questions regarding indigenous societies under colonialism and for highlighting less familiar aspects of colonial India. At one level, Yang reconstructs Bihar's marketing system, from its central place in the city of Patna down to the lowest rung of the periodic markets. But he also concentrates on the dynamics of exchanges and negotiations between different groups and on what can be learned through the "voices" of people in the bazaar: landholders, peasants, traders, and merchants. Along the way, Yang uncovers a wealth of details on the functioning of rural trade, markets, fairs, and pilgrimages in Bihar. A key contribution of Bazaar India is its many-stranded narrative history of some of South Asia's primary actors over the past two centuries. But Yang's approach is not that of a detached observer; rather, his own voice is engaged with the voices of the past and with present-day historians. By focusing on the world beyond the mud walls of the village, he widens the imaginative geography of South Asian history. Readers with an interest in markets, social history, culture, colonialism, British India, and historiographic methods will welcome his book.

Download or read book Rule by Numbers written by U. Kalpagam and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-08-20 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines aspects of the production of statistical knowledge as part of colonial governance in India using Foucault’s ideas of “governmentality.” The modern state is distinctive for its bureaucratic organization, official procedures, and accountability that in the colonial context of governing at a distance instituted a vast system of recordation bearing semblance to and yet differing markedly from the Victorian administrative state. The colonial rule of difference that shaped liberal governmentality introduced new categories of rule that were nested in the procedures and records and could be unraveled from the archive of colonial governance. Such an exercise is attempted here for certain key epistemic categories such as space, time, measurement, classification and causality that have enabled the constitution of modern knowledge and the social scientific discourses of “economy,” “society,” and “history.” The different chapters engage with how enumerative technologies of rule led to proliferating measurements and classifications as fields and objects came within the purview of modern governance rendering both statistical knowledge and also new ways of acting on objects and new discourses of governance and the nation. The postcolonial implications of colonial governmentality are examined with respect to both planning techniques for attainment of justice and the role of information in the constitution of neoliberal subjects.

Download or read book The Transition to a Colonial Economy written by Prasannan Parthasarathi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-04-19 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to widespread belief, poverty and low standards of living have been characteristic of India for centuries. Challenging this view, Prasannan Parthasarathi demonstrates that, until the late eighteenth century, labouring groups in South India, those at the bottom of the social order, were in a powerful position, receiving incomes well above subsistence. The decline in their economic fortunes, the author asserts, was a process initiated towards the end of that century, with the rise of colonial rule. Building on revisionist interpretations, he examines the transformation of Indian society and its economy under British rule through the prism of the labouring classes, arguing that their treatment by the early colonial state had no precedent in the pre-colonial past and that poverty and low wages were a product of colonial rule. The book promises to make an important contribution to the economic history of the region, and to the study of colonialism.

Download or read book Inglorious Empire written by Shashi Tharoor and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2018-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inglorious Empire' tells the real story of the British in India from the arrival of the East India Company to the end of the Raj, revealing how Britain's rise was built upon its plunder of India. In the eighteenth century, India's share of the world economy was as large as Europe's. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation. British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial "gift" - from the railways to the rule of law -was designed in Britain's interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain's Industrial Revolution was founded on India's deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry.