"Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry" is currently available on the @harvardpress.bsky.social website at a 30% discount (use code HOL25) and can also be found at your favorite booksellers. Thanks for reading and happy holidays to all!

These tensions continue to manifest in contemporary business-state relations in the 21st. And they are not only elite conflicts; they are visible in broader societal struggles from fights over FDI reforms & multinational corporations in Indian retail markets (Walmart, Amazon) to the #farmerprotests

…to clashes between multinational corporations and Indian companies throughout the 20th century, including between iconic brands like Coca-Cola & Thums Up during the post 1991 economic liberalization period.

The book argues that these categories of “traditional” and “modern” constitute a moral order of capitalist legitimacy that has shaped industrial policymaking from the demise of the East India Company and the rise of new Indian business groups such as Tata and Wadia in the late 19th century…

These “Captains of Industry” were contrasted with other business actors seen as merely trading rather than producing, or as engaging in financial speculation and other allegedly “traditional” & regressive activities.

I argue that Indian policy elites distinguished between capitalists seen to invest profits in expanding production and technological innovation—practices deemed synonymous with industrial #development & economic modernization.

Indian #economicnationalism has never been characterized by a straightforward preference for domestic over foreign capital. There are deep and longstanding anxieties about the nature and orientation of Indian business actors.

The book examines how Indian elites wrestled with this question in the late colonial and postcolonial periods, arguing that it reflects a false binary. Contra choosing btwn domestic and foreign capital, Indian policymakers have long considered the business ethics of individual capitalists and firms.

The book is animated by the following tensions and questions: Is foreign capital an agent of economic growth in developing countries or a vehicle of extraction? And crucially, is domestic capital always seen as viable alternative?

The book identifies the moral underpinnings of contemporary #capitalism through the case of #FDI policy in India. It shows how perspectives on domestic and foreign capital have long been shaped by moral beliefs about capitalist legitimacy, from the late colonial period to the present.