Any general account of capitalism in India needs to be mindful of two characteristics of the region. First, Indians have been doing business with the outside world for millennia. Second, there was an extraordinary degree of regional diversity within the Indian subcontinent. Capitalism tends to enter comparative economic history in three different ways: as a mode of production in orthodox Marxism; as international trade in the world systems analysis; and as institutions in current discourses on international development. A quick glance at the map of the Indian subcontinent shows that its topography would have presented any long-distance trader living before the age of steam with a great advantage and a great disadvantage at the same time. In the 1990s, contributions on new institutional economic history emphasized the importance of social norms, and suggested that the formation of a bureaucratic state and social norms could lead to different, sometimes alternative, frameworks of regulation and in turn of capitalism.