The Market and the Sovereign: Politics, Performance, and Impasses of Cross-LOC Trade

doi:10.1017/9781108762533.008

8 - The Market and the Sovereign: Politics, Performance, and Impasses of Cross-LOC Trade

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2020

Aditi Saraf

Edited by

Ajay Gandhi ,

Barbara Harriss-White ,

Douglas E. Haynes and

Sebastian Schwecke

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Ajay Gandhi: Affiliation:
Universiteit Leiden
Barbara Harriss-White: Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Douglas E. Haynes: Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
Sebastian Schwecke: Affiliation:
Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta

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Summary

This chapter examines the complex entanglements of commerce and sovereignty in the modern artifact of cross-border trade that was inaugurated in 2008 between the India- and Pakistan-controlled parts of Kashmir. The exchange was devised as a nontaxable, nonmonetized form of barter, and strange customs evolved to ensure that the trade could be neither “internal” nor “external.” Yet for traders who engaged cross-border commerce in all its absurdity and elasticity, its artifactual form served as an opportunity for activating transversal ideas of autonomy, community, and profit otherwise not permissible under the regulatory regimes of nation states. Drawing on the historical emergence of markets as sites of political claims-making, I examine recent boundary wars between licit and illicit trade at the Line of Control to show how both traders and the state continually improvise law and exchange express distinct - and often incongruous - ideas of fairness and freedom.

Keywords

borders regulation trade self-determination militarization Jammu and Kashmir India-Pakistan relations

Type: Chapter
Information: Rethinking Markets in Modern India
Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction
, pp. 206 - 233

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108762533.008 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2020

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8 - The Market and the Sovereign: Politics, Performance, and Impasses of Cross-LOC Trade

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