Amid widespread concern about the role of subsidies in the depletion of global fish stocks, the UN Sustainable Development Goals identified achieving a WTO agreement to restrict fisheries subsidies as a major international priority. Seen as an important means for the WTO to contribute to addressing a pressing global development and environmental issue, and thus resuscitate the institution following the Doha Round collapse, fisheries subsidies have been the subject of intense negotiating efforts at the WTO. However, the key issue of contention is how China and other large emerging economies should be treated under any new disciplines. The fisheries subsidies issue sharply underscores the problem with extending special and differential treatment (SDT) to China: since China now has the largest industrial fishing fleet in the world and provides the greatest volume of subsidies, exempting its subsidies from disciplines would severely harm the sustainability of global fisheries. Efforts to negotiate a standalone agreement on fisheries subsidies have run aground amid this central issue of dispute. The result has been a failure to arrive at new disciplines, the consequences of which are felt most keenly by poor developing countries whose populations are heavily dependent on fisheries for food security, livelihoods, and exports.

For the Comaroffs criminality has become a global idiom for social and economic life. Here, eleven case studies of criminal markets in India (Harriss-White and Michelutti, 2019) are found to support the Comaroffs’ global model in which state privatization generates contested jurisdictions and plural sovereignties. But distinctively Indian characteristics of criminal markets are also found. As suggested by Jha, these are preconditions for the funding of electoral democratic politics. The recent history of riverbed sand markets in Tamil Nadu on which urbanization and infrastructure depend reveals the capture and complicity of all levels of the revenue and regulative bureaucracy and of entire party political hierarchies. Profits and tribute resulting from rapid technological aggrandizement, the formation of regional monopolies, and of mafianized cartels in sand are the object of both competition and collusion. Resistance expressed through PIL results in un-enforced judicial decisions. Tamil Nadu’s famed populism coexists with predatory, pork barrel politics. The implications of criminalized sand markets for theories of actually existing markets and institutional change are discussed.

This chapter begins with descriptions of different landscapes of alcohol production and consumption in Jharkhand and discusses how transactions of alcohol are tied up with social as well as cosmological and economic obligations for Adivasis. The latter half of the chapter describes how such transactions are subject to complex issues of regulation involving intersecting cosmologies and sovereignties. In particular, law and policing inflect transactional grammars of alcohol in Jharkhand and, in doing so, impinge on issues of livelihood - and existence itself - for many Adivasi families.

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.

Although it is well known that the colonial state embarked upon creating a “rule of property” in India from the eighteenth century onward, the manner in which this project unfolded in early East India Company settlements such as Bombay was different from the territories that only later came under British control. In the latter, a confident and assertive colonial state executed its agenda; in the former, a tentative Company was concerned initially with asserting its sovereignty by asserting that all the land in Bombay belonged to it. In cities like Bombay, thus, a deep and enduring tension lay at the heart of the rule of property: between a state that endorsed a liberal vision sanctifying private property, on the one hand, and a state that jealously guarded its proprietary rights over lands, on the other hand. This tension was deployed by state and nonstate actors to pursue their own ends.

Since the 1950s, public discourse in India has referred to black money: undeclared or illicit income, sometimes in foreign accounts. Black money - so as to circumvent state taxes and controls - pervaded ordinary exchange and political financing. Today, large purchases have white and black ratios; public figures vow to retrieve black money in Swiss accounts. Black money is, at once, a means to transact business, a barometer of value, an elusive specter, and a moral outrage. It suggests how money can be differentiated, converted, corrupted, and disguised. This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of a Mumbai neighborhood marked by migration and informality. It examines the generation of black money from the diversion of publicly subsidized goods, the community’s assessment of these practices, and possible conduits for such income. Black money, I suggest, can be understood as a moral critique of money’s spectral and pernicious character, as well as a productive hinge between transactional orders and an expression of relational ties.

This chapter explores the role and function of occult forces in South Asian bazaars. Drawing mainly, but not exclusively, on material from eastern South Asia, it challenges the repeated attempts by scholars to read these forces along functionalist lines. Instead, it demonstrates that there is a substantial body of formalized textual knowledge which theorizes the nature, role, and application of these forces. This knowledge is available, in the bazaar itself, in a specialized genre of printed books. The chapter argues against mapping the knowledge produced in these books within the category of “religion,” since the emphasis on belief and bounded identities that have become germane to modern ideas of “religion” are inapplicable to the practices of the occult bazaar. The occult bazaar, it is argued, should be treated as a distinctive sphere of abstraction that is separate from, though interacting with, the more formalized and well-known abstraction of “the economy.”

“From the outside, the market in India is often seen as an exchange arena bound by state-imposed rules. Those within - buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, brokers and advertisers, financiers and debtors, police and inspectors - understand it differently. Such parties collude and compete in myriad everyday activities. These include those of accumulation and circulation, of production and speculation, and of arbitrage and management.

Involved actors, in short, experience the Indian market dissimilarly from the ways in which many planners and policymakers comprehend it. This market is best understood as an ensemble of practices and institutions. It has active and reactive patterns of economic and sociocultural practices, flexible adjustment and coping mechanisms, unforeseen contingencies and aberrations, and strategies of ambiguity and transgression. Transactional agents navigate gray areas and tacit understandings. They reproduce durable informal relations and customary practices. These dynamics only partially relate to state-led market-framing processes.”

In 2002, India embarked on a plan to promote itself for investment, trade, and tourism with its “Incredible India” campaign, which brought together every possible government sector to market the nation. Now, after a huge influx of multinational products and shopping malls that feature them, global capitalism has transformed India’s commercial culture. “Brandism” has arrived. The bazaar, however, is a site of resistance and mediation to this process. It is an economic and moral system, where products and people are entangled in complex networks, creating, disciplining, and sacralizing various moods and modes of behavior. This is especially the case within the bazaars of the Pakka Mahal in Banaras - a center for religion, culture, and commerce for millennia. Based on nearly two decades of research in these bazaars, my chapter examines the logic and practice of what I call “Bazaarism,” with a focus on the role of reputation and trust in creating solidarities.

This chapter studies the operation of trust on financial markets in the North Indian city of Banaras (Varanasi). It emphasizes an interpretation of trust on markets as an artifact and artifice based on an experiential category of practical knowledge used to handle exchange under conditions of high uncertainty, and identifies two distinct patterns in its handling, marked as procedural and reputational registers of (handling) trust. The first case analyzes the difficulties faced by locally operating banks in the mid-twentieth century to shift from reputational to procedural registers of handling trust, using banking advertisements and other archived material. The second case outlines the shifts in the manner reputational registers of trust are used in extra-legal money lending in the wake of Indian legislation against these financial practices, contrasting an ethnographic study of contemporary practices to historical sources on money lending in the first half of the twentieth century.