¹ Ranade, M. G., Essays on Indian Economics: A Collection of Essays and Speeches (Madras: G. A. Natesan and Co., 1906), p. 11Google Scholar, capitalizations in original. The first edition of this book was published in 1898 during Ranade's lifetime (1842–1901), and the quote is from his speech at the Deccan College, Poona, in 1892. The date of publication of the volume therefore hides the fact that Ranade's ideas had taken shape by the early 1890s.

² Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

³ Influential works include Sanyal, Kalyan, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality, and Post-Colonial Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar; Chatterjee, Partha, ‘Development Planning and the Indian State’, in Empire and Nation: Selected Essays, Menon, Nivedita (ed.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 241–266CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, ‘The Idea of Planning in India, 1930–1951’, PhD thesis, The Australian National University, 1985.

⁴ Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986)Google Scholar. It is significant that whatever their differences may be on the reasons for such an outcome, and the appropriate political and intellectual response to it, both Chatterjee and Vivek Chibber agree on the fact of such an outcome. See Chibber, Vivek, Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁵ Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development, is particularly susceptible to this criticism.

⁶ See Chatterjee, ‘Development Planning and the Indian State’. The central problem with the Foucauldian approach is its conflation of the instrumental use of concepts with the prior problem of the historical constitution, plausibility, and availability of ideologies. See Sartori, Andrew, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Chapters 1 and 2, for a clear-headed historiographical statement of this distinction. In my interpretation of the trajectory of Indian political economy, I follow the basic critical impulse vis-à-vis the question of plausibility set out in those chapters.

⁷ Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, p. 16.

⁸ That there could, or should, be a distinct and unified body of thought called ‘Indian’ political economy was the self-understanding of Indian nationalists and therefore requires no assumption of conceptual coherence on my part.

⁹ Up to the penultimate section of this article, I use ‘social’ and ‘economic’ to refer to the understanding of these categories proffered by Indian nationalists themselves. The views of the nationalists are not my personal views, for reasons that will become clear in the concluding section. My chosen actors, however, did not often use the term ‘ethical’, and at times they used it interchangeably with ‘moral’. I use ‘ethical’ to refer to historically specific, background normative orders of thought and action. From my perspective therefore, the separation of the ‘social’ from the ‘ethical’ in late colonial India was crucial and it demands more careful historical interpretation than it has hitherto received.

¹⁰ This is not to suggest that the works of a previous generation of scholars such as Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1901) should not be considered important forerunners of twentieth-century sociology. The point is that the insistence on the study of ‘society’ and ‘economy’ as distinct and non-overlapping domains was a product of intellectual developments during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, both economists as well as sociologists came to agree that although overlaps could continue to occur, such as in the sociological determination of ‘preferences’, economics and sociology would now ordinarily function in non-overlapping zones.

¹¹ See Granovetter, Mark, ‘The Old and the New Economic Sociology: A History and an Agenda’, in Beyond the Marketplace: Rethinking Economy and Society, Friedland, Roger and Robertson, A. F. (eds) (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 89–112Google Scholar.

¹² Robbins, Lionel, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1932), p. 15Google Scholar.

¹³ The use of a phrase such as ‘classical political economy’ is bound to overlook significant internal differences. Indeed, other than a basic orientation towards the study of the production of wealth in commercial society and its distribution among classes, there was perhaps little else on which all thinkers within the tradition unanimously agreed, with Ricardo being the only one who unambiguously and consistently adhered to the ‘labour theory of value’. The use of the phrase is justified in historical terms, however, since no body of social or economic thought in the nineteenth century proceeded without clarifying either its own adherence to or its difference from ‘classical’ ideas. It should also be mentioned here that a fierce debate has been ongoing over the past 40 years on the question of whether CPE (especially Smith) should be read as a branch of the history of political thought or as a precursor of modern economics. At stake is the problem of whether a ‘commercial society’, based on a form of sociability constituted by a historically specific mode of human interdependence not immediately dependent on political authority for its viability, can be said to have emerged as a new object of analysis in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If yes, then political economy can indeed be considered a new science of the ‘social’ as a pre-political category, otherwise not. A well-known collection of essays delineating a reading of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political economy as a branch of political thought is Hont, Istvan, Jealousy of Trade: International Trade and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar. For a good overview of the ways in which the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers distinguished their concepts of ‘sociality’ and ‘socialization’ from the quasi-mythical concept of a ‘state-of-nature’ in contractarian theories of political authority, see Berry, Christopher, ‘Sociality and Socialisation’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, Broadie, Alexander (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 243–257CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And for a Marxian reading of the emergence of political economy as a new science of the social in late seventeenth-century England, see Sartori, Andrew, ‘From Statecraft to Social Science in Early Modern English Political Economy’, Critical Historical Studies, 3, 2 (2016), pp. 181–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The debate surrounding the early modern period is crucial and, although it does not directly impinge on the subsequent narrative here, it is important to the extent that any attempt to explain the internal contradictions within IPE and its conceptual-political trajectory points to the need to understand the history of capitalism as a history of a social and not merely a political form.

¹⁴ Again, this is not to suggest that CPE was marked by complete unity, coherence, and a lack of internal contradiction on the issue of how to study economy, society, and normative commitments in conjunction. It is rather to emphasize that such a unified study was still considered possible and desirable. It is the rapid change with regard to such a possibility in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that requires substantive explanation.

¹⁵ Hodgson, Geoffrey M., How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 56–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 79–94. Clarke, Simon, Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology: From Adam Smith to Max Weber (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 182–206Google Scholar. The emphasis here on Menger's influence is not meant to belittle the impact of William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) in England or Léon Walras (1834–1910) in Switzerland. It is important, however, to recognize the different motivations of these writers. While Jevons lived in England and hence was understandably addressing CPE, Menger fought with the German historicists and Walras worked in a tradition of utility theory with roots as far back as Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832). And of course, the contribution of the American economist John Bates Clark (1847–1938) to the consolidation of a marginal productivity theory of distribution must not be forgotten. The upshot is that as an intellectual current, ‘marginalism’ was rather more diffuse than both its champions and its detractors have made it out to be. Cf. Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History, pp. 89–94.

¹⁷ Clarke, Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology, pp. 182–204, interprets this eschewal of normative considerations as a separation of the problem of substantive equity from that of formal efficiency. But even that seems too generous, since the central question of how and where to place limits on ‘laissez-faire’ in order to nurture ethical life was framed in much broader terms as a historical (even epochal) problem within CPE. Indeed, the question of equity can be (and has been) addressed in quite narrow technical terms in the field of ‘welfare’ economics during the second half of the twentieth century. Cf. in this regard the section in this article on K. T. Shah: Conceptual foundations of state planning in India.

¹⁸ See the section in this article on Radhakamal Mukerjee: Giving up on the social? The economic and the ethical in Radhakamal Mukerjee's thought, for an elaboration of this point.

¹⁹ Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History, p. 121.

²⁰ Clarke, Marx, Marginalsim, and Modern Sociology, p. 285. This claim, by no less a figure than Weber, points to the need to also take seriously the rise to prominence of psychology as a separate discipline since the second half of the nineteenth century, and its meteoric rise since the end of the Second World War. In terms of historical trajectories, it is significant that among Menger's students in the late nineteenth century—Friedrich von Wieser and Eugene Böhm-Bawerk, for example—the psychological study of the content of preferences was not considered anathema, even though Menger's own theoretical formulations meant that such a study no longer needed to be considered a necessary component of economic science as such. By the time we reach Robbins and the ‘second-generation’ Austrians (especially Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek), however, a complete indifference and apathy towards any analysis of the content of preferences is clearly discernible. See Endres, Anthony M., Neoclassical Microeconomic Theory: The Founding Austrian Version (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 41–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Indeed, the subsequent narrative will hopefully demonstrate that adequately undertaking such a task can, and will, have implications for how events elsewhere, including in the ‘West’, are to be understood. It also seems worth mentioning here that, given the impact of the German historical school on thinkers within IPE, future research might fruitfully undertake a comparison of the Indian experience with other erstwhile-colonized regions where the school has been influential. This has hitherto been made difficult both by the often narrowly disciplinary mode in which the history of economic thought is written, as well as by the tendency to focus only on canonical thinkers.

²² It may be possible to fill this lacuna by going through the volumes of the Indian Economist journal, which was published from 1869 onwards.

²³ For example, Granovetter, ‘The Old and the New Economic Sociology’. See also the study of the same separation in the American context by Young, Cristobal, ‘The Emergence of Sociology from Political Economy in the United States: 1890 to 1940’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 45, 2 (2009), pp. 91–116CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. It should also be mentioned in this context that the story of CPE's trajectory as one of the loss of an object, that is, as a move from coherence to incoherence, is way too schematic and insufficiently attentive to historical detail. Such a narrative of disintegration can be found in Theodor Adorno's ruminations on this question in the last lecture series he delivered between April–July 1968 before his death in 1969. Adorno, Theodor W., Introduction to Sociology, Jepchott, Edmund (trans.) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 136–144Google Scholar. Cf. Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History, pp. 95–112.

²⁴ Spengler, Joseph, Indian Economic Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1971), pp. 144–155Google Scholar.

²⁵ This aspect of IPE, therefore, was a critique of the regime of ‘free trade imperialism’ that the second British empire had come to practise in the nineteenth century. For an account of how ideas drawn from CPE came to inform the regime of free trade imperialism, see Semmel, Bernard, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy, the Empire of Free Trade, and Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially Chapter 6, ‘Parliament, Political Economy, and the Workshop of the World’.

²⁶ See Dasgupta, Ajit, A History of Indian Economic Thought (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 112–119Google Scholar, for a discussion of this question as it pertains to M. G. Ranade's thought. It should be mentioned, however, that even this project of ‘relativization’ was neither unique to India nor a completely alien problem for thinkers within the tradition of CPE. John Stuart Mill, for example, had ruminated on the extent to which ‘competition’ or ‘custom’ informed social interactions and determined political-economic outcomes in different societies. See Mill, John Stuart, Principles of Political Economy: With Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, Books I–II (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965; 1848)Google Scholar, especially Chapter IV of Book II, ‘Of Competition, and Custom’.

²⁷ Goswami, Manu, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), p. 237CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ See Kellock, James, ‘Ranade and After: A Study of the Development of Economic Thought in India’, Indian Journal of Economics, 22 (1941–42), pp. 245–260Google Scholar; and Joshi, T. M., ‘A Critique of Indian Economics’, Indian Journal of Economics, 22 (1941–42), pp. 276–279Google Scholar.

²⁹ I focus on four texts: Ranade, Essays; Mukerjee, Radhakamal, The Foundations of Indian Economics (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1916)Google Scholar; Mukerjee, R., Groundwork of Economics (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1925)Google Scholar; and Shah, K. T., National Planning, Principles and Administration (Bombay: Vora and Co. Publishers, 1948)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Mukerjee and Shah were members of the original 15-member National Planning Committee established in 1938 under the chairmanship of Jawaharlal Nehru. For a brief summary of the influence of Ranade's legacy on Indian planning, see Karve, D. G., ‘Ranade and Economic Planning’, Indian Journal of Economics, 22 (1941–42), pp. 235–244Google Scholar. For a dissenting view, see the chapter on Ranade in Singh, V. B., From Naoroji to Nehru: Six Essays in Indian Economic Thought (Delhi: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 40–66Google Scholar.

³¹ See Sinha, Mrinalini, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for an important interpretation of events between 1917 and 1935, when women began acting as political subjects for the first time and articulated a demand for suffrage using a novel language of individual rights. The literature on caste mobilizations tends to be more province-specific and has not focused as much on clarifying the extent to which the 1920s represented a break. Nevertheless, it is clear that the question of political representation had taken centre-stage by the early 1930s in the run-up to the passing of the second Government of India Act in 1935. The well-known Poona Pact of 1932, for which the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar agreed to withdraw the demand for separate electorates for Scheduled Castes in return for greater representation within the electorates reserved for Hindus, was symptomatic of the historical moment. For a good overview of the events leading up to the Poona Pact, see Kumar, Ravinder, ‘Gandhi, Ambedkar, and the Poona Pact, 1932’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 8, 1–2 (1985), pp. 87–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² On the concept of ‘late industrialization’ in general, see Gerschenkron, Alexander, ‘Reflections on the Concept of “Prerequisities” of Modern Industrialization’, in his Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 5–30Google Scholar.

³³ My attempt to clarify the contradictions that arose from the attempt of Indian nationalists to hold together various modes of critique is fundamentally informed by Andrew Sartori's observation that Swadeshi discourse attempted to weld together four such modes: a political-economic critique of British rule, an ethical critique of commercial society, a historicist critique of abstraction, and an idealist critique of materialism. See Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, Chapter 1, ‘Bengali “Culture” as a Historical Problem’. Although Sartori focuses only on developments within Bengal, my reading of Ranade suggests that similar attempts were underway in other parts of India as well. Indeed, the idea that only national self-sufficiency (Swadeshi) could act as the grounds for self-rule (swaraj) was almost a truism within Indian nationalist thought. On this point, see Goswami, Producing India, Chapter 8, ‘Territorial Nativism: Swadeshi and Swaraj’, which is particularly germane to the arguments made in this article, for two reasons. First, Goswami demonstrates that the fusing together of a universalist and productivist vision of development with local idioms and (allegedly) indigenous norms of self-sacrifice, informed Indian nationalism en bloc from the 1870s onwards. Hence, the relevance of studying Swadeshi ideology cannot be limited to the movement in Bengal during 1903–08 in response to the proposed partition of the province. Second, she underscores that although the immediate content of the Swadeshi movement was an emphasis on the substitution of imports with indigenous manufactures, what was effectively at stake was the deeper question of what it meant to conceive of the Indian ‘nation’ as a collective agent capable of overcoming its poverty and colonial dependence. This is the reason why the Indian National Congress officially endorsed Swadeshi in 1906 as the only possible path for the attainment of swaraj.

³⁴ Ranade, Essays, p. 5.

³⁵ Ibid., pp. 9–10.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Ranade, Essays, p. 10. Simon Clarke has suggested that despite its criticisms of CPE, the German historical school found no way of defining the content of the necessary moral regulation that could specify the limits of self-interest. Ranade's approach was clearly superior in this particular respect, since it proceeded from an assertion of difference at the level of social relations that was itself generative of ethical content. See Clarke, Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology, pp. 161–166.

³⁹ Goswami, Producing India, p. 251.

⁴⁰ See Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, Chapter 5, ‘The Conceptual Structure of an Indigenist Nationalism’; and Goswami, Producing India, Chapter 8.

⁴¹ Ranade, Essays, pp. 20–21. Here, and in subsequent quotations, I have slightly modified spelling in order to keep it consistent with the rest of the article.

⁴² Ibid., p. 128. Already in this statement of Ranade, we can discern an emergent teleological conception that characterizes ‘advanced’ and less advanced races in terms of economic development. Although I cannot elaborate on this point here, it can be argued that the acceptance by twentieth-century Indian nationalists of developmental historicism (whether of the classical Marxist or Rostovian ‘stages of growth’ variety) was one modality of possible resolutions to the contradictions in Ranade's thought. Specifically, the historicist critique of abstraction, once divorced from the political-economic critique of British rule and the ethical critique of commercial society, became a developmentalist ideology in which any concrete historical moment could be grasped as a ‘stage’ in an abstract, necessary process of economic growth. This resolution, however, only reinforced the separation of the abstract and the concrete, and failed to address the central question so clearly posed by Ranade: how might the applicability of economic abstractions to any particular, concrete set of social relations be judged?

⁴³ Ibid., p. 195, emphasis mine. Subsequent nationalist thought has never really clarified these issues raised by Ranade. Did the onset of colonialism merely worsen India's ancient poverty? Or did it bring about new forms of poverty? And what might an adequate critique that grasps the role of both colonial subjugation and ‘old traditions’ as causes of Indian poverty look like? The fall from grace of economic history in recent decades has meant that less smoke has been blown over such questions, but the issues themselves have hardly been settled.

⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 24.

⁴⁵ One way of getting around this problem was to reverse the argument and assert that the sociological in India had always been, and could continue to be, the ground for economic development. Ranade himself took up such a position at times, for example, when he argued that the people of the Torrid Zone could claim that in the past ‘their skilled products found a ready market in temperate kingdoms, and excited such jealousy as to dictate prohibitive sumptuary laws both in ancient Rome and in modern England’. Ibid., p. 26. In recent decades, a similar line of thinking has informed a large literature on Afro-Eurasian early modernity and its vibrant commercialization. An influential text in this genre that deals with the Indian case is Parthasarathi, Prasannan, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a good, extended, critical review of Parthasarathi, see Peer Vries, ‘Challenges, (Non-)-Responses, and Politics: A Review of Parthasarathi, Prasannan, “Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850”’, Journal of World History, 23, 3 (2012), pp. 639–664Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ I have borrowed this phrase from Datta, Bhabatosh, ‘The Background of Ranade's Economics’, Indian Journal of Economics, 22 (1941–42), pp. 261–275Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 273.

⁴⁸ See Stokes, Eric, The English Utilitarians and India (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), especially Chapter 2Google Scholar, ‘Political Economy and the Land Revenue’.

⁴⁹ See Ranade, Essays, pp. 7, 17 and passim.

⁵⁰ This issue strikes at the heart of the contradiction in Ranade's thinking. Many countries were pursuing state protectionism in the late nineteenth century. It is hard to see how such statist developmentalist frameworks had anything to do with the specific ‘social’ relations of joint families and caste in India that Ranade had foregrounded. Indeed, he never resolved this tension between an argument in favour of specific policies on the basis of conceptual frameworks not spatially delimited to India, and an insistence on the uniqueness of Indian social relations. Ultimately, as Kellock pointed out, it was unclear whether Ranade wanted a modified economics (such as Listian economics) applied to India or a separate set of economic principles for each nation. See Kellock, ‘Ranade and After’, p. 252.

⁵¹ See Datta, ‘The Background of Ranade's Economics’; Kellock, ‘Ranade and After’.

⁵² See, especially, Ranade, Essays, Chapter IV, ‘Present State of Indian Manufactures and Outlook of the Same’; Chapter VI, ‘Iron Industry—Pioneer Attempts’; Chapter VII, ‘Industrial Conference’.

⁵³ On the fortunes of indigenous capital during the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, see Ray, Rajat Kanta, ‘Asian Capital in the Age of European Domination: The Rise of the Bazaar, 1800–1914’, Modern Asian Studies, 29, 3 (1995), pp. 449–554CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ray, Rajat Kanta, ‘The Bazaar: Changing Structural Characteristics of the Indigenous Section of the Indian Economy before and after the Great Depression’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 25, 3 (1988), pp. 263–318Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth, ‘Writing Stri Dharma: International Feminism, Nationalist Politics, and Women's Press Advocacy in Late Colonial India’, Women's History Review, 12, 4 (2003), pp. 623–649CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Forbes, Geraldine, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 64–156CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ Hodges, Sarah, ‘Revolutionary Family Life and the Self Respect Movement in Tamil South India, 1926–49’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 39, 2 (2005), pp. 251–277, at p. 252CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 266.

⁵⁷ The role of social divisions and the use of coercion in the Swadeshi movement have been narrated in detail by Guha, Ranajit, ‘Discipline and Mobilize: Hegemony and Elite Control in Nationalist Campaigns’, in his Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 100–150Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, see especially Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, ‘Reification, Rarification, Radicalization’.

⁵⁹ Lucknow was not the only university with joint departments of economics and sociology. At Bombay University too, the Department of Economics and Sociology was founded in 1914. Eventually, separate sociology and economics departments were established at Lucknow during the 1950s, a separation that Mukerjee opposed but could not prevent. At Bombay too, the economics department began to assert its independence from the mid-1940s onwards. For a discussion of such institutional developments at the all-India level, see Welz, Frank, ‘100 Years of Indian Sociology: From Social Anthropology to Decentring Global Sociology’, International Sociology, 24, 5 (2009), pp. 635–655CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ The biographical information in this paragraph is drawn from the insightful essays in Modi, Ishwar (ed.), Pioneers of Sociology in India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2014), pp. 79–158Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Ibid., pp. 51–52, emphasis mine.

⁶² This problem could easily have been bypassed by surrendering to the naturalization of capitalist exchange relations through the mediating concept of ‘scarcity’ so characteristic of marginalism, but that would defeat the purpose, since Mukerjee also wanted to claim that social relations in India were based on status and not on contract.

⁶³ Marshall, Alfred, Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan and Co., 1890; 2013)Google Scholar. Mukerjee did not often draw upon Marshall explicitly when theorizing the economic, but it is clear that he was aware of Marshall's work. In Mukerjee, Foundations of Indian Economics, he referred to Marshall twice, once to quote the latter's appreciation of the ancient carvings at Konarak (ibid., p. 260) and once to quote directly from the Principles to assert the economic advantage of small-scale production (ibid., pp. 361–363). In Mukerjee, Groundwork of Economics, he quoted Marshall only once, drawing upon the latter's discussion of industrial organization (ibid., pp. 193–194). Nevertheless, I believe that Mukerjee's attempt to theorize the economic and to combine it with an ethical critique of commercialism can plausibly be interpreted as Marshallian in inspiration. For a brief overview of the concepts in Marshall's ‘economic sociology’ which are germane to the discussion in this section, see Aspers, Patrick, ‘The Economic Sociology of Alfred Marshall: An Overview’, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 58, 4 (1999), pp. 651–667CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁴ Mukerjee, Groundwork of Economics, p. 8.

⁶⁵ Ibid., p. 35.

⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 73, emphasis mine.

⁶⁷ Mukerjee, Foundations of Indian Economics, p. 321.

⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 323.

⁶⁹ This can be interpreted as yet another Marshallian manoeuvre on Mukerjee's part, since Marshall had also foregrounded ‘organization’ as a fourth factor of production and connected this to his concepts of ‘faculties’ and ‘character’. Marshall's basic argument is similar to Mukerjee's: the manner in which productive activity is organized has an effect on the exercise of human faculties and the development of our character. It is for this reason that Marshall, like Mukerjee, was also critical of repetitive factory work.

⁷⁰ Ibid., p. 345.

⁷¹ To take just one example, while discussing the mechanical threshing of rice and wheat, Mukerjee acknowledged that the adoption of machinery could lower the costs for small-scale producers and thereby help them compete in the market. Moreover, it could free up time and labour for other tasks. Mukerjee, Foundations of Indian Economics, pp. 99–102. Leaving aside the larger issue of working out the conditions under which the use of machinery could translate into actual freedom from the domination of time, what is important is that Mukerjee recognized the potential inherent in mechanization and did not reject machinery tout court on the grounds that it was modern.

⁷² All of my chosen historical actors consistently used male pronouns in their writings. The use of the female pronoun here is my personal intervention.

⁷³ Not only did such an argument rest fundamentally on Mukerjee's economic theory, the fact that he explicitly referred to Marshall while making this argument clarifies the connection between the two thinkers. Mukerjee, Foundations of Indian Economics, pp. 361–363.

⁷⁴ Ibid., p. 323.

⁷⁵ Mukerjee, Groundwork of Economics, pp. 201–207.

⁷⁶ Mukerjee, Foundations of Indian Economics, p. 441.

⁷⁷ In Mukerjee, Foundations of Indian Economics, Book IV, he referred continuously to attempts in Europe to preserve cottage industries and how India could learn from such attempts.

⁷⁸ Shah, National Planning, p. 13, emphases mine.

⁷⁹ Ibid., pp. 71–72.

⁸⁰ Ibid., p. 72. To refer to Shah's novel emphasis on the importance of individualism and contractual marriages is not to resort to any notion of linear historical progress on all fronts. As historians of women and gender have long pointed out, the language of marriage as ‘contract’ had begun to be put to use in legal discourse from the turn of the twentieth century. The result, however, was mostly negative with regard to women's autonomy and individuality within the family. See Sen, Samita, ‘Unsettling the Household: Act VI (of 1901) and the Regulation of Women Migrants in Colonial Bengal’, International Review of Social History, 41, 4 (1996), pp. 135–156CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sen's narrative, however, oscillates uncomfortably between an affirmation of the possibility of women's autonomy opened up by the language of contract and a proto, post-colonialist rejection of such language as ‘colonial legal discourse’ that was ‘in tune with the general movement towards a rigidification of gender hierarchy’ (ibid., p. 149). In contrast, my reference to Shah's emphasis on contract is merely meant to clarify that it indicated a move away from certain received idioms of critique within IPE, and hence generated contradictions that remained unresolved in the state planning project. In not presupposing the uses to which such language could have been (or can be) put, my approach seeks to hold open possibilities instead of circumscribing them.

⁸¹ Shah, National Planning, p. 93.

⁸² Ibid., pp. 77, 20.

⁸³ Ibid., p. 62.

⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 64, emphasis mine.

⁸⁵ Ibid., pp. 40, 21, 69.

⁸⁶ Ibid., p. 102.

⁸⁷ Some of the most influential concepts adopted by Indian planners were Keynesian in spirit. These included aggregates such as output, employment, consumption, and investment, as well as synthetic averages such as rate of interest, rate of real and nominal wages, and the aggregate price level, all of which took the ‘nation’ as their spatial referent. In this sense, Keynesian economics played an important role in guiding the transition from Indian political economy to formalism. For a broad historical overview of the emergence of these macroeconomic concepts, see Radice, Hugo, ‘The National Economy: A Keynesian Myth?’, Capital and Class, 22 (Spring 1984), pp. 111–140CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a brief discussion of the seminal work of V. K. R. V. Rao on the measurement of Indian national income along Keynesian lines, see Dasgupta, A History of Indian Economic Thought, p. 130.

⁸⁸ Shah, National Planning, p. 8.

⁸⁹ Ibid., p. 17.

⁹⁰ Ibid., p. 16.

⁹¹ Ibid., p. 17.

⁹² Ibid., p. 53.

⁹³ Historians disagree on the actual number of disparate territories that the British left behind in the Indian subcontinent. There is a broad consensus that other than the newly created sovereign states of India and Pakistan, there were close to 500 such territories, mostly in India, ranging from massive states equal in size to many European countries—such as Hyderabad and Kashmir—to tiny fiefdoms or jagirs of several villages. See Guha, Ramachandra, India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy (London: Macmillan, 2007), pp. 35–58Google Scholar, for an account of the extraordinary process by which these territories were (often forcefully) brought within the Indian federation.

⁹⁴ For example, by tracing the interconnections between the movement for women's rights, on the one hand, and the new taxation regime established in response to the financial pressures generated by the First World War and the Great Depression, on the other, Eleanor Newbigin has demonstrated that the granting of property rights and the vote to Indian women was accompanied by a rationalization of Hindu personal law, owing to the economic need to establish the Hindu family as a single, taxable collective. Thus, economic necessities and political contingencies culminated in the establishment of a legal structure based on many of the patriarchal legacies of Hindu personal law. See Newbigin, Eleanor, The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India: Law, Citizenship and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁵ Shah, K. T., Ancient Foundations of Economics in India (Bombay: Vora and Co. Publishers, 1954)Google Scholar. Also cf. footnote 45 above.

⁹⁶ This reading of Marx is deeply indebted to Postone, Moishe, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁷ Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, Fowkes, Ben (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books, 1867; 1976), p. 1020Google Scholar.

⁹⁸ Kerr, Ian, Building the Railways of the Raj (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 7–9Google Scholar.

⁹⁹ Marx, Capital, p. 1025.

¹⁰⁰ Marx, Karl, ‘The Method of Political Economy’, in The Marx-Engels Reader, Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1978), pp. 236–244, at p. 240Google Scholar, emphasis mine.

¹⁰¹ Marx, ‘The Method of Political Economy’, pp. 239–240, emphases mine.

¹⁰² For an argument about how and why a Marxian approach to the history of political economy matters for historiographical debates, see Sartori, Andrew, ‘Global Intellectual History and the History of Political Economy’, in Global Intellectual History, Moyn, Samuel and Sartori, Andrew (eds) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 110–133Google Scholar.

¹⁰³ Shah, National Planning, p. 6.