India has the largest informal, unregistered economy in the world, infrastructurally backward, yet vital for both growth and livelihoods. In the first section of this article, five economic institutions that shape this economy are introduced: small firms, informality, non-metropolitan towns, innovation and innovation systems, and the state's regulative impact on the economy it does not directly regulate. In the second section, we trace the development of the commodity economy of a South Indian town taken for case study over 40 years, before exploring three kinds of innovation in the third section: invention, adaptive, and adoptive innovation. In the fourth section, the formal and informal institutions that nurture informal innovation are analysed: family business, business associations, banks and finance, informal insurance and gold, hybrid state–private institutions, and informal innovation inside the state. The conclusion confirms the innovative dynamism of the informal economy and the complex pathways of institutional change that both shape, and are shaped by, innovation.

The forceful expropriation of land, labour, water, and other productive resources is fundamental for processes of agricultural expansion and intensification. What is known today as ‘land grab’ was theorized by Marx as ‘primitive accumulation’ and by David Harvey as ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Today it is most prominent and controversial in Africa, where the governments of India and China are major perpetrators; and it also drives most contemporary urban expansion in India and China. This article deploys David Washbrook's idea of ‘country politics’ to explore the process of land grabbing in the early-modern expansion of agrarian Bengal, where local peasant society and worldwide imperial political economy came together to expand frontiers of farming in what is now the Sylhet District of Bangladesh.

During the 1920s, a new genre of didactic poems prescribing the proper Islamic practice of everyday peasant lives were published out of printing presses in deltaic, eastern Bengal's small towns. This article argues that these printed poems constituted a discourse of agrarian Islam that prescribed reforms in peasant material life—work, commerce, consumption, attire, hairstyle, and patriarchal authority—as a means of ensuring the viability of peasants’ market-based livelihoods. The article examines the emergence of a small-town Muslim intelligentsia that authored and financed the publications of these poems out of the Bengal delta's small-town printing industry. Eschewing communalism as an analytical frame in understanding South Asian Muslim identities, this article argues that Bengali peasant Muslim subjectivity was located in peasant engagements with agrarian markets. Agrarian Islamic texts urged Muslim cultivators to be good Muslims and good peasants, by working hard, reducing consumption, and balancing household budgets.

This article focuses on the interplay between the political authorities and economic actors in the Federal Republic of Germany in the process of establishing relations with the People's Republic of China after 1949. Within this framework, the article will assess the role played by the Ost-Ausschuss der Deutschen Wirtschaft (Eastern Committee of German Economy), a semi-official organization recognized by the West German government. Both the ability of German economic actors and China's urgent need for economic contact with the West caused German-Chinese trade relations to circumvent the strict non-recognition policy followed by the West German government. The article also argues that, while economic relations heralded official recognition of the People's Republic of China by other Western European countries, in the case of the Federal Republic of Germany a division between the two spheres was finally accepted by the major actors involved, and ended only after the change of attitude imparted by the Nixon presidency in the United States during the early 1970s.

This article analyses the role of the legal profession and the evolution of aspects of Indian nationalist ideology during the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22. Very few legal professionals responded to Gandhi's call to boycott the British courts despite significant efforts to establish alternative institutions dedicated to resolving disputes. First identified by leading legal professionals in the movement as courts of arbitration, these alternative sites of justice quickly assumed the name ‘panchayats’. Ultimately, this panchayat experiment failed due to a combination of apathy, repression, and internal opposition. However, the introduction of the panchayat into the discourse of Indian nationalism ultimately had profound effects, including the much later adoption of constitutional panchayati raj. Yet this discourse was then and remains today a contested one. This is largely a legacy of Gandhi himself, who, during the Non-Cooperation Movement, imagined the panchayat as a judicial institution based upon arbitration and mediation. Yet, after the movement's failure, he came to believe the panchayat was best suited to functioning as a unit of village governance and administration.

Drawing on published documents and research in Russian, Uzbek, British, and Indian archives, this article explains how a hasty attempt by Russia to put pressure on the British in Central Asia unintentionally triggered the second Anglo–Afghan War of 1878–80. This conflict is usually interpreted within the framework of the so-called ‘Great Game’, which assumes that only the European ‘Great Powers’ had any agency in Central Asia, pursuing a coherent strategy with a clearly defined set of goals and mutually understood rules. The outbreak of the Second Anglo–Afghan war is usually seen as a deliberate attempt by the Russians to embroil the British disastrously in Afghan affairs, leading to the eventual installation of ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan, hosted for many years by the Russians in Samarkand, on the Afghan throne. In fact, the Russians did not foresee any of this. ‘Abd al-Rahman's ascent to the Afghan throne owed nothing to Russian support, and everything to British desperation. What at first seems like a classic ‘Great Game’ episode was a tale of blundering and unintended consequences on both sides. Central Asian rulers were not merely passive bystanders who provided a picturesque backdrop for Anglo–Russian relations, but important actors in their own right.

There are challenging complexities in analysing both historical trends and contemporary structures in the region now comprising Pakistan. Interrelating both history and the present poses further challenges. With scholarship aligned on either side of the apparent watershed of 1947, analysts have hitherto remained negligent of a pattern of continuity and disjuncture that is explored in this article, which it is hoped will enable a deeper understanding of historical causations and outcomes. Further, we propose here that such multiple and diverse trends, while they might demand distinct empirical analyses, can coalesce within three overarching themes. Analysing these themes and their interstices, enables a more cohesive and integrated understanding of Pakistan's complex realities than has been hitherto forthcoming from the more segmented approaches that dominate discourse on the study of Pakistan's past and present. The author aims to shed light on why and how retardation in Pakistan is so resilient, and hopes that understanding these long-term outcomes will be greatly assisted by an analytical approach predicated on three themes: thwarted nationalism, economic counter-revolutions, and anarcho-vassalage.

By examining the career of a woman agrarian entrepreneur in early nineteenth-century Gujarat, this article seeks to foreground the role of family firms specializing in the assessment, realization, and investment of land revenue. The article argues that such firms, which were commonly found service providers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were deemed to be alienators of the loyalties and revenues that the East India Company state considered its due. They were allowed to persist on sufferance for a few decades but were phased out by the 1830s, an obliteration that has erased their role from the history of South Asian capitalism.

The Nilgiri hill communities have for a long time been the focus of anthropological inquiry, though they have rarely been the focus of historical inquiry that delves more deeply into the past than the colonial period. And, while the fields of history and anthropology have moved beyond tropes of primitive and timeless, our studies of those formerly so-called ‘timeless primitives’ have remained stuck in time. I argue, therefore, for an interdisciplinary modified Subaltern Studies approach, integrating data from anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and genetics, to develop a longue durée social history of the Nilgiri hills. For the Nilgiri communities, as with other tribal communities, narratives about their past have tended to emphasize their isolation until the modern period. In this article, drawing together data from several disciplines, I argue that the communities of the Nilgiris, especially the Toda, so frequently held up as examples of cultural isolation, were not truly isolated, neither from neighbouring tribal communities, nor from the states and empires of the plains below. I argue that the maintenance of distinctive religious, subsistence, and linguistic practices, despite contact with a wider world, is evidence of an active process of isolationist group formation/maintenance and resistance to other ways of being.

Relying on evidence from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and on the private archives of both Aldo Moro and Pietro Nenni, this article shows that from the mid-1950s onwards, important politicians—Socialist Pietro Nenni, Christian Democrat Giovanni Gronchi and Liberal Gaetano Martino—worked to encourage economic exchanges between Italy and China, and were linked with the concurrent initiatives of economic actors like Dino Gentili and Enrico Mattei. It also reveals that this gradual but steady process placed the China question firmly on the agenda of Italian parliamentary debates and government programmes as early as 1964. Finally, it shows that, while American diplomacy was still dominated by the Vietnam War and opposed any initiative towards Chinese recognition, in 1969–1970 the long process of rapprochement between Rome and Beijing came to an end. Thanks to Nenni's and Moro's diplomatic action, Italy recognized the People's Republic of China (PRC) before the Americans decided to inaugurate triangular diplomacy and reach out to China.

This article makes use of a recently unearthed archive in Sweden, complemented by research in the India Office Records and Maharashtra State Archives, to explore the business networks of the small-scale railway contractor in 1860s Bombay Presidency. The argument centres on the career of one individual, comparing him with several contemporaries. In contrast to their civilian colleagues, freebooting engineers have been a somewhat understudied group. Sometimes lacking formal technical training, and without an official position in colonial India, they were distrusted as profiteering, even corrupt, opportunists. This article will present them instead as a diverse professional class, incorporating Parsis alongside various European nationalities, who became specialists in local milieux, sourcing timber and stone at the lowest prices and retaining the loyalty of itinerant labourers. It will propose that the 1860s cotton boom in western India provided them with a short-lived window of opportunity in which to flourish, and to diversify into a variety of speculative enterprises including cotton trading, land reclamation, and explosives. The accidents and bridge collapses of the 1867 monsoon, and subsequent public outcry, will be identified as a watershed after which that window of opportunity begins to shut. The article's concluding section analyses the contractors’ relationship with their labour force and its intermediary representatives, and strategies for defusing strikes. Ultimately, small independent contractors were agents of modernity not formally affiliated with the imperial project, and forced to bargain with merchants and strikers without official backing. Theirs is a record of complex negotiations at the local level, carried out in the immediate post-Mutiny settlement.

This article, largely based on archival research, highlights two contradictory outcomes of colonial state formation in central Borneo. The first is characterized by territorial consolidation and efforts to neatly sedentarize peoples within each colonial territory, while the second is characterized by pacification that unwittingly liberalized the flows and movements of people and commodities transgressing colonial state boundaries. The 1924 Kapit Peacemaking Agreement in colonial Sarawak is often noted for its significance in bringing a final end to the practice of inter-ethnic headhunting, principally between the Iban of Sarawak and the Kenyah from Dutch Borneo. While it marked the successful outcome of a long phase of colonial pacification and territorial consolidation for both colonial states in Borneo, the agreement's outcome simultaneously highlights the contradictory inter-colonial motives and expectations regarding the resulting increase of cross-border flows of people and commodities. The presented case highlights challenges facing Dutch colonial state formation when attempts to subjugate and sedentarize riverine peoples, who were geographically tied to fluid commodity chains and flows, directly undermined the former's own efforts to establish authority in its borderland frontier.

This article studies corruption in India through an ethnographic elaboration of practices that are colloquially discussed as the ‘eating of money’ (paisa khana) in northern India. It examines both the discourse and practice of eating money in the specific context of the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (NREGA). The article works through two central paradoxes that emerge in the study of corruption and the state. The first paradox relates to the corruption–transparency dyad. The ethnography presented shows clearly that the difficulties in the implementation of NREGA arose directly out of the transparency requirements of the statute, which were impeding the traditional eating of money. Instead of corruption being the villain it turns out that, in this particular context, it was its categorical Other—transparency—that was to blame. The second and related paradox emerges from an ethnographic examination of the processes and things through which development performance, corruption, and transparency are established and adjudged in the contemporary Indian state. Corrupt state practices and transparent state functioning are authoritatively proclaimed through an assessment of evidence—material proof in the form of paper—that is constructed by the Indian state itself. The push for transparency in India at the moment is not only leading to an excessive focus on the production of these paper truths but, more dangerously, is also deflecting attention away from what is described as the ‘real’ (asli) life of welfare programmes. Ultimately, this article contends that we need to eschew treating corruption as an explanatory trope for the failure of development in India. Instead of devising ever-more punitive auditing regimes to stem the leakages of the Indian state, this work suggests that we need a clearer understanding of what the state really is; how—and through which material substances—it functions and demonstrates evidence of its accomplishments.

Taking as its point of departure David Washbrook's essay ‘The Indian Economy and the British Empire’, this article takes a more detailed look at some episodes in the history of British India in the era of the Company Raj, with a view to placing them within a broader imperial framework, as advocated by Washbrook. The first part of the article examines, through an array of case studies, the actual contribution made by the Company to ‘global’ British expansion, concluding that it invested a lot of (Indian) blood and money in ventures from which it derived little benefit, as in the case of the expeditions to Manila (1762), Ceylon (1795), and Java (1811). It is shown that the Company's interests were ultimately sacrificed to the necessity of maintaining the European balance of power through consideration of the colonial interests of minor European powers such as Portugal or the Netherlands. While the Company saw its interests thus overlooked in the ‘global’ imperial arena, it could not find compensation in increased economic activity in India itself. Although the compulsions of ‘military-fiscalism’ largely explain such an outcome, we should not lose sight of the role of Indian agency in limiting the Company's options, as is shown by a rapid look at the history of both labour and capital markets, which the Company did not succeed in bending completely to its needs.

This article explores the relationship between Chinese officials and Western European industrialists, revealing that in the second half of the 1950s, there already was a specific Western European interest in China's market potential, and that this was met with favour on the Chinese side. In order to become a strong and independent country, the People's Republic of China was especially interested in evaluating a wide range of offers in the chemical and energy sectors. By looking at the early achievements of the Italian company, National Hydrocarbon Holding (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, ENI), this article will show how its offer in terms of technology and engineering met with the favour of the Chinese at the beginning of the 1960s. This was just when the local petroleum industry was moving towards self-reliance, which China ultimately achieved, albeit for a short time. Sources show that, despite economic and political constraints, PRC decision-makers were perfectly aware of prices and commercial strategies, as well as of the state-of-the-art technology of the time. Furthermore, China's commercial cooperation with Western European companies in the 1950s–1960s meant that early on Chinese leaders had an opportunity to evaluate market alternatives to their tightly constraining alliance with the Socialist bloc.

In the wake of European colonization, Muslims across the globe have wrestled with the problem of intellectual dualism, or the bifurcation of knowledge into the distinct Islamic and modern Western spheres. This article examines the career of Pakistani intellectual and University of Chicago professor, Fazlur Rahman (1919–1988), who emerged as a particularly significant figure in this debate over intellectual dualism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Arguing that academic methodologies were integral for Muslim understandings of Islam, Rahman broke down the dichotomy between Western and Islamic knowledge in favour of a merging of the two, an approach I term ‘fusionism’. He propagated this fusionist vision, with mixed success, in his native Pakistan and across the Islamic world. In his position as a respected professor at the University of Chicago, Rahman furthermore re-imagined and utilized the Western university as a valuable space for modern Islamic thought, thereby challenging any sharp boundary between the two discourses and their respective institutions.

The partition riots that erupted in Delhi following independence in 1947 resulted in the massacre of thousands of Muslims and the departure of roughly 300,000, leaving the remaining Muslim community seriously depleted, both numerically and politically. The article investigates the spatial aspect of Muslim minoritization in the city, namely their ghettoization, resulting from ongoing struggles over Muslim houses. It traces the gradual encroachment on the Muslim-majority neighbourhoods designated ‘Muslim zones’. An analysis of this dynamic reveals that, contrary to the prevalent assumption that Muslim zones were outside the jurisdiction of the Custodian of Evacuee Property, a great deal of the Custodian's intervention took place precisely in these areas. This investigation also reveals that, in addition to civic violence and the bureaucratic violence of the Custodian, a host of other factors played a significant role in determining the geography and intensity of encroachment—namely deep political divisions that cut across all levels of governance and policing, as well as socioeconomic class, informal economy, and corruption. This divided political, bureaucratic, and social landscape reflected the profound uncertainties underlying the process of decolonization, and sustained the violence that lingered on long after the partition riots had ended according to official narratives.

This article will examine the relationship between Gandhi's two major intellectual developments in his last years: his insistence on political secularism (‘individualization of religion’) and his controversial religious experiments with brahmacarya (sleeping naked with his 17-year-old grandniece, Manubahen). Contrary to the prevalent interpretations, I will argue that Gandhi's political principle of secularism during the last years of his life entailed implicitly his radical religious belief, which he thought worth risking his life to present before the public. There was an intimate relationship between the concepts of brahmacarya, individuality (vyaktitva), and religion (dharm) that constituted his principle of secularism—these concepts were integrated by Gandhi in his distinct Hindu metaphysics of ātmā. Although Gandhi's ideas on ātmā were initially influenced by Śrīmad Rājcandra's Jainism, he later repudiated the latter's views and revised them by incorporating some ideas from Western Orientalists, including Sir John Woodroffe's tantric thought. Gandhi's concept of ātmā was considered to inhere with the cosmological spiritual power of śakti, ultimately identified with God (Īśvar, Brahm): this concept of ātmā was one of the fundamental components of Gandhi's eventual ideas of individuality and religion. Gandhi attempted to realize his ‘unique individuality’ (‘anokhuṃ vaktitva’) in his last religious experiments with brahmacarya, which were conducted contemporaneously to his increasing political valorization of secularism. Gandhi's secularism was virtually a political platform to universalize religion, paradoxical in that he meant to go beyond the impregnable hedge of privatization by making religion deeply individualized—that is to say, ātmā-centred.

This article explores situations in which forced migrants revisit places and homes they had fled from, drawing on research carried out among Kashmiri Hindus, better known as Pandits, who were displaced following the outbreak of conflict in Jammu and Kashmir in 1990. Due to the breakdown of law and order, selective attacks, and a climate of fear, most of the community had relocated from the Kashmir valley to the south in Jammu and to even cities such as New Delhi, constituting one of the most prominent groups of Internally Displaced Persons in the region. While there is an interest in repatriation/resettlement in scholarship and policy, the experiences of the Pandits reveal the multiple meanings ‘return’ holds for the displaced. This article will draw on the experiences of Pandit forced migrants in Jammu who have returned to visit Kashmir. Their experiences will be situated with work on return migration, the Kashmir conflict, and the political location of the Pandits in the region. The article argues that return migration is an inconclusive phenomenon that critically raises questions of home and uncertainty, and provides a way to understand how the displaced locate themselves in the world.

This article provides a first systematic mapping of politically influential shrines across Pakistani Punjab by identifying shrine-related families that have directly participated in elections since 1937. One of the earliest entrants in the politics of pre-partition Punjab, shrine elites (pīrs) have shown remarkable persistence in electoral politics post independence. We find striking long-run continuities in the initial configuration of religion, land, and politics fostered during colonial rule and embodied in political shrines. Exploring possible mechanisms of this persistence, we emphasize the role of shifting political alliances, repeated military interventions, marital ties among shrine elites, and preservation of political brokerage. Defined by their privileged ‘origins and associations’ and organized as a group with a strong sense of solidarity around protecting common interests, the pīrs are a key component of Punjab's power elite, the study of which is central to understanding the genesis and persistence of elites and institutions.