Douglas E. Haynes’ new book, The Emergence of Brand-Name Capitalism, marks the much-awaited turn in Indian business history writing in fascinating ways. Haynes’ earlier essays on the history of consumption (2010) and the making of the middle class in late colonial India (2011) return as two central themes in this book. Departing from extant business history scholarship that has focused primarily on business families and trading firms in British India, Haynes explores a unique method for doing business history – “the textual and visual analysis of advertisements” (p. 2). This method of analysis, which deploys print advertisement as the primary archival source, allows Haynes to make a crucial contribution to the growing field of Indian business history – it illustrates that the proliferation of brand-name commodities in middle-class Indian households predates the liberalization of the Indian economy in the last decade of the twentieth century. As the title of the book makes abundantly clear, Haynes’ period of analysis is after all strictly confined to the late colonial period in Indian history, i.e., the first half of the twentieth century. Haynes’ focus on “brand-name” commodities allows him to adequately historicize the advent of multinational corporations amidst a rising tide of anticolonial resistance across late colonial India. This is, therefore, not a seamless account of India’s induction into the circuits of global capitalism. Rather, Haynes illuminates an inherent dilemma amongst the members of the urban middle class caught between the nationalist obligation of exclusively purchasing homegrown commodities and the bourgeois ambition of consuming packaged foreign goods. Here, the study of advertisements becomes crucial in showing how the visual and textual print form curated a vision board of conspicuous consumption towards achieving “modern” conjugal living amongst the emerging middle class in the context of urban western India.

The emergence of brand-name capitalism marks a new chapter in Indian history that had previously been reduced to a “colonial marketplace” for the sale of cheap English piece goods in the hands of the English East India Company over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (see Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade, [1998]). Did the entry of Euro-American multinational corporations into Indian markets in the early twentieth century signal a new “civilizing” mission that used “scientific” advertising strategies to pull the Indian middle class into the folds of luxurious global commodity chains? Haynes disagrees. Instead, he shows the ways in which advertisements ruptured the hegemony of such civilizing discourses, translating the universality of these brands into vernacular idioms, and adjusting the globalized commodities towards specific, localized needs.

The attention to “modern conjugalities” is instructive here – Haynes attends to the promotion of a range of branded products, like male sex tonics, female beauty products, health drinks, cooking medium, and electrical appliances, to suggest how the image of a healthy, functional, re/productive, heterosexual modern middle-class family unit was carefully constructed. It educated the potential consumer on the necessity of these commodities towards building a “happy married life,” thereby distancing itself from the frivolity and extravagance typically associated with conspicuous consumption. Here, Haynes’ treatment of the middle class as a sociological category is attentive to the term’s inherent pluriversality. It is a class that is divided in its racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and caste compositions, yet united in its desire for the social reproduction of its bourgeois class conditions.

There is another significant aspect to the book that begs discussion, even though Haynes merely alludes to it, if at all. The work of advertisements towards building a pedagogy of modern heteronormative familyhood via specific modes of consumption is itself a massive biopolitical project. In one place, Haynes refers to a survey wherein a housewife is being interviewed about who decides on the purchase of household products; the wife casually remarks, “My husband chooses, but of course I tell him what to choose” (p. 101). It gestures to the private world of a middle class gendered economic subject who has learned to exercise her “free will” towards the fulfillment of personal desires, while being dutiful towards the upkeep of her family. In a broader context, the statement further reveals how advertisements had revolutionized the landscape of middle class Indian economic life by foregrounding care, hygiene, and well-being as necessary prerequisites for a successful conjugal family – the cornerstone of modern society. The role of capitalism in fixing gender roles and sexual behavior is not a new subject. But, Haynes’ illustration of the ways in which branded domestic products were designed to allay middle-class anxieties around infertility, sexual inadequacy, fatigue, disease, malnutrition, and personal hygiene deserve appreciation. He successfully engages in a world building exercise where the entry of global commodities in a nationalist historic setting attains new meaning in localized, familial contexts. It is not clear why Haynes cites Timothy Burke’s formulation of “prior meaning” to mean the range of preconceived notions with which advertisers entered new African markets as a theoretical crutch to advance his own, quite distinctive argument. If anything, this book, with its careful and attentive perusal of an impressive archive of visual material is a testament to how the universal codes of globalized modernity came to be challenged, disrupted, and reconstructed in an environment of constant “friction”, a concept Haynes loans from Anna Tsing quite appropriately.

In 2014, the Business History Review ran a special issue on India (Volume 88, Issue 1). In its introduction, eminent business historian Dwijendra Tripathi recalled a time when the study of Indian capitalism was viewed by left-leaning social historians as a mark of shameful compliance. Douglas E. Haynes’ book (which is dedicated to Professor Tripathi, among others) is certainly a testament to how far Indian business history has come since then. But, more significantly, with its choice of visual material, discussion of middle class conjugalities, and a journey into the intimate worlds of brand-name commodities, this book paves a new path for the future of business histories in general.