A Tangled Jungle of Disorderly Transactions? The production of a monetary outside in a north Indian town
TL;DR: This paper argued that the Indian state in its correlated attempts to regulate and streamline the operation of monetary markets in line with capitalist development policies and to remove exploitative credit market practices instead produced a binary between a monetary outside and inside.
Abstract: This article argues that, starting from the late colonial period, the Indian state in its correlated attempts to regulate and streamline the operation of monetary markets in line with capitalist development policies and to remove exploitative credit market practices instead produced a binary between a monetary outside and inside. While the state's efforts were intended to delineate the boundaries of the outside produced in this way, removing competing segments of Indian capital from the expanding monetary system, this process of delineation contributed to an already existing divergence in the operational modes. Correspondingly, it reinforced a process of differentiation that centred on the removal of liberal-bourgeois contractual law from market governance on the monetary outside that was gradually substituted by a reputational economy of debt. The monetary outside so produced constitutes one specific form of capitalist outsides in the Indian economy, interpreted as economic arenas and (extractive) accumulation regimes that functionally and procedurally differ from the dominant capitalist economic sector in modern India with which they co-exist. Both historiographic and ethnographic approaches are used to study the related processes of delineation and differentiation in the production of a monetary outside, with a special emphasis on the United Provinces/Uttar Pradesh and the north Indian town of Banaras (Varanasi).
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01 Jan 2020
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Posted Content•
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that economic action is provoked by technologies of the imagination that generate speculation and that the fortunes of business, trade and the livelihoods of informalised workers rest on these practices, which generate shortterm unstable forms of capital accumulation.
Abstract: Economic theory and technocratic policy have long understood economic action to be a communicative activity. From Laplace and Adam Smith to current liberalisation fiscal policy in India designed to produce price signals and entrepreneurial behaviour this conceptualisation has been dominant. Instead this article draws on the anthropology of divination to argue that capitalist action is provoked by technologies of the imagination that generate speculation. These issues are explored in the context of changing forms of governance of the Hooghly riverine economy by bureaucrats in the Kolkata Port Trust. Through ethnography we track how public-private partnerships are forged by exemplary men or 'seers' deploying divinatory action. The fortunes of business, trade and the livelihoods of informalised workers rest on these practices, which generate short-term unstable forms of capital accumulation. Drawing on this case, we can potentially develop comparative critical approaches to the recent emergence of popularist-speculators in India and elsewhere.
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01 Jan 2020
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01 Jan 2020
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References
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Book•
01 Jan 2000
TL;DR: In this article, the idea of provincializing Europe and the Narration of Modernity is discussed, with a focus on postcoloniality and the artifice of history, and the two histories of capital and domestic cruelty.
Abstract: Acknowlegments ix Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe 3 Part One: Historicism and the Narration of Modernity Chapter 1. Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History 27 Chapter 2. The Two Histories of Capital 47 Chapter 3. Translating Life-Worlds into Labor and History 72 Chapter 4. Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts 97 Part Two: Histories of Belonging Chapter 5. Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Subject 117 Chapter 6. Nation and Imagination 149 Chapter 7. Adda: A History of Sociality 180 Chapter 8. Family, Fraternity, and Salaried labor 214 Epilogue. Reason and the Critique of Historicism 237 Notes 257 Index 299
3,940 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the inability to accumulate through expanded reproduction on a sustained basis has been paralleled by a rise in attempts to accumulate by dispossession, which is the hallmark of what some like to call 'the new imperialism' is about.
Abstract: Global capitalism has experienced a chronic and enduring problem of overaccumulation since the 1970s. I interpret the volatility of international capitalism during these years, however, as a series of temporary spatio-temporal fixes that failed even in the medium run to deal with problems of overaccumulation. It was, as Peter Gowan argues, through the orchestration of such volatility that the United States sought to preserve its hegemonic position within global capitalism. The recent apparent shift towards an open imperialism backed by military force on the part of the US may then be seen as a sign of the weakening of that hegemony before the serious threat of recession and widespread devaluation at home, as opposed to the various bouts of devaluation formerly inflicted elsewhere (Latin America in the 1980s and early 1990s, and, even more seriously, the crisis that consumed East and South-East Asia in 1997 and then engulfed Russia and much of Latin America). But I also want to argue that the inability to accumulate through expanded reproduction on a sustained basis has been paralleled by a rise in attempts to accumulate by dispossession. This, I then conclude, is the hallmark of what some like to call ' the new imperialism' is about.
766 citations
Book•
12 Apr 2007
TL;DR: In this paper, a new political imagination for post-colonization world is proposed, based on the Ship of Fools and De-essentializing development: capital and governmentality.
Abstract: 1. Introduction: Rethinking Capitalist Development 2. Ship of Fools 3. Accumulation as Development: The Arising of Capital 4. De-essentializing Development: Capital and Governmentality 5. Difference as Hegemony: Capital and the Need Economy 6. Conclusion: Towards a New Political Imaginary for Post-colonial World
365 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that existing theories of land grabs do not adequately explain why dispossession becomes necessary to accumulation at particular times and places, and seek to reconstruct Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession to adequately account for it.
Abstract: Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have become the epicenters of ‘land wars’ across India, with farmers resisting the state's forcible transfer of their land to capitalists. Based on 18 months of research focused on an SEZ in Rajasthan, this paper illuminates the role of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (ABD) in Indian capitalism today and its consequences for rural India. It argues that the existing theories of land grabs do not adequately explain why dispossession becomes necessary to accumulation at particular times and places, and seeks to reconstruct Harvey's theory of ABD to adequately account for it. It then shows the specific kind of rentier- and IT-driven accumulation that dispossession is making possible in SEZs and the non–labor-absorbing, real-estate–driven agrarian transformation this generates in the surrounding countryside. Land speculation amplifies class and caste inequalities in novel ways, marginalizes women and creates an involutionary dynamic of agrarian change that is ultimately impoverish...
286 citations
TL;DR: The law may be seen as a set of general principles through which political authority and the state (however constituted) attempt to legitimize the social institutions and norms of conduct which they find valuable.
Abstract: Perhaps the most intransigent problem in the recent history of Indian society remains an adequate understanding of the processes of social change which took place under colonialism. As the continunig controversies within, as much as between, the traditions of modernization theory, Marxism, and the underdevelopment theory make plain, the Indian historical record is peculiarly difficult to grasp with conventional sociological concepts. In the study of Western European society, a focus on the evolution of legal ideas and institutions has proved a useful entry point to social history.The law may be seen to represent a set of general principles through which political authority and the state (however constituted) attempt to legitimize the social institutions and norms of conduct which they find valuable. As such, its history reflects the struggle in society to assume, control or resist this authority. Its study should help to reveal the nature of the forces involved in the struggle and to suggest the implications for social development of the way in which, at any one time, their struggle was resolved. The condition of the law may be seen to crystallize the condition of society. This, of course, could be said of any governing institution. But where the law becomes uniquely valuable is in that, because of its social function, the struggle around it is necessarily expressed in terms of general statements of principle rather than particular statements of private and discrete interest. At the most fundamental level, these principles demarcate the rules on which the contending parties seek to build their versions of society and provide useful clues to their wider, often undisclosed, positions.
265 citations