‘Business Culture’ and Entrepreneurship in British India, 1860–1950

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.-M. Misra
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Business Culture ◽  
Large Firms ◽  
Eastern India ◽  
British India ◽  
Industrial Economy ◽  
Corporate Organization ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Trading Economy

In the late nineteenth century British expatriate enterprise enjoyed extraordinary success. A few large firms effectively dominated the external trading sector and the modern industrial economy of Eastern India. Based in Calcutta, these firms have been credited with the introduction into India not only of modern industry, but also of modern corporate organization. However, having reached a peak of dominance in the early 1900s, British enterprise seemed to lose its dynamism and became increasingly associated with the old and declining sectors of the Indian industrial and trading economy.

The Moghia Menace, or the Watch Over Watchmen In British India

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 751-779 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANASTASIA PILIAVSKY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Systemic Change ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Indigenous Governance

AbstractThis paper contributes to the history of ‘criminal tribes’, policing and governance in British India. It focuses on one colonial experiment—the policing of Moghias, declared by British authorities to be ‘robbers by hereditary profession’—which was the immediate precursor of the first Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, but which so far altogether has passed under historians’ radar. I argue that at stake in the Moghia operations, as in most other colonial ‘criminal tribe’ initiatives, was neither the control of crime (as colonial officials claimed) nor the management of India's itinerant groups (as most historians argue), but the uprooting of the indigenous policing system. British presence on the subcontinent was punctuated with periodic panics over ‘extraordinary crime’, through which colonial authorities advanced their policing practices and propagated their way of governance. The leading crusader against this ‘crisis’ was the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, which was as instrumental in the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Moghia menace’ and ‘criminal tribes’ in the late nineteenth century as in the earlier suppression of the ‘cult of Thuggee’. As a policing initiative, the Moghia campaign failed consistently for more than two decades. Its failures, however, reveal that behind the façade-anxieties over ‘criminal castes’ and ‘crises of crime’ stood attempts at a systemic change of indigenous governance. The diplomatic slippages of the campaign also expose the fact that the indigenous rule by patronage persisted—and that the consolidation of the colonial state was far from complete—well into the late nineteenth century.

Islamic Identities in Colonial India

2018 ◽  
pp. 14-53
Author(s):  
Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British India ◽  
The South ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Subject ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter introduces many of the groups that will form the subject of this book and charts their emergence and development in conditions of British colonial rule. It shows that the traditionalist orientations that enjoy great prominence in the South Asian landscape began to take a recognizable shape only in the late nineteenth century, although they drew on older styles of thought and practice. The early modernists, for their part, were rooted in a culture that was not significantly different from the `ulama's. Among the concerns of this chapter is to trace their gradual distancing from each other. The processes involved in it would never be so complete, in either British India or in Pakistan, as to preclude the cooperation of the modernists and their conservative critics at critical moments. Nor, however, were the results of this distancing so superficial as to ever be transcended for good.

scholarly journals Constructing Native Homosexuality in British India

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Ruhnke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Moral Superiority ◽  
Previous Scholarship

In this paper I will examine how British constructions and criminalization of Indian homosexuality that evolved within the discourse of the imperial project. I will situate my discussion in the late nineteenth century, during which British colonists introduced anti-sodomy statutes to the Indian colony and homosexuality was socially and legally reconsidered in ways without precedent in pre-colonial India. By considering how Indian homosexuality was constructed in this colonial moment, we will be able to better understand the methods by which Britain asserted their colonial authority in nineteenth century India. In order to prove my claim, I will consider previous scholarship that has analyzed British Orientalist representations of Indian homosexuality, trials and testimonies under the anti-sodomy statute, Section 377 of the Indian Penal code, and the political and historical context of the late nineteenth century colonial moment in British India. Drawing upon this scholarship, I argue that British constructions and criminalization of Indian homosexuality served to emphasize the difference between native subjects and British rulers. I demonstrate that by associating “perverse” and “criminal” homosexual identity with native subjects, British rulers accentuated the divide between the ruler and the ruled, thus reinforcing their racial and moral superiority and, in turn, their colonial authority. 

Rise of the Managers

2020 ◽  
pp. 242-272
Author(s):  
Anton Howes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Industrial Design ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
Middle Management ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Large Firms ◽  
New Members ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter analyzes why the Royal Society of Arts never had a permanent function but was instead meant to find new things to improve. It discusses the utilitarian-supported reforms of the late nineteenth century that laid the foundations for state systems of education, health, and welfare to grow in size and complexity. It also points out changes in the membership of the Society that reflects the growth of both government and corporate bureaucracies. The chapter describes Society's new members in the mid-twentieth century that were increasingly drawn from the civil service, middle management, and chairmen or directors of companies. It also conveys how the Society reacted to the trend of bureaucracies by increasingly appealing to large firms for the sponsorship of its industrial design bursaries.

In Good Company

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 30-33
Author(s):  
Usha Sanyal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Segregation ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
British India ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
The Public ◽  
Changing Patterns ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article is part of Darakhshan Khan’s larger body of work on womenin the Tablīghī Jamā‘at, who, as she argues persuasively, have not been giventhe scholarly attention they deserve (barring a few notable exceptions,among them Metcalf 2000). Khan observes that the reasons for this rangefrom the fact that the public image of the Tablīghī Jamā‘at is that of itinerantmales, not females, and that gender segregation in South Asian Muslimcommunities makes women invisible to male scholars. Moreover, in today’spost-9/11 world the Tablīghī Jamā‘at is often viewed through the lens ofcounter-terrorist concerns.Khan’s article revolves around several key themes: the geographicalmobility of Muslim bureaucrats in late nineteenth-century British India;changes in the structure of the family; changing patterns of religious leadershipin British India, resulting in part from the creation of seminaries suchas the Dār al-‘Ulūm, Deoband; and the incorporation of Muslim womenin religious leadership roles in Tablīghī networks from the mid-twentiethcentury onward. The article seems to fall into two distinct parts. The firsthalf deals with Muslim men from ashraf families working in British Indiangovernment jobs in the late nineteenth century who moved constantly(with their wives and children) in response to bureaucratic postings, livingwesternized lives at the margins of highly stratified British Indian socialnetworks. Drawing on sources ranging from Urdu literature to biographies,Khan shows how isolating this was for the wives and sometimes professionallydisappointing for the husbands. The second half of the article dealswith Muslim religious elites and their more limited geographical travelsin British India in pursuit of religious knowledge, often coinciding with ...

Experts against Objectivity: Accountants and Actuaries

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-113
Author(s):  
Theodore M. Porter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Large Firms ◽  
Accounting Firms ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter assesses objectivity in accounting. The drive for rigor and standardization arose in response to a world in which local knowledge had become inadequate. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the elite of accountants in Britain was to be found in independent accounting firms. Independence provided some assurance of impartiality. It was important also for accountants to have a wide reputation for probity and skill, and this came to be guaranteed by the names of a few large firms. These firms spread also to the United States, a more challenging setting in which to maintain a gentlemanly profession. The shift away from elite disinterestedness toward standardization as the basis for accounting objectivity began in earnest in the 1930s. There was much disagreement among prominent accountants about the desirability of standardization. The balance of opinion, especially at the most elite levels, was against it. The chapter then studies actuaries.

A Rule of Proprietary Right for British India: From revenue settlement to tenant right in the age of classical legal thought

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 345-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
FAISAL CHAUDHRY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Species ◽  
British India ◽  
Indian Land ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Land Control ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractScholars have long debated the impact of the British ‘rule of property’ on India. In our own day it has become common for historians to hold that the Raj's would-be regime of free capitalist property was frustrated by a pervasive divide between rhetoric and reality which derived from a fundamental lack of fit between English ideas and Indian land control practices. While seemingly novel, the contemporary emphasis on the theory-practice divide is rooted in an earlier ‘revisionist’ perspective among late-nineteenth-century colonial thinkers who argued that land control in the subcontinent derived from a uniquely Indian species of ‘proprietary’ (rather than genuinely propertied) right-holding. In this article, I critically examine the revisionist discourse of ‘proprietary right’ by situating it in a broader comparative perspective, both relative to earlier ideas about rendering property ‘absolute’ during the East India Company's rule and relative to the changing conception of the property right among legal thinkers in the central domains of the Anglo-common law world. In so doing, the article significantly revises our understanding of the relationship between property, law, and political economy in the subcontinent from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century.

The Transformation of Cotton Marketing in the Late Nineteenth Century: Alexander Sprunt and Son of Wilmington, N. C., 1884–1956

1981 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Killick
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Dust Storm ◽  
New South ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cotton Crop ◽  
The Real ◽  
Corporate Organization ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
North And South

Historians of the New South will find in Professor Killick's essay, based on the business archives of an important fin-de-siécle and early-twentieth-century cotton marketing enterprise, further powerful proof that the real story can only come from informed, sympathetic studies of what private men of affairs were accomplishing behind the dust storm of political demagogy that marked most public utterances, North and South, on southern problems in this era. Real entrepreneurship sprang up to give the marketing of the cotton crop a directness and an efficiency that ineffectual antebellum southern leaders had only dreamed of. This torch of enterprise was successfully passed, moreover, from a dying family firm to a more modern corporate organization, headed by even more skilled marketers who had learned well the lessons of their predecessors and were well prepared to flourish in the vastly changed post-1929 world. The stereotype of the prolonged backwardness of the South after 1877 is further discredited in this essay, which, significantly, is written from the far side of the Atlantic, where marketing of the cotton crop was always the most important aspect of its history.

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