Abetting the market: on property, propriety and actually existing capitalisms

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 See Barbara Harriss-White’s work on regulation as a resource (1996). In her sense, regulation is not an unproblematic administrative imposition upon market parties. Rather, market players consciously assist in its crafting, implementation, evasion and obstruction. This occurs for myriad reasons including competition and the evasion of official records, levies and taxes.

2 Schwecke bases this on a tentative study of first information reports filed in local police stations that did not lead to the commencement of court litigation. This demonstrates the ubiquity of collusive forms of transgressing the legal construction of property rights, even between the parties legally designated as owners and the seeming transgressors. The law, in many cases documented here, takes on the role of an ulterior appellate authority for the aspiring litigants, though an ineffectual one in resolving contestations of the social practice of property as evidenced by the failure of these allegations to move to court litigation. A parallel instance, also from Banaras, of navigating competing claims to property, is in regards to renegotiating credit dues in extra-legal financial markets, in this case contractually agreed-upon property-to-be (Schwecke 2022).

3 Law in South Asia long been analyzed through the prism of its contextual contingency, especially concerning lacunae in its supposed universality (Galanter 1989, Cohn 1965, 1996). See also Jauregui’s argument on how resource allocation leads to changes in authority’s acceptance in the case of north India’s police forces (2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ajay Gandhi

Ajay Gandhi is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor at Leiden University writing on modern South Asia.

Sebastian Schwecke

Sebastian Schwecke is Director, Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, Delhi. His publications concern the modern history and economic anthropology of South Asia, and include Debt, trust, and reputation: extra-legal finance in northern India (Cambridge 2022).

Barbara Harriss-White

Barbara Harriss-White, Emeritus Professor, Oxford University, drove from Cambridge to New Delhi in 1969 and has been researching markets and rural development, Indian capitalism and aspects of deprivation ever since. Her latest works include The wild east: criminal political economies in south Asia (2019) and Agricultural market reforms and farmer protests in India (2021).

Douglas E. Haynes

Douglas E. Haynes is a professor of South Asian History at Dartmouth College. He has written Rhetoric and ritual in colonial India (California 1991), Small-town capitalism in western India (Cambridge 2012) and the Emergence of brand-name capitalism in late colonial India (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2023).