This is an admirable attempt to examine the development of the Marwari business community in early twentieth-century India, against a background of encroaching British legal constraints on traditional family enterprise. These Marwari business elites moved from their homeland of Rajasthan to Bombay in the 1870s and Calcutta in the 1880s. British Indian efforts to impose legal modernity on traditional Indian business is dissected through an analysis of legislative changes within commerce and finance, charitable trusts, philanthropy, market arrangements, and speculative activities over 1870–1940. There is discussion of the conflicts within the native community on these matters, including the changing role of women within Indian business. British administrators are seen struggling with these conflicts in a period after the raj's abandonment of unbridled “liberalism.” What Thomas Metcalf has described as the “ordering of difference” between the British and Indians is shown to present particular difficulties in the context of moneymaking in colonial India (Ideologies of the Raj [Cambridge, 1995], 113–59).

Stages of Capital straddles the apparently incompatible disciplines of economic/business history and cultural/postcolonial history. The author's challenge in this respect parallels the tensions in the underlying narrative between the public/economic and the private/cultural spheres. However, an examination of civil and criminal law in India represents a suitable focal point for examining these tensions. Gandhi and other leading congressional representatives came from a Western legal background. At the same time, Marwari industrialists shared with the British a frustration with ambiguous kinship-based rules for transacting business. Rutu Birla analyzes legal reforms across wide-ranging themes including age of consent, child marriage, speculation and gambling, taxation, pension funds/charitable trusts, and joint-stock companies. In each case we are made aware of the clash between traditionalists and reformers on the British and Indian sides, who sought to make changes against a background of disappointing industrial development and persistent poverty. The resilience of ancient Hindu and Jain traditions is explained by Marwaris’ wish to preserve the private/cultural sphere, sometimes in conflict with Western capitalism. As financiers for Anglo-Indian managing agents, Marwaris performed a collaborationist role, channeling their wealth into London-controlled activities and heightening the “drain.” At the same time, they conflicted with the British over traditional pursuits like rain speculation. Indeed, the Rajhastani habit of betting on monsoon rains was extended to Marwari wagers on cotton, opium, and jute prices at the port cities. This brought embryonic futures market to India but attracted “material and moral” criticism from the British (146). In Bengal, the legislative council sought to drive rain gambling into the private domain of Marwari families away from the public arena where it was more likely to contaminate public ethics. These raj efforts to grapple with the Marwari futures markets give insight into conflicting cultural and economic challenges. However, the account would have benefited from more contextualization of the social and religious aspects of Marwaris to identify why they became dominant over other moneylenders, including London-based capital. Birla portrays London capital flows as moving “globally” through British joint-stock companies (33). In fact, London's rentier class demanded government guarantees for their Indian loans, making the contribution of Marwari moneylenders still more intriguing.

Many of Birla's themes coalesce in a detailed assessment of the “Hindu Undivided Family” (HUF). This was “an Anglo-Indian legal construct” designed to provide a compromise between British “public” joint-stock companies and “private” Indian family enterprise (15). The law of property contract was imposed on family organizations, Hindu and non-Hindu, through the HUF. In this way, large groups of people with only distant ancestral links were bound by personal law in a paternal manner. Like postcolonial assertions that caste was an invention of the British, Birla sees this as an attempt by the British to constrain ancient corporate activity within a compartmentalized system of “divide and rule.” In particular, the British imposed a false distinction between “state and market” and “economy/culture” on Indian businessmen (25). Birla critiques this British delineation by adopting Foucault's approach to economic matters, in which the economy is seen as part of a “discourse of governing.” In British India, government influence over the economy evolved slowly from the state monopoly structure of the East India Company up to 1857 to a system of joint-stock companies supported by British-style legal rigidities. In short, argues Birla, the Smithian market is constructed by the British to facilitate the continuing “neoliberal enthusiasms” of the raj (23). As part of the accompanying drive for laws and standardization, the British created the compromise HUF, which failed to override cultural differences. For example, HUFs retained the right to move ownership of assets to deceased family members or even deities, beyond the grasp of the public domain. In pursuing this compromise, the British undermined kinship-based business completely.

However, in analyzing law and business development through a postcolonial lens, the more universal tensions in business and legal relations can be lost sight of. The impression is sometimes given that India's difficulties were a reflection of colonial tensions solely. In fact, as Birla points out elsewhere, British German and American authorities all viewed speculative products like financial futures with suspicion. Attempts to regulate these activities in India were not founded on racism solely. Equally, bringing HUFs within Calcutta's tax remit on accumulated profits is presented as an enclosure of traditional business within the public economy. However, the raj's motivation seems not to have been to undermine private kinship arrangements but the more prosaic one of balancing India's annual budget. This antagonism between corporate entities (private and public) and government over taxation is universal. More generally, presenting British legal reforms as a “gendering of the market” (30) is unconvincing. In using building blocks of postcolonial studies to examine economic history, the author sometimes emphasizes tangential aspects. That said, this study does bring a refreshing perspective to the topic with many thoughtful insights.