Property rights and well-functioning markets lie at the center of explanations of economic development and growth. To economic historians, this is familiar territory. Good institutions have been the focus of the work on colonial development by D. Acemoglu, S. Johnson, and J. Robinson.Footnote ¹ Contractual obligations and how they are fulfilled define the scope of property rights. The works of economic historians in different geographical contexts have emphasized the universality of community-based contracts and also legally enforceable ones in commercial transaction. Avner Greif's classic work on the Maghribi traders and trade in the Italian city states is a case in point.Footnote ²

Ritu Birlas's discourse moves away from such universal descriptions of Law, Culture, and Market Governance to the specific world of colonial India. Here the Indian context stands out in isolation. Birla describes the role of kinship-based commerce and their contribution to Indian towns and bazaars. She reconstructs the world of the Indian mercantile community in its changing interactions with a modernizing economy. This secluded world of the Indian merchants faced the imposition of colonial law based on British notions of fairness, which was at odds with a culture defined by the Hindu undivided family. The world of the public and private was distinguished, and while British law could impinge on the sphere of the public, the private had to protect by the norms of the Hindu joint family. Whenever British law infringed upon upon the private sphere, it questioned the legitimacy and cultural specificity of the Indian family.

This notion is expressed best in the representation of a prominent member of the mercantile community: “If Hindu custom need reform, the reform needs to come from within and not from without. Interference with social customs based on religious laws…is highly undesirable” (p. 218.) The statement was made in the context of a bill that tried to change the custom of child marriage. The discussion within the Marwari community to the changes in marriage law both in terms of raising age at marriage as well as looking at marriage as a civil contract is very well documented and brings new information to light. This was the inner sphere of the “private.” The role of marriage in promoting partnerships in commercial venture is an important aspect of the interaction between kinship and commerce. Imposition of imperial standards was viewed with hostility.

However, it was not only this inner world that the Indian merchants sought to protect. The resistance to imposition from Britain civil society was well articulated in other spheres of commercial life. This is where Birla's book makes an addition to the literature. The distinction between the private and the public came up in the context of adoption of limited liability in company law in India. Birla argues that the Company Bill of 1882 did not set out to address the specific context of the “family firm” (p. 49). The conflict also came up in the context of what constituted a charity and therefore should be outside the sphere of income tax rules. It also appeared in the regulation and prevention of gambling and of speculation, whether the speculation involved rain forecasts or prices of jute and cotton. To the community, these were age-old customs.

The introduction of income tax into the world of the Indian merchant constituted one such intrusion. Birla writes: “The act claimed for the public the necessary extraction from groups who had hitherto been exempt from their due share of the public burden” (p. 57). The merchants fiercely tried to protect the religious donations and investments made in temples from the arms of the state. The discussion in the book is a glimpse into the world of a privileged group that is reluctant to redistribute. Here it is difficult to empathize with the “victim.” The reluctance of the upper castes to share public money for the benefit of the rest of the society is well documented in the work of Latika Chaudhary and has continued to be the case in independent India.Footnote ³ The merchant communities belonged to the privileged upper castes.

Overall, Birla's book opens to us a fascinating world of the merchant communities of India, who survived and competed effectively with their British counterpart. The book brings together the intricate details of how these privileged communities sought to protect their spheres when challenged by a different cultural context.

However, the British cultural context cannot simply be judged as “imperialist.” This was a product of the long fought battles against privilege by parliamentarians, social reformers, and workers in Britain. Changes in labor laws and company laws were brought in to create a fairer society. Examples are the abolition of child labor, curtailing the hours worked by the common man, and making education compulsory and free. If India adopted many of these laws under pressure from the imperial power, those changes must be judged on their own merit and not simply as a “colonial construct.”

There is much to learn from this book. The detail opens up further areas of debate and discussion on colonialism, property rights, and economic development. All these themes are familiar to the economic historian and the evidence adds new insights to what we understand to be a private order institution useful in enforcing contracts.