In Company of Kinsmen: Enterprise and Community in South Asian History, 1700–1940, Tirthankar Roy, a preeminent economic historian of India, offers a detailed description of economic organization in precolonial and colonial India that was structured around community-based collectives. The book discusses the functions served by these collectives, which he refers to as endogamous guilds, among merchants and bankers, skilled artisans, workers, and peasants, and explains how the collectives changed in response to colonial rule. In some cases, the colonial economy weakened personal ties of community, for example, those among merchants and bankers, but in other cases it recreated new forms of community as among migrant workers.

Roy begins by describing his view of collectives in India. Similar to Hindu castes, these endogamous guilds shared marriage rules and occupational choices. But, unlike Hindu castes, they incorporated non-Hindu business communities practicing endogamy, such as the Parsis and Bohra Muslims. Access to capital and skills played an important role in shaping the collectives. Merchants, bankers, and skilled artisans used collectives to enforce contracts, resolve disputes, and facilitate the transfer of occupational knowledge among members. In comparison, tenants, peasants, and laborers primarily used collectives as a bargaining tool with nonmembers. Although business collectives in other parts of the world did occasionally unite marriage and occupation, Roy emphasizes “the idiom of caste sometimes invested the guild with a moral force that had no parallel in the world history of the guild” (p. 21). Nonetheless, Indian collectives did share common features with collectives in other parts of the world. The moral and cultural basis for contract enforcement and business transactions among Indian merchants was different, but their collectives also relied on reputation and trust similar to the Maghribi Traders. Indian artisans used their collectives to impart job training much like premodern European guilds.

Chapter 2 describes how these collectives interacted with the state. Roy argues that endogamous guilds of merchants, bankers and skilled artisans successfully constrained the power of precolonial kings in the form of a social contract. “In effect, the king could enjoy his monopoly of violence by offering an implicit guarantee to protect monopolies of families to their own hereditary skills” (p. 87). Commercial and property disputes were decentralized and resolved by individual collectives that both designed and enforced their own laws relying on community and religious codes for legal guidance. While strengthening contract enforcement within collectives, this institutional policy probably reduced the frequency of intergroup business transactions. In the colonial period, a mixed Anglo-India legal apparatus attempted to codify the vast morass of community codes under a unified judicial process. The result was a hugely inefficient system in much need of reform by the end of the nineteenth century.

The remaining chapters examine the collectives of the principal economic actors namely merchants, skilled artisans, workers, and peasants. Focusing on merchants, chapter 3 emphasizes that unlike their European counterparts, Indian merchant guilds represented “a cluster of families related by ties of marriage and kinship, and possessing its own rules of law that came closer to a moral code than professional statutes” (p. 89). Despite the differences, Roy shows how these endogamous guilds successfully provided business services such as contract enforcement and dispute resolution or rather negotiation in the precolonial period. Drawing on both primary sources (for example, the accounts of European travellers) and secondary literature, this chapter offers a wealth of details on how collectives operated in practice and highlights the role of community ties to sustain business relations. The ill-fated journey of a certain George Forester who lost his savings effectively illustrates the difficulties faced by outsiders engaging in business transactions in this world. The rise of colonial rule, however, destabilized and weakened community ties as individual families became more significant in the increasingly commercial and industrial world of the nineteenth century. Instead of relying on communities to resolve disputes, individuals now sought justice in colonial courts.

The narrative turns to skilled artisans in chapter 4 where Roy notes the differences between north and south Indian artisan collectives in the precolonial period. In north Indian urban towns, skilled artisan collectives functioned as factories supported by Mughal courtiers, while in south India the collectives took the form of endogamous guilds rooted in caste. As the chief buyer of their products, collectives in both regions relied heavily on royal courts. Training, apprenticeship, and quality control were among the principal functions of these collectives. This part of the narrative shares parallels with Stephan Epstein's research on the apprenticeship aspect of guilds in premodern Europe (“Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change in Preindustrial Europe.” The Journal of Economic History 58, no. 3 [1998]: 684–713). With the spread of colonial rule, the scope of artisan collectives weakened although training persisted well into the twentieth century, for example, in the case of artisans in Lahore in 1940.

Chapter 5 uses case studies to draw interesting parallels between the experience of indentured labor in Mauritius in the mid-1800s, Assam tea workers in the late 1800s, and Bombay cotton mill workers in the 1920s. In these cases, the collectives “represented a partnership between the headman and the manager ensuring reliable supply of effort, in exchange for some freedom granted to the former to recruit and retrench workers” (p. 188). Although these collectives, composed mainly of male workers, shared a common bond based on caste and kin, they were very different from the endogamous merchant guilds because the workers largely relied on each other to meet “immediate needs of security and communication” (p. 188). Finally, chapter 6 illustrates how the erratic evolution of colonial law, which often emphasized “the claims of the joint family over the claims of the individual” (p. 218) allowed peasant collectives to persist despite the introduction of private property rights in land.

While the sections on workers and peasants are informative, the economic basis for sustaining these collectives is not as strong as the earlier material on merchants and artisans. The choice of case studies is also a bit ad hoc leaving the reader wondering about collectives in other industrial sectors such as mining and railways. Another important question surrounds the potential costs of such collectives. Constraining effective contract enforcement to caste or community-based collectives introduced certain inefficiencies in the market and probably weakened economic development. While the author briefly alludes to costs (p. 43), this reader would have liked to learn more about the economic significance of costs such as whether costs varied by collectives, and how regional and skill-based variation in collectives related to regional patterns of economic growth. But, these are minor quibbles. Overall, Company of Kinsmen is a fascinating description of the organization of economic collectives in India, their interaction with the state, and their evolution with colonial rule. While social and cultural historians have written extensively about caste and community in South Asia, Roy offers a fresh perspective by bringing the institutional economics literature into the discussion. Relying on primary sources and a large secondary literature, Roy paints a rich picture of the economic functions served by caste and community in sustaining trade. The book makes an invaluable contribution to Indian economic history, business history, and global history more generally. It is a welcome addition for scholars working in these fields!