In modern India, the success of businessmen drawn from the small caste/community of Marwaris is legendary. India today possesses more billionaires than China, most of them Marwari. As “oligarchs,” they also exercise a more pervasive control over their national economy than in any country other than Russia. While Ritu Birla's fascinating book does not exactly explain how they have come to do it, she provides deep insights into how it was possible for so hierarchical a structure of capital to emerge.

Birla explores the political and legislative processes involved in the attempts of the colonial British from the late nineteenth century to self-avowedly “modernize” the relations of Indian capitalism. Previously, they had been content to allow Indian traders—for all their practical engagement in the global economy—to remain in the domain of “tradition,” their property and (to a considerable extent) market relations governed by principles of caste, kinship, and religion. Capitalist subjects were assumed to be white—and Christian. However, a variety of economic and political pressures from the turn of the century necessitated the shift towards a more multicultural capitalism with colonial subjects, too, brought into the domain of reason and progress. Various enactments followed aimed at extending company law, securing rights of contract, and separating “gambling” from legitimate “speculation.” The respectable and responsible Indian capitalist subject started to emerge.

However, he always retained something of a distinctive identity. Having long foresworn “interference” in matters of religion and tradition, lest it stir revolt against a thin and alien ruling power, the colonial state continued to be nervous of radical innovation. As a result, it allowed the Hindu joint family and the religious/charitable trust to retain privileged positions within the new world of Indian capital, redefining them but also preserving them as sanctuaries against the pressures of the market place. In response, Marwari capitalists utilized them to build and protect accumulations that not even the taxation policies of the state were effectively able to touch. For Birla's story to be brought fully into the present, it would also be necessary to consider developments since Independence (the narrative of her book ends in the 1930s). But the shape of things to come was already clear.

Birla brings a range of sources—legislative bills, debates and commentaries, accountancy procedures, and the clauses of Company Acts—previously considered too arcane or “dry” to interest historians and social theorists under her analytical spotlight—and shows their vital importance in sign-posting the passage towards India's modernity. Her principal concern is the “discourse” of Indian capitalism where she exposes the contradictions and complexities involved in processes that contemporary ideology has been inclined to regard as routine. Her study is extremely important in understanding the society India has become.

At the same time, it is possible to wonder whether her emphasis on Indian/colonial particularity is not overstated. The drive to establish rational capitalist subjects in all contexts has encountered problems of cultural value and social organization, which are not easily reduced. Moreover, in the case of the “English” tradition of law, there is continued ambiguity in the treatment of property as a relation of contract as opposed to a foundation of social order. In England, too, family property could be “entailed” and religious/charitable foundations become vehicles for the accumulation of wealth. A more comparative approach to law may be necessary before the full distinctiveness (or not) of the Indian experience can be appreciated.

Also, Birla's interest in discourse draws her towards “conversations” with Foucault, Marx, and Spivak, which may be of concern to discourse theorists but exist in a realm of abstraction rather above that occupied by most historians and students of the law. Such refinement can be at the expense of more mundane questions concerning what practical difference the particular institutionalisation of Indian capitalism made to the performance of the Indian economy, and to the definition of social rights and distribution of social wealth within it. However, Birla provides some important leads, which other scholars will undoubtedly begin to follow, and she deserves great credit for establishing the terrain of a subject likely to attract further research.