The work under review collects nine essays by Claude Markovits published between 1981 and 2003 and an epilogue written for the volume, providing an invaluable companion to his three monographs (1985, 2000, 2004). Markovits's body of work is significant not only for its quantity, but also for its spatial and temporal span: he has analyzed South Asian economic-historical processes from the modern (eighteenth century) through the contemporary periods, and has also treated in depth South Asia's social, economic, and political connections with East Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia over the last 300 years. This extremely rich oeuvre has unequivocally established Claude Markovits as one of the foremost economic historians of South Asia.
Among Markovits's many contributions to South Asian economic history, the essays in this volume underscore at least three strengths of his approach to the surviving historical evidence (consisting mainly of references to merchants and mercantile activity in colonial-era censuses, gazetteers, English-language archives, and other primary sources). First, his works repeatedly emphasize the importance of a historical perspective on modern mercantile studies, contextualizing South Asian socioeconomic processes within their own spatial-temporal trajectory (see, e.g., pp. 21, 111, 178). To be sure, Markovits's corpus boasts a significant number of works on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thereby advocating the maxim, “Know the past in order to know the present.”
Markovits's essays are also exemplary in their analysis of community allegiances and differences through time and space. His essay on merchant circulation in South Asia (pp. 187–219), for example, defines the shared identity of Calcutta Marwaris as dependent on common caste and/or regional origins, but also emphasizes the integration of Marwaris and other communities—such as some Muslim groups—into their “diasporic” contexts and their participation in the religious and social lives of these adopted cultural milieus. “Ethnic solidarity” should be understood as much more nuanced than an across-the-board phenomenon: rather than a single solidarity, there were multiple solidarities defined by specific caste or subcaste, locality of origin, and so on. Indeed, these solidarities were active mechanisms of information, rather than passive determinants of commercial partnerships. Business contracts along caste or other group-based affiliations were prevalent not because of a blind preference for co-members, but precisely the inverse: a greater amount of usable information was available about individuals, families, and their financial exposures within shared caste and/or regional community networks, than about those outside them (p. 209).
The epilogue, written specifically for this collection, makes yet another thought-provoking contribution to the study of South Asia's economic history. The essay very usefully traces the study—or lack thereof—of merchants and their histories from the post-1947 years through present-day historiography. Commenting on the marginal space in scholarship relegated to merchants despite, for example, their exquisitely honed mechanisms for transmission of economic, sociopolitical, and perhaps even literary information and knowledge (an important theme throughout the essays; see esp. pp. 214, 231, 246, 260, 266), Markovits ruefully remarks, “The erasure from the historical record of a group which basically represented indigenous agency in the economic field results … in the return to a strangely ‘Orientalist’ reading of the trajectory of Indian society under colonial rule” (pp. 263–64). Such a remark is nothing less than a rallying cry for scholars, not only in its reference to “a strangely ‘Orientalist’” trajectory, but also in calling attention to the very real danger of losing rich sources of historical insight with the eclipsing of mercantile history. In light of this danger, one immediately searches for ways to rescue and “return the merchant to South Asian history” (the epilogue's interrogative subtitle), such as the exploration of nontextual sources such as mercantile patronage of architecture and other cultural works.
The only critique possible of Markovits's impressive essays resides precisely in their references to historical realities informing modern ones. While the essays continually acknowledge the importance of past processes, no specific parameters are demarcated for them. Thus, how far back do “pre-colonial state formations” (p. 21) extend? The absence of a defined historical horizon is also evident in the assertion that “the literature regarding the mercantile world of South Asia … has little to say about the specific role of Muslims” (p. 105). In fact, information on the Muslim mercantile communities of South Asia is available in textual and epigraphic sources from the twelfth century onward, and perhaps earlier. Would these historical processes be relevant to the modern through contemporary mercantile realities of South Asia, as pointed out in the essays? The temporal definition of “historical” processes would lend greater weight to their possible connections with early modern and modern realities, specifying more clearly the premodern past that, instead, remains undifferentiated. Moreover, the organization of the essays in chronological order from premodern through contemporary themes would perhaps also have provided greater clarity throughout the volume.
Besides these minor points, this superb collection of essays is a staple for the economic history of South Asia, serving as a thorough introduction for newcomers to the subject, and a detailed and solid series of studies for established scholars.
