G. Balachandran

Conflicts in the international maritime labour market: British and Indian seamen, employers, and the state, 1890-1939

Academic interest in the attitudes and policies of western states and labour movements towards foreign workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has surfaced in a number of contexts. In their historical survey of ’globalisation’, Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson remark on the ’globalisation backlash’ spawned by labour’s opposition to immigration in the major labourimporting economies, viz., Argentina, United States, Brazil, Canada, and Australia.’ Regarded as a society characterised by emigration rather than immigration, Britain has largely escaped similar close attention. However, as students of British free trade and Indian fiscal policy have long underlined, the British labour move-

Power and markets in global finance: the gold standard, 1890–1926

This paper explores the intimate connection between imperialism and a liberal global economy in the late nineteenth century and the inter-war period by distinguishing and disentangling the imperial and political dimensions of the pre-World War I gold standard, and interwar efforts to restore it. By doing so it attempts partial!y to redress the relative neglect of power in historical accounts of the international financial arrangements, and re-balance conventional liberal assumptions about the role of markets and incentives in the consolidation and spread of global institutions such as the gold standard. By re-embedding the intertwined financial histories of the imperial and Atlantic worlds into a global context, perspectives from the empire help develop more historically-situated analyses of global economic institutions and arrangements, and help clarify the many intersecting processes involving both power, in all its forms, and markets, that have historically shaped financial relations and institutions.

Atlantic paradigms and aberrant histories

Theoretical paradigms based on Atlantic experiences pose a challenge for attempts to imagine anew histories of commerce and culture in the colonial and Indian Ocean world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Foregrounding place origins of purportedly universal doctrines, this paper attempts provisionally and suggestively to explore this challenge by locating and dislocating in place some conventional frameworks for interpreting patterns of trade and mobility in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It relates two connected arguments gesturing to the disruption and suppression of alternative, and potentially subversive, imaginings of worldwide spatial connections and cultural flows in the course of the north Atlantic hoisting itself atop a hierarchy of modernity and historical progress imagined to radiate outwards from it. The first is about the generalization through theory and history of a set of commercial relationships and institutional arrangements historically peculiar to the Atlantic, as being characteristic of the “world economy.” The second argument relates to the misrecognition of spaces of circulation in accounts of migration, and their compression into linear movements where the northern Atlantic world represented the ultimate destinations for the working poor belched out from the rest of the non-Western world.

Claiming histories beyond nations: Situating global history

History is conventionally imagined and narrated in the context of the nation, relating its stories and shaped by its imaginaries. To the extent the latter are selectively re-encoded into seemingly wider scales or spaces of historical narration, projects such as global history may be said to be oxymorons. Historians in the post-colonial world have also long been aware of the nation’s shadow even in purportedly transnational projects emanating from the North, yet many remain similarly in thrall to the nation. In surveying the various levels at which histories have attempted to be narrated purportedly beyond the boundaries of nations, this article argues for a more consciously layered awareness of our multiple historical locations. Life unfolds at multiple levels and spaces between which exist complex overlays, tensions, conflicts and connections. Besides the conventions and expediencies of scholarship, often in practice historians too, will feel impelled to privilege one or another level or locus for their stories. However it is important to be aware of the reasons and limitations of such choices, and that no level or locus of analysis can credibly claim to subsume all others, or render them redundant.

Book Review: Itty Abraham, How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics

Itty Abraham, How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014, 217 pp.

Globalizing Labour? Indian Seafarers and World Shipping, c. 1870–1945: A Roundtable Response

This book deals with maritime workers, seafarers and merchant shipping in the Indian subcontinent during a crucial period of the British Empire. It examines the recruitment and control of coolies and seafarers, their social and regional composition, wages, itineraries, work, voyages, as well as patterns of resistance. This volume also explores the importance of Indian labour in the context of European merchant shipping. It provides a detailed account of development of shipping industry and economic life in the subcontinent-ship owners and their organizations, voyages and destinations, private intermediaries, city and port life, industrial and commercial centres, and colonial economic policies. The author also evaluates the position of India in the world economy in the period of late capitalism and high imperialism, interweaving the mutually reinforcing contexts of colonialism and globalization. This book will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of modern Indian history, labour studies, and economics.

History 2 or 2 B? Capital Narratives for Asia and Asian Narratives for Capital

Naturalizing a global ‘world of capitalist totality’ serves as a modality for normalizing global processes of capital accumulation. However ‘global’ remains a project evinced in specific forms of cultural action and practices. This preliminary article juxtaposes two vastly separated spheres of global economy and society that are rarely considered together. The haute sphere of a crisis ridden global financial system increasingly sees its salvation in mobilizing and disposing of the ‘surpluses of the Orient’ in a manner that speeds up global capital accumulation. In this light the financial crisis and the enhanced global role and aspirations of Asian states, in particular China and India, may lead to compromises in the ways both states have articulated local, national and global accumulation processes to one another, and mediated their impact on marginalized domestic social groups. Historians have traditionally misrecognized struggles of subordinated social groups to resist surrendering their claims to capital or resist proletarianization. It has now become more important than ever to revisit these struggles and their redoubts to uncover cultural and political actions for grounding the ‘global’, and the practices, idioms and relationships of resistance to them.

Developing the state of a nation in a post-colonial world

Remarking on the failure of most state-making efforts in early modern Europe, Charles Tilly noted more than 30 years ago that the ‘disproportionate distribution of success and failure puts us in the unpleasant situation of dealing with an experience in which most of the cases are negative, while only the positive cases are well documented’. A decade later, a well-known volume of essays on state and economic development, which appeared in the background of speculations about the ‘disappearance’ of the state in the wake of alleged ‘globalisation’, populated the spread between supposed success and failure in contemporary state-building with a range of possibilities deriving essentially from relations between states, societies and transnational actors.

Book Reviews : CLAUDE MARKOVITS, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 327

relations and institutions originating in Europe: direct and portfolio investment, European enterprise, associated laws of property and contract and forms of business organisation, and the normative practices associated with them. Non-western businesses and practices, their adaptations to new challenges and opportunities, their transmission of skills, capital and trade to other regions of the world, and their promotion of new networks of trade and enterprise have seldom attracted comparable levels of attention. In part, this is because debates about global historical processes focus on outcomes rather than on underlying processes and the institutional settings in which they are played out. Of singular significance here is the creation of a two-tiered international economic system comprising a hccute sphere whose institutions and agents mobilise and allocate capital efficiently, and a base sphere where both are absent and which is transformed and harnessed by the capital and enterprise of European agencies. Even if the two-tiered structure cap-