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Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace. By SUDIPTA SEN. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. iv, 225 pp. $37.50 (cloth).
Sudipta Sen's monograph on the history of marketplaces in Bengal and parts of Northern India during the eighteenth century seeks, on the one hand, to associate the politics of colonial knowledge with the study of marketplaces and, secondly, to explore the "interface between political economy and culture" (p. 7) in the precolonial and early colonial period. It also attempts to offer a cultural explanation of the NawabEast India Company conflict in eighteenth-century Bengal.
By far the most impressive aspects of this book lie in its successful exploration of the close connections between marketplaces and the broader social/political fabric of nawabi Bengal, as well as the cultural meanings inherent in commercial practices and in certain articles of trade. The best example here is constituted by the explanation of how the symbolic connection of salt with loyalty, and of betelnut with hospitality, sheds light on why the right to trade in these commodities was fiercely guarded by the nawabs and granted only as special...