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Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs: Indian Business in the Colonial Era . By Markovits Claude . Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan , 2008. Pp. xii + 292. ISBN 10: 0230205984 ; 13: 9780230205987.
After the positive implementation of liberal economic policy at the beginning of the 1990s, India enhanced its rate of economic growth from 3.2 percent (annual average from 1965 to 1981) and 4.8 percent (in 1981-1988) to 6.3 percent (in 1988-2006).1This accelerated rate of growth was attained largely by revitalizing activity in the private sector by merchants, traders and entrepreneurs. The revival of such activity meant, for example, that the share of gross domestic investment by the private sector to the gross domestic product increased from 10.3 percent in 1980 and 14.7 percent in 1990 to 23.4 percent in 2004.2
Despite the recent increase in activity, we have only a limited amount of research focusing on the historical role played by such merchants, traders and individual entrepreneurs in modern South Asia. Merchant, Traders, Entrepreneurs: Indian Business in the Colonial Era by Claude Markovits, a distinguished specialist in the history of the mercantile and entrepreneurial world of South Asia, is a collection of the author's recent fruitful attempts to fill this gap.
The book is organized in three parts, each of which consists of several chapters written between 1981 and 2003 on the Indian mercantile and entrepreneurial world during the colonial period. Most chapters in these three parts supplement or extend arguments in two of the author's previous books: Indian Business and Nationalist Politics, 1931-1939: the Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party, published by Cambridge University Press in 1985, and The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama, from the same publisher, in 2000. Thus, Merchants, Trader, Entrepreneurs, on the one hand, gives us a good summary of his arguments in these two books, and, on the other, strengthens the arguments he constructed there.
The first part, "Business and Politics", deals with the relationship between business interests and political nationalism - a theme that Markovits described in detail in Indian Business and Nationalist Politics. In that book, he established that...