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Indian Business History

Can business history, as the history of men (rarely, women) in business, be an autonomous discipline, in the sense that it is separable from the history of the economy (or economies) in which the businessmen operate, the social relations in which they are involved, the attitudes to other people that they come to inherit, nurture or change, or from the political dispensation which regulates their lives or which they aspire to regulate? I do not believe that it can be so separated. At the same time, however, there is room for writing such histories provided that the scholars are careful to specify the political, social and macroeconomic settings in which the target group operates. The close relationship of economic and business history was recognised by the founding fathers of business history, such as the British economic historian Thomas Ashton.1 Ashton did not emphasise the relation between business history and political or even social history, presumably because in the British case, the basic political structures did not change radically after the revolution of 1688, establishing the supremacy of the Parliament as the institution symbolising the power of moneyed landlords, bankers and merchants. In the Indian case, there is a complication that there were basic changes in the political arrangements governing the country between the eighteenth century and 1947, and again another basic change on 15 August 1947. Political and social relations are important for businessmen in respect of access to markets, information, credit, technology and political patronage. Even among some students of economic and business history there is an illiterate belief that capitalism and capitalists have thrived without political patronage. There is, of course, a difference between particularistic patronage and a general bias towards favouring those Review Article