SAST 166-401/HIST 156-401 is a course on the history of Indian business taught by Professor Faisal Chaudhry. It will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3-4:30pm in Williams Hall 215. The course will examine Indian business from ancient to modern times by considering the interactions between entrepreneurialism, labor, and collective power. It will analyze business as both a means of private accumulation and a phenomenon shaped by broader social and political forces. Students will complete reaction papers and a final exam essay. Grades will be based on class participation, the papers, and the take-home exam.

1. SAST 166-401/HIST 156-401
Time: TR 3-4:30pm; Loc: Williams Hall 215
Instructor: Faisal Chaudhry
faisalc@sas.upenn.edu, 215-898-6048
Office Hours: W 2-3, R 430-530pm, Williams 809
A History of Indian Business
Course Description: With annual growth rates between
5-10 percent for much of the last fifteen years, it may
seem that the turn of the millennium has marked a
fundamental shift in the state of Indian business. Yet
stories also abound about the dark side of India’s recent
“shining” where matters such as distributional justice and
the fate of social strata like the urban poor and agrarian
subalterns are concerned. Moreover, broader regional
and international forces continue to affect the business
climate in a manner that constantly reminds us that
independent India today remains linked in complex ways
to historical India, which lacked any absolutely clear cut
geographical correlate, blending across its ostensible
‘borders’ over land and sea…(cont.)
For more information see
https://canvas.upenn.edu/courses/1311108

2. SAST-166: A History of Indian Business
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…Course Description continued
How then should we think of the history of Indian business? In what ways is such a
history different from or the same as the economic history of the South Asian
subcontinent, its borderlands, and the broader oceanic worlds it was long connected
to? Can isolating something to call business in the past illuminate what we now
reflexively assume to be the financial, commercial, and industrial operations of
business in the present?
Moving from ancient to modern times in South Asia, in this course we will consider
these and other questions by tracing the interactions between the three-fold forces of
entrepreneurialism, labor, and collective power (whether based in the structures of
society or state)—considered as the underlying conditions of business activity’s
possibility. At the same time, given the increasingly unique character of post-fifteenth
century life the world over (in the age of ‘capitalism’), we must additionally see that
business was a phenomenon unified by more than just these preconditions.
Consequently, we will also consider the unity of business from a functional
standpoint—by considering it as a means for the (private) accumulation of surplus,
especially in the form of money, under the ever-present legal-institutional backdrop
comprising the ‘modern(izing market) economy.’ It will be necessary to thus keep in
mind that business activity in history is always shaped by broader social and political
forces, with the individual desire for accumulation itself only more or less balanced
against the needs and desires of the larger community.
By looking at specific topics ranging from merchants and their bills of exchange in
South Asia’s antiquity to the impacts of colonial rule in the 19th
-century to the
contemporary fervor over economic liberalization the course will be a history of the
past as well as a history of the present.
Readings and Required Texts
Readings will be posted in the “Course Modules” section of the course website (at
https://canvas.upenn.edu/courses/1311108 ), generally becoming available for each
subsequent week after the previous Thursday’s lecture. As the bracketed readings in
the schedule of topics listed below suggest, the assigned readings in the current
version of the syllabus are subject to change as the semester progresses. So
remember to check for an updated version of the assignment and syllabus in the
appropriate parts of the canvas website.
There is only one required text for the class, which is available for purchase at the

3. SAST-166: A History of Indian Business
3
Penn Book Center.
-Roy, Tirthankar. India in the World Economy: From Antiquity to the Present. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Additionally, in the last two units of the class we will also be reading (selections from)
seven Harvard Business School Case Studies.
-If not otherwise made available, these can be purchased for approximately $8-10
each at https://hbr.org/store/case-studies.
Assignments and Grading
Grades for the course will be based on 3 components of 30-40% each. These are as
follows:
30% Class Attendance and Informed Participation
30% 5 Reaction Papers to readings (3-4 pages each, 6% each)
40% Take Home Final Exam Essay (10-12 pages)
Course Policies
Attendance and Participation: As a course intended for inquisitive students, it will be
more participatory than a traditional lecture even if still more lecture-based than a
seminar. Therefore, in addition to reading and attendance, it is important that
students come to class in the spirit of engaging in scholarly dialogue about the topics
and materials we will be covering. (More than one unexcused/undocumented
absences will result in your overall mark being docked a half-grade. For more
information on attendance policies and the mechanisms that exist to report
anticipated absences that can be excused see http://www.college.upenn.edu/class-
attendance.)
Written Work: Students are required to submit all assignments at the start of each
lecture on the day of which they due. Late submissions will result in the deduction of
a half letter grade for each day the assignment is late. For example, if an assignment
is not handed in at the start of whatever given lecture session when it is due, the first
deduction will mean that otherwise A- work can score, at best, only a B+. Should you
have a documented excuse for being unable to hand in an assignment please be sure
to contact the teaching staff about this as soon as possible so that an appropriate
alternative can be can worked out. Urgent medical or family emergencies and
religious holidays will be accommodated, though here as well you should mention

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such dates in advance.
Plagiarism and Violations of Academic Integrity: Students should be sure to read the
University’s code of student conduct, especially its section on violations of academic
integrity and plagiarism. Plagiarism, which is the unacknowledged use of the ideas or
works of another on a paper, is something that will be taken very seriously and that
will not be tolerated. (Also see: http://www.upenn.edu/academicintegrity/.) It will
result in an automatic failing grade for the assignment as well as the possibility that
you will face larger consequences from higher administrative censure by the
appropriate office at the University.
Schedule of Topics
I. Preliminaries
0. 1/14: Course introduction: What is Business History? What is India?
-Patrick Friedson, “Business History and History,” in Geoffrey Jones & Jonathan Zeitlin,
eds.,The Oxford Handbook of Business History (2009), 9-31.
-Immanuel Wallerstein, “Does India Exist,” The Essential Wallerstein (2000), 310-314.
1. 1/19: The Factors of Production: Land. Labor. Capital. Entrepreneurship?
-Naomi R. Lamoreaux et al., “Economic Theory and Business History” in Jones & Zeitlin,
OHBH, 37-57, 67-73.
Imre Szeman, “Entrepreneurship as the New Common Sense,” South Atlantic
Quarterly, 114: 3 (July 2015), pp. 471-85.
2. 1/21: Dichotomies as Old as Time? Private/Public, Individual/Collective,
Market/State, Economy/Culture…
-Michael E. Smith, “The Archaeology of Ancient State Economies,” Annual Review of
Anthropology, 33 (2004), 73-94.
-David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), 21-42, 43-71.
(A 15 minute interview of some of the ideas covered in these two chapters is available
at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05447pc )
3. 1/26: Economic Geographies of South Asia: Between Land and Ocean
-Dharma Kumar and Tapan Raychaudhuri, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of
India, Vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge, 1981), 1-23.
-Phillipe Beaujard, “The Worlds of the Indian Ocean,” in Michael Pearson, ed., Trade,
Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World (Palgrave 2015), 15-25.

5. SAST-166: A History of Indian Business
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-*Multimedia Source: Review the Timemap of South Asia at
http://www.timemaps.com/history/south-asia-30bc to get a sense of the progression of
settlement and state structures up to the year 1000. Do the same for the time map that
brings you easterly across the Indian Ocean toward Southeast Asia
http://www.timemaps.com/history/south-east-asia-3500bc
II. South Asian Political Economies from the Antique to the Late ‘Medieval’
4. 1/28: ‘Business’ Opportunity through the First Millenium AD: The Emergence
of Surplus, Social Structure, and Commerce
*Primary Source: Look at brief selections from the Arthashastra (Penguin ed.
Rangarajan Tr.), 178-82, 233-40, 254-59.
-Romila Thapar, “Surplus and the Soul,” History of Religions, 33: 4 (May 1994), 305-324.
-[D. D. Kosambi, “The Basis of Ancient Indian History (I),”Journal of the American
Oriental Society, 75: 1 (Jan. - Mar. 1955), 35-45.]
-Tirthankar Roy, India in the World Economy: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge
2012), 20-49.
************************Reaction Paper 1 is Due on Class 5****************************
5. 2/2: ‘Business’ Opportunity Until the Coming of Europe: The Consolidation of
Landed Imperium and Blossoming of the Indian Ocean Trade
-Roy, India in the World Economy, 50-77.
-K.N. Chaudhuri, “The Unity and Disunity of Indian Ocean History from the Rise of Islam
to 1750: The Outline of a Theory and Historical Discourse,” Journal of World History,
Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 1-21. Read: pp. 1- top of 5, bottom of 7-8, bottom of
18-22.
*Primary Source: Look at photos and selected translation of temple inscriptions
concerning Tamil Merchants operating in Chola country, SE Asia and China (c. 800-
1200 AD) (excerpted form Risha Lee, “Constructing Community: Tamil Merchant
Temples in India and China, 850-1281,” Columbia University: Unpublished PhD
Dissertation (2012).
**Multimedia Source: Review rest of Timemaps of South and Southeast Asia and
through c. 1600 at http://www.timemaps.com/history/south-asia-1215ad and at
http://www.timemaps.com/history/south-east-asia-1215ad ; and for Middle East from
750-1600 at http://www.timemaps.com/history/middle-east-979ad

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III. Debating: Early Modern Asia and the Business of ‘Capitalism’
6. 2/4: Class Formation and New Modes of Production (The West, not the Rest)
-T.H. Aston & C.H.E. Phillips, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and
Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (2002 [1985]), vii-viii, 1-9.
-Irfan Habib, “Potentialities of Capitalistic Development in the Economy of Mughal
India,” The Journal of Economic History, 29: 1 (Mar., 1969), 32-50, [51-61], 62-78.
7. 2/9: Ideas & Institutions (From Max Weber to Douglass North)
-Douglass North and Robert Paul Thomas, “An Economic Theory of the Growth of the
Western World,” The Economic History Review, New Series, 23: 1 (Apr., 1970), 1-17.
-Morris D. Morris, “Values as an Obstacle to Economic Growth in South Asia: An
Historical Survey,” The Journal of Economic History, 27: 4 (Dec., 1967), 588-607.
*Primary Source: Look at Examples of Pre-Colonial Indic/Indo-Islamic Economic
‘Rationality’: Mahajani Merchant Writing and Ain-i-Akbari Taxation Tables
8. 2/11: World Systems and Late Divergences (Asia Before Europe?)
-Immanuel Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Duke 2004), 23-41.
-Andre Gunder Frank, “India in the World Economy, 1400-1750,” Economic and
Political Weekly, 31: 30 (Jul. 27, 1996), 50-64.
IV. (Transitions to) Colonialism and the Genesis of ‘Modern’ Business
9. 2/16: Business Groups in the 18th
Century Transition to Colonial Rule:
Companies, Continuity and Collaboration
-[R.B. Ekelund, R.D. Tollison, "The Mercantilist Origins of the Corporation,” Bell Journal
of Economics, 11 (1980), 2, 715-720]
-David Washbrook, “India in the Early Modern World Economy: Modes of Production,
Reproduction and Exchange,” Journal of Global History, 2:1 (2007), 87-111.
-Roy, India in the World Economy, 111-122.
-[Lakshmi Subramanian, “A trial in Transition: Courts, Merchants and Identities in
Western India, circa 1800,” Indian Economic Social History Review 41: 3 (2004), 269-
291.]
*************************Reaction Paper 2 is Due on Class 10**************************
10.2/18: Sovereignty in Transition: c. 1757-1857

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-Douglas M. Peers, “Gunpowder Empires and the Garrison State: Modernity, Hybridity,
and the Political Economy of Colonial India, circa 1750-1860,” Comparative Studies of
South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27: 2 (2007), 245-258.
-Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the
Colonial Marketplace (1998), [1-18], 60-88.
11.2/23: Entrepreneurialism in Transition: c.1757-1857
-Dwijdendra Tripathi, The Oxford History of Indian Business (2004), pp. 28-58.
-C.A. Bayly, “The Age of Hiatus: The North Indian Economy and Society, 1830-50,” in
C.H. Philips & Mary D. Wainwright, eds., Indian Society and the Beginnings of
Modernisation, c. 1830-1850 (1976), 83-101.
12.2/25: Labor in Transition: c.1757-1857
- Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the Eighteenth
Century: Britain and South India, “Past & Present, 158 (Feb., 1998), 79-109.
-Paul Baak, “About Enslaved Ex-Slaves, Uncaptured Contract Coolies and Unfreed
Freedmen: Some notes about ‘Free’ and ‘Unfree’ Labour…in Southwest India…”
Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1999), pp. 121-157, but read only 121-34.
[-Roy, India in the World Economy, pp. 142-146, 157 (section on “Labor Migration” &
“Conclusion”).]
13.3/1: Entrepreneurialism in the Era of High Colonialism: 1857-1947
-Roy, India in the World Economy, 158-75, 181-97 (ch. 6 until section on “labor”; and
ch. 7 until section on “Science and Technology”).
-Harish Damodaran, India’s New Capitalists: Case, Business, and Industry in a Modern
Nation (Palgrave 2008), 1-5, 8-23.
14.3/3: Sovereignty in the Era of High Colonialism: 1857-1947
-Manu Goswami, “From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial
South Asia, 1870 to 1907,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40: 4. (Oct.,
1998), 609-632.
-Roy, India in the World Economy, 210-23 (ch. 8 in its entirety)
*Primary Source: Dadabhai Naoroji, Excerpt on “The Benefits of British Rule” (1871).
********* 3/3 Evening Film Screening: Amol Palekar’s Paheli (1977)**********

8. SAST-166: A History of Indian Business
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3 / 5 – 3 / 1 3 : N O C L A S S - S P R I N G B R E A K
************************Reaction Paper 3 is Due on Class 15***************************
15.3/15: Labor in the Era of High Colonialism: 1857-1947
-Sugata Bose, “Ch. 5: Resistance and Consciousness?” in Peasant Labour and Colonial
Capital: Rural Bengal Since 1770 (Cambridge 1986), 140-80.
-Roy, India in the World Economy, 175-180.
16.3/17: Business, Class, and Caste (1): Social Stratification and the Control of
Money, Surplus, and Collective Power Before Independence
-Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics, 1931-1939: The Indigenous
Capitalist Class and the Rise of the National Congress (Cambridge 1985), 101-127,
179-189.
*Primary Source: Brief Excerpts from 1944-45’s A Brief Memorandum Outlining a Plan
of Economic Development for India (the so-called “Bombay Plan” authored by a group
of Bombay-based industrialists prior to independence).
V. Business in the Age of Post-Colonial ‘Developmentalism’ and State-Led
Growth Strategies
17. 3/22: Business and the Developmentalist State: License Raj or Laying Ground?
-Roy, India in the World Economy , 224-237.
- James Cypher & James Dietz, The Process of Economic Development, 3rd ed.
(2008), [127-32], 140-64.
- Amartya Sen, “Indian Development: Lessons and Non-Lessons,” Daedalus, 118: 4,
(Fall, 1989), 369-389.
18.3/24: Business, Class, and Caste (2): Social Stratification and the Control of
Money, Surplus, and Collective Power in the Age of Socialism and Planning
-Paul Brass, ed., Routledge Handbook of South Asian Politics: India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal (2010), 55-59.
-Francine Frankel, India’s Political Economy: 1947-2004 (Oxford 2005), 17-27, 63-71,
74, 99-101, 109-111, 125-126, 129-130, 156-157.
-Damodaran, India’s New Capitalists, 23-41.
19.3/29: Case Study 1 (on the Big Infrastructure Sector): Power Supply

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-Harvard Business School (HBS) Case Study: Deepa Mani, Geetika Shah & Revati Nehru,
“IT-Led Business Transformation at Reliance Energy,” June 13, 2013.
- Mohua Mukherjee, Private Participation in the Indian Power Sector: Lessons from Two
Decades of Experience (World Bank Group 2014), 1-8, 12-16. You can find a pdf of the
full report at http://www-
wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2014/10/09/000442464_20141009104537/Rendered/PDF/911590PUB0Box3
033900EPI02103390Oct2.pdf
- Press/Web Clippings: State of Odisha as Model of Reform: look at Indian Express
article http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/setback-for-reliance-infrastructure-orissa-power-
regulator-cancels-distribution-licence-of-anil-ambanis-company/ and also look at some of the
players in the energy market by surveying these websites
http://www.gridco.co.in/View/Home.aspx & http://www.rinfra.com/home.html
- Navroz K. Dubash and Sudhir Chella Rajan, “Power Politics: Process of Power Sector
Reform in India,” Economic and Political Weekly, 36: 35 (Sep. 1-7, 2001), pp. 3367-
3374.
-D. Parameswara Sharma, et al. “Performance of Indian Power Sector during a Decade
under restructuring: a Critique,” Energy Policy, 33: 4 (March 2005), 563–576.
20.3/31: Case Study 2 (on ‘Maturing’ the Domestic Market through the Retail
Sector): Agricultural Produce
-HBS Case Study: Sourav Mukherji, Milena Mueller, and Kunal Basu, “Reliance Retail:
Creating Social Value through Banana Supply Chain,” June 1, 2013.
-Press /Web Clippings on the Liberalization of the Retail Trade in Agricultural Produce
- http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/11/indian-retail
- http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/nov/29/india-needs-
foreign-owned-supermarkets
- http://macroscan.org/cur/dec11/cur121211Multinational_Retail.htm
- P. S. Vijay Shankar,” Four Decades of Agricultural Development in MP: An Agro-
Ecological Sub-Region Approach,” Economic and Political Weekly, 40: 48 (Nov. 26 -
Dec. 2, 2005), 5014-5024.
************************Reaction Paper 4 is Due on Class 21***************************
21.4/5: Case Study 3 (on the Finished Goods Sector): Textiles and ISI vs. Export
Led Growth
-HBS Case Study: V.G. Narayanan, Namrata Arora, and Vidhya Muthuram, “Nalli Silk
Sarees (A),” July 9, 2012.
- Dipak Mazumdar, “Import-Substituting Industrialization and Protection of the Small-
scale: The Indian Experience in the Textile Industry,” World Development, 19: 9 (Sep.
1991), 1197–1213.
- Meenu Tewari, “Is Price and Cost Competitiveness Enough for Apparel Firms to Gain

10. SAST-166: A History of Indian Business
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Market Share in the World after Quotas? A Review,” Global Economy Journal, 6: 4 (Nov.
2006), 1-8, 33-39 only.
******************Film Screening: Mani Ratnam’s Guru (2007)*****************
VI. Business in the Era of Liberalization and Contemporary Globalization
22.4/7: Business and the Neoliberal State: Growth through Market Reform or
Upward Redistribution?
-Roy, India in the World Economy, 238-253.
-Kalim Siddiqui, “Growth and Crisis in India’s Political Economy from 1991 to 2013,”
International Journal of Social and Economic Research, 4: 2 (2014), 84-99.
-Press Clippings on the Amartya Sen-Jagdish Bhagwati Controversy (A Clash Between
Two Leading Economists Concerning the Indian Economy)
23.4/12: Business, Class, and Caste (3): Social Stratification and the Control of
Money, Surplus, and Collective Power in the Age of ‘Globalization’
-Tarun Khanna, Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping their
Future and Yours (Harvard 2007), 1-21, 26.
- Lakshmi Iyer, Tarun Khanna, and Ashutosh Varshney, "Caste and Entrepreneurship in
India," Economic & Political Weekly 48: 6 (February 9, 2013): 52–60.
24.4/14: Case Study 4 (on the FIRE Sector): Real Estate Finance and Hot Money
Flows
-HBS Case Study: Stephen R. Foerster & Marc Folch, “Cadim: The China and India Real
Estate Market Entry Decisions,” Jan. 22, 2009.
-Graeme Newell and Rajeev Kamineni, “The Significance and Performance of Real
Estate Markets in India,” Journal of Real Estate Portfolio Management , 13: 2 (2007),
161-172.
- Llerena Guiu Searle, “Conflict and Commensuration: Contested Market Making in
India's Private Real Estate Development Sector,” International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, 38: 1 (Jan. 2014), 60–76.
-Jan Nijman, “Mumbai's Mysterious Middle Class,” International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, 30: 4 (Dec. 2006), 758-773.

11. SAST-166: A History of Indian Business
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25.4/19: Case Study 5 (on the New Services Sector): Healthcare Access & Delivery
-HBS Case Study: Amitava Chattopadhyay, et al., “Arogya Parivar: Novartis' BOP
Strategy for Healthcare in Rural India,” October 27, 2014.
-Mark Esposito, Amit Kapoor & Sandeep Goyal, “Enabling Healthcare Services for the
Rural and Semi-Urban Segments in India: When Shared Value Meets the Bottom of the
Pyramid,” Corporate Governance: The International Journal of Business in Society, Vol.
12, No. 4 (2012), pp. 514-27.
- David H. Peters and V.R. Muraleedharan, “Regulating India's Health Services: To what
end? What future?,” Social Science & Medicine, 66: 10 (May 2008), 2133-2142.
-Shantayanan Devarajan and Shekhar Shah, “Making Services Work for India's Poor,”
Economic and Political Weekly, 39: 9 (Feb. 28 - Mar. 5, 2004), 907-919.
*************************Reaction Paper 5 is Due on Class 26**************************
26.4/21: Case Study 6 (on Innovation, Comparative Advantage and Constraint in
the High End Manufacturing Sector): Automobiles
-David Bailey, et al., “Global Restructuring and the Auto-Industry,” Cambridge Journal
of Regions, Economy and Society,” 3:3 (2010), 311-318.
-HBS Case Studies: Rajkumar Venkatesan & Shea Gibbs, “The Tata Nano: The People’s
Care (Abridged),” July 5, 2013; Arpita Agnihotri & Saurabh Bhattacharya “The Tata
Nano: What Went Wrong?,” Nov. 11, 2015.
-Mahuya Pal, “Organization at the margins: Subaltern resistance of Singur,” Human
Relations, pre-print doi: 10.1177/0018726715589797 (Oct. 2015), 1-17.
27.4/26: Case Study 7 (on the Informal Sector): Approaches to Organizing the
‘Unorganized’/Invisible Economy
-HBS Case Study: Sourav Mukherji, Caren Rodrigues & Sridhar Pabbisetty, “LabourNet:
Empowering Informal Sector Labourers,” March 1, 2012.
-Barbara Harriss-White, “India’s Informal Economy Facing the Twentieth-Century,” in
Kaushik Basu, ed., India’s Emerging Economy: Performance and Prospects in the 1990s
and Beyond (MIT 2004), 265-285.
-T. M. Thomas Isaac, Richard W. Franke & Pyaralal Raghavan, Democracy at Work in an
Indian Industrial Cooperative: The Story of Kerala Dinesh Beedi (Cornell 1998), 1-21.
********************Final Exam Essay is Due on May 10 by 5pm***********************