Description
Barbara Harriss-White’s work breaks new ground in showing how non-market and non-state institutions shape India’s market society. She focuses on markets for land, labour and essential commodities in small town economies to show the vitality of caste and ‘religious pluralism’ (among other factors) in their functioning. Far from being vestiges of an earlier era, she argues that both caste and religion are being reworked in the contemporary era to ensure the subservience of small town economies to the interests of big capital and imperialist globalisation. The linkages between small town economies and the workings of Capital come alive in her analysis. She examines the ground realities of the markets which form the building blocks of Indian capitalism and the attendant crisis of democracy and the deprivations of the people.
CONTENTS
- Preamble
- Market Romanticism and India’s Regulative Order
- Caste‑Corporatist Capitalism : Civil Society and Accumulation (with Elisabetta Basile)
- India’s Religions and the Economy
Barbara Harriss-White
Barbara Harriss-White has been Professor of Development Studies at Queen Elizabeth House and Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford University, UK. Since 1969 she has researched agrarian change in South Asia through field studies of villages, small town economies and markets. In recent years her focus has been on dalits in Indian economy, on which she has lectured and initiated workshops both in India and in England.
She has authored 14 books, edited 10 books, 11 major reports (research consultancies), 122 chapters in books, 3 encyclopedia, 53 papers in journals, 35 working papers. Her well-known books are ‘India Working: Essays in Society and Economy’; Rural India Facing the 21st Century; Outcaste from Welfare: Adult Disability in Rural South India.
Her other interests include environment and climate change.
