The Oxford History of Indian Business (review)

Dwijendra Tripathi has provided an invaluable service to scholars and practitioners in business management, history, and social sciences with his book, The Oxford History of Indian Business. Tripathi is considered to be the founder of the field of business history (with an emphasis on all facets of this history including politics, economics, and society) in India. His tenureship at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad led to the adoption of an academic and research program in business history, which remains limited in India. His pioneering efforts through careful application of available historical and archival materials distinguish him as an outstanding academic scholar. Building upon his previous work, his enduring legacy will be this encyclopedic work, which offers great promise to revitalize the lagging field.

The major objectives of this book include the provision of an analytical understanding of the roots of modern business practices in India, identification of forces that shaped the historical evolution, and the continuity and uniqueness of business practices up to the modern period. Tripathi admirably fills the self-identified gap of a comprehensive volume on Indian business history. The approach is microhistorical with a focus on specific historical details and case studies, as well as the integration of material and nonmaterial macro and microforces to understand how they shape business forms and business interactions with the society.

The main focus is on the colonial period and the transition from mercantilism to industrialism that created the Indian brand of business enterprise (and its particular historical evolution) and the socioeconomic, political, and cultural contexts that led to its development. Before British colonization, economic markets were fragmented and plural; there was a lack of political and economic organization, and the focus was exclusively on commercial trade rather than manufacturing. In contrast, European enterprises were larger, with coordinated trading and some manufacturers operating in multiple nations, and organized as joint stock companies. The lack of an Indian industrial business class continued late into the colonial period.

Tripathi's explanation for the lack of a business class and manufacturing orientation centers on the restricted opportunities and operating space allowed for these developments. Poor infrastructure, lack of education and training allowing for the adoption of efficient technologies, and limited size of markets rather than cultural predispositions or imperial exploitation impeded the development of Indian enterprise at competitive scales. Indian business never competed directly against British or other multinational enterprises.

The industrial elite eventually rose, albeit unevenly, in terms of geography and time. This was accompanied by the adoption of the managing agency system. Tripathi has been at the forefront of analyzing this system, unique to India, and its links to social and economic structures. The joint family system, which has been at the heart of India's social structure, has also been critical in determining the nature of its business class. The latter has been dominated by single-families controlled, large, diversified conglomerates, allowing for coordination of internal and external sources of financing.

The full ascendancy of Indian business would have to wait after Independence with the decline of British companies, and to a lesser extent, multinational companies. Tripathi points out that favorable objective conditions developed as unintended consequences of the colonial power's desire to develop India as a market for its goods and to tap its natural resources for their benefit. Of course, as a historian, Tripathi knows that there was no unified India before colonization, and even an indigenous consolidation of power would not have led to the growth of an industrial business base in India.

In an interesting comparison interspersed throughout the book, Tripathi contrasts the case of Japan's industrial business class with India's on the adoption of technology and their relations with governments. The lack of adoption of technology by Indian enterprises due to the enduring colonial mentality is characteristic of Indian business even today. Indian businesses also had limited relations with the colonial government and their role in the development of a postindependent...