Shedding Light on Capitalism, Islam, and Empire in South Asia

The intersection of community, caste and capitalism is taken as axiomatic when we look at the rise and consolidation of business and entrepreneurship in colonial and postcolonial India. Analyses of Indian economic life have almost always dabbled with the intersections of caste and capital even if these have not provided substantive evidence of how caste as a corporation and capital as a set of practices worked in tandem to deal with volatile markets, state intervention in the form of laws and regulation and shortage of capital that threatened to extinguish enterprise. Michael O’ Sullivan’s No Birds of Passage does this brilliantly as it tracks the history of three powerful Gujarati Muslim communities—the Khojas, the Memons and the Bohras, and their global trading operations through the 19th and 20th centuries. The work, however, is much more than a history of global trade and businesses, it is simultaneously a history of community formation around commercial practices, legal exceptionalism and religious orientation that he refers to as manifestations of corporate Islam.