SAST 3559 |
Business and Banking in South Asia: The Cultures that Produced Gold, Cotton, Rice, Debt
Geeta Patel
W 3:00 - 5:30 PM
New Cabell Hall 542
South Asia, the region which stretches from Afghanistan to Burma and down to Sri Lanka, has been the center of thousands of years of trade and finance. At the heart of networks that stretched from Europe through central Asia to the Americas, South Asians moved gold, textiles, agricultural products and credit. In this course, which is the first of a two semester new course offering, we will investigate the early history of this vast flow through the following: the highlights of the history of business and banking, trade and finance from about 1500 B.C to the early European merchant adventurers, the worlds and cultures that were implicated in that history, and some of the theoretical questions that help us understand how business and banking worked. We will read secondary sources that include writing by Amiya Bagchi, Kalyan Sanyal, K.N. Chaudhuri, Ashin Das Gupta, Engseng Ho, Irfan Habib, Ranabir Chakravarty supplemented by some primary materials when appropriate such as letters, literary texts, travel narratives, government documents, archeological objects as. Topics will encompass: Indian Ocean travelers, Roman trade with India, Marwari mercantile communities, religious constituencies at the center of networks such as Buddhist merchants and groups associated with Hindu temples, Banjara carters, Armenian traders, Jewish families, Hadrami Muslim families whose networks stretched from the Middle East into South East Asia, pirates, petty traders during the Mughal period, crafts, agriculture, coolies and shipping communities, labor, textile exchanges, spice trade and the evolution of instruments such as hundis (promissory credit, debt and commodity notes) that permitted the movement of capital over long distances and times.
In this course we will ask a series of questions. Some of these help us come to grips with practices of business and banking, the technologies entailed in them (the who, what, where, when and why) and some of these are larger questions that enable us to understand how to envision these practices in their manifold formations.
What comes under business, what was business – selling, trading, exchange, barter, production, labor, equity collection, promissory notes, specie accumulation, debt acquisition? Who were the kinds of figures involved – peddlars, craftsmen, merchants, rulers, priests, pirates, money lenders, financiers, families, collectives who shared interests, networks, collectives who imagined themselves through stories from a single event or place, people who shared trust or distrust? Where did these practices take place, what sorts of places were involved – regions, markets, local entrepots, ports, towns, informal meeting places versus regularized stopping points, temples, oceans, routes, homes, ships, armies, compounds, street corners, fields, in pockets, nowhere? What was involved – objects, goods, equity, promises, trust/distrust, cash/kind, notes, formalized economies, informal agreements, legal notes, legislated transactions, debts, gifts, work, agricultural produce? How do we grapple with the question of time in engagements that entail business and banking: do we think in terms of the duration of transactions, the relationship between past and future involved in single or multiple transactions? Do we think in terms of the timelines that help us see what these practices might be? How do national histories of earlier periods transform what we see of those periods, the timelines or places or figures that play into understanding business and banking? What theoretical vantage points or ideas are deployed by those who write about these issues? |
