Decolonisation, state-formation and 'national' economies
Rethinking post-War economic history
In February 2025, Business History Review published a paper based on my doctoral dissertation, “Visions of Indian Economic Unity on the Eve of Partition”.
I reconstruct how two late colonial Indian companies were confronted with decolonisation of British India, which took the form of the partition of an economy that had ended World War II as one of the tenth industrial producers of the world. Naturally, their business models were keenly impact.
While the cases are curious enough, they point to a major theme of my research, namely that attention to financial history shifts the accepted histories of decolonisation and accepted histories of post-colonial nation-states.
In the interest of furthering a discussion that is (and was to me, also) disconcerting, I am sharing the documents on which I based my analysis. I found both the announcements as I examined the late colonial financial weekly, Commerce in the NMML archives in Delhi.
Happy to take questions!
