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How did the Tamil merchant become India's first link to the outside world? The tale of the Tamil merchant is a fascinating story of the adventure of commerce in the ancient and early medieval periods in India. The early medieval period saw an economic structure dominated by the rise of powerful Tamil empires under the Pallava and Chola dynasties. This book marks the many significant ways in which the Tamil merchants impacted the political and economic development of south India.
How did the British colonial administration view the Tamil natives? How did the natives, in turn, view the colonial power brokers? Underscoring a transactional rather than one-way reality of colonial politics, The View from Below is a balancing act of scholarship. Kanakalatha Mukund considers the 'attitudes' and 'responses' as dialogic, whereby the colonial state and indigenous society are locked in a fierce but subtle combat for attention and dominance in the Madras region. The Tamil institution upon which Mukund focuses her study for the most part is the temple. Moving further on from this politically crucial and socially focal site, the study covers a number of other related phenomena: the staging of sectarian and caste conflicts aimed to seize the control of the temples; the new social leadership and patterns of patronage; the construction of identity by aspiring elite groups of both parties; and the folk representations of Poligar rebellions. This book will be useful to historians, anthropologists and specialists on South India, and those interested in the history of Madras.
The book focuses on the changes in the trading world of the Tamil merchants in the southern Coromandel region, with the arrival of European trading companies and the concomitant creation of European port enclaves and the rapid expansion of demand for Coromandel cotton textiles. The author uses impressive range of original sources literary, inscriptional and archival to cover a long period of history (beginning with the maritime trade in the Sangam period) to argue that the merchants evolved over the centuries into a distinct class of merchant capitalists with a conscious perception of their identity as an economic and social class.
How did the Tamil merchant become India's first link to the outside world? The tale of the Tamil merchant is a fascinating story of the adventure of commerce in the ancient and early medieval periods in India. The early medieval period saw an economic structure dominated by the rise of powerful Tamil empires under the Pallava and Chola dynasties. This book marks the many significant ways in which the Tamil merchants impacted the political and economic development of south India.
This groundbreaking study examines how the East India Company founded an empire in India at the same time it started losing ground in business. For over 200 years, the Company’s vast business network had spanned Persia, India, China, Indonesia and North America. But in the late 1700s, its career took a dramatic turn, and it ended up being an empire builder. In this fascinating account, Tirthankar Roy reveals how the Company’s trade with India changed it—and how the Company changed Indian business. Fitting together many pieces of a vast jigsaw puzzle, the book explores how politics meshed so closely with the conduct of business then, and what that tells us about doing business now. ‘One of the first major attempts to tell the company’s story from an Indian business perspective’—Financial Express
Using comparative and long-term perspectives the seventeen essays in this collection discuss the development of labor relations and labor migrations in Europe, Asia and the US from the thirteenth century to the present.
It explains the practice of trade and commerce in the Mauryan era, where a monarch was the apex of administration. The Arthashastra was one of the earliest books on the subject of political economy, and explained the art of creating and preserving wealth and other such economic concepts. The ancient book not only holds the views of Chanakya, but also the ideas and thoughts of the learned men of that time. The book also talks about leadership, and puts down the doctrine that a king must practice in his personal life, and while discharging his official duties in order to be an effective ruler. In Arthashastra: The Science of Wealth, the author provides an effective rendering of the original work, stressing on the art of statecraft and wealth generation.
Rationality is one of the basic underlying assumptions of economic behaviour of an individual, firm or industry. Economic theory rests on and takes as its starting point the assumption that each economic producer tries to maximize his individual gain, that profit motivation governs the behaviour of producers . This assumption is more true in explaining the behaviour of the non-agricultural sector of the economies than that of the agricultural sector. Contents: Introduction, Select Review of Literature and Methodology, Agricultural Economy, Regional Imbalances in Agricultural Growth, The Supply Behaviour of Food and Nonfood Crops, Regional Variations in Supply Behaviour of Major Crops, Summary of Findings.
Everyday political business in early modern cities took place under many different sources of tension. De facto establishment of the oligarchy in the government collided with the urban community’s expectations of participation and with the responsibility for common welfare which was supposed to be the guideline for policies in the municipal boards. Urban Elections and Decision-Making in Early Modern Europe offers new interpretations of the governmental techniques applied by urban elites to cope with these tensions. Written by leading historians of urban history and based on a broad foundation of previously unpublished research the volume explores the procedures of decision-making in early modern cities from an international and micrological point of view. It examines the attempts of delegating and stabilising power through elections, asks for the different ways of developing and demonstrating consent or dissent within the cities’ walls—urban revolts included—and offers a new theoretical framework to describe and understand these phenomena adequately.
In 1906, Britain's grip on the world was unassailable. Its navy ruled the seas, and its trade empire spanned the globe. But in the small port town of Tuticorin, a lawyer named V.O. Chidambaram Pillai—known to the world as VOC—had a revolutionary idea that would challenge the might of the empire itself. VOC's plan was audacious: to launch the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company, a venture that would compete head-on with the British India Steam Navigation Company, the shipping giant that controlled the region. To make his dream a reality, he rallied native traders and patriotic citizens, raising the capital needed to launch his daring enterprise. But the company faced a formidable foe: British mercantile interests and the imperial state both backed its competitor, giving it deep pockets and brazen government backing. VOC and his allies would have to defy overwhelming odds to make their venture a success. Swadeshi Steam is a tale of heroism and defiance in the face of colonial oppression. Based on four decades of research in archives around the world, this inspiring saga showcases the power of one individual's vision to ignite a movement.