Mughals to Ambanis: The roots of India Inc

In popular imagination, Reliance represents the starting point for big business in India, with Dhirubhai Ambani the man who showed Indians the way to make money. Lakshmi Subramanian’s new book India Before The Ambanis seeks to dispel that notion by stretching the timelines deep into the 16th century and offering a smorgasbord of people, stories and situations from the pre-Ambani era. In a 1963 essay, Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth-Century Indian Economic History, published in The Journal of Economic History, Morris D. Morris writes: “The neglect of India’s economic history, particularly the period 1800-1947, is one of the most distressing gaps… Not only is ignorance of Indian economic behaviour over time disturbing in itself, but the attempts at planning since 1947 have suffered because of this. Its premise is straightforward—if the essence of business is knowing how to make money, and accumulate and redeploy it for social and commercial gain, there was enough evidence of this in the India of the 17th century with travel writers like John Fryer noting the Bania’s ability to do so. Future writers, continuing Subramanian’s scholarship of business history studied as a subject in itself, can pick from the many trailing themes of the book.