Indian Capitalism from the Field

This session of the webinar series will feature Prof. Barbara Harriss-White. She is the Emeritus Professor of Development Studies, Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College , Oxford University and a Visiting professor at JNU.

Abstract

While Polanyi argued that a society dominated by market exchange – market society – was a dehumanised contradiction in terms, both Marxist and neo-classical economics have modelled the logics of capitalism and of markets in pure terms. But pure markets and capitalism only exist in the forms of these models. Much effort has been expended on analysing ‘actually existing’ capitalism and ‘real’ markets which are found to be suffused with the institutions/ structures/ relations/politics which provide historical character. How have field studies help us to cope with the tensions between the general and the specific? This lecture will offer some reflections on this question.

Speaker's Bio

Barbara Harriss-White is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies, Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College , Oxford University and a Visiting professor at JNU. Since 1969 when she drove from Cambridge to New Delhi, she has studied aspects of the Indian economy through fieldwork – on agriculture and its markets, on many dimensions of deprivation, on small town India, latterly on the economy as a waste-producing system and on the state.

She has published widely : latest books/special issues (2016) Middle India And Urban-Rural Development: Four Decades Of Change (New Delhi, Springer); (2019) (with Lucia Michelutti) The Wild East: Criminal Political Economies In South Asia (London, University College London Press – open access; (2020) (with Ajay Gandhi, Douglas Haynes and Sebastian Schwecke) Rethinking Markets In Modern India, (CUP); (2021) (with Sukhpal Singh and Lakwinder Singh, Agricultural Market Reforms And Farmer Protests In India In The Context Of Agrarian Crisis In South Asia (Millennial Asia Special Issue 12(3)).

She supervised 40 PhDs and 40 post docs, directed Oxford’s Queen Elizabeth House and was founder-director of Oxford’s Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme. Restricted during the covid years, she has been active in Teachers against the Climate Crisis, a group of university teachers working out of Delhi.

Format

Prof. Barbara Harriss-White will be speaking for the first 45 minutes. We will then be holding a Q&A Session.

This session is part of the larger project:

Season II Dissecting Capitalism: Its past, present and future

This series aims to explore the tenets of capitalism over the fabric of time and examine its influence on the global economy and social classes.

More information on Season I