India’s Market Society: Three Essays in Political Economy

Barbara Harriss-White’s work breaks new ground in showing how non-market and non-state institutions shape India’s market society. She focuses on markets for land, labour and essential commodities in small town economies to show the vitality of caste and ‘religious pluralism’ (among other factors) in their functioning. Far from being vestiges of an earlier era, she argues that both caste and religion are being reworked in the contemporary era to ensure the subservience of small town economies to the interests of big capital and imperialist globalisation. The linkages between small town economies and the workings of capital come alive in her analysis. She examines the ground realities of the markets which form the building blocks of Indian capitalism and the attendant crisis of democracy and the deprivations the people.