Merchants and Colonialism

Merchants and Colonialism is part of the Occasional Papers series circulated by the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. Amiya Bagchi provides a historiographic account of the traditional role of merchants in pre colonial India and identifies how these roles were different from the role of the capitalist in post-colonial India. In general, the behaviour of merchants in precapitalist societies was, according to Bagchi, widely different from that of capitalists in developed capital...