Published on Reviews in History (https://reviews.history.ac.uk ) Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India Review Number: 892 Publish date: Thursday, 1 April, 2010 Author: Ritu Birla ISBN: 9780822342687 Date of Publication: 2009 Price: £16.99 Pages: 360pp. Publisher: Duke University Press Place of Publication: Durham, NC Reviewer: G Balachandran Historical and anthropological encounters between culture and capital are conventionally staged in India, as elsewhere in Asia and parts of Europe such as Italy, as encounters between relationships and practices defined as cultural, and some set of definitional meanings, logics, institutions, and practices associated with capitalism and the market. Though few serious scholars now view ‘culture’ as ever fully formed, fixed, or unchanging, the modular stability of the relationships that are understood to constitute culture, and its habitations, meanings, deployments, and boundaries, have largely remained unshaken. This stability mirrors in turn the stability of the ‘economy’ as a domain of reason and calculation whose constitution and structure obey capital’s compelling logic. In recent years the economy’s seeming given-ness has been challenged in different ways by anthropologists, critical philosophers, and postcolonial theorists, all however emphasising what Susan Buck-Morss enunciates as its logical significance as a ‘fundament of collective life’ attendant on the constitution of the market as the ‘null point of the social community’. Stages of Capital astutely picks its way through ‘culture’ and ‘community’ to map their mobile redoubts, expressions, relationships, power arrangements and boundaries in relation to the correlative constitution of the market as an object of regulation and governance, and to trace the mutual yet incomplete ‘disembedding’, as it were, of ‘market’ and ‘culture’. The raft of fiscal and business legislation passed in colonial India between c.1870 and 1920 provides the historical archive for this work. Pertaining to taxation, succession, commercial and securities transactions, ‘company affairs’, and charities and charitable donations, these laws represented an assertion of colonial sovereignty and its will for dominance over indigenous political and social geographies of exchange characterized by more plural and layered sovereignty arrangements. Ideological and cultural sites for ‘staging capital as modernity’, the new laws also aimed to produce the ‘economic agent’ as a subject of colonial governance. Embedded in kinship-based forms of commerce and enterprise, this likely agent ranged across spaces the new laws sought to carve up and constitute as public, viz. the market which was framed as a legitimate object of sovereign regulation to assure the free circulation of capital, and private, viewed as capital’s dark hole and the refuge where ‘culture’ found expression. Producing the economic agent, standardizing market norms and practices, and resolving fluid and informal liability obligations into contractually enforceable lien