How Indian enterprise evolved: From bazaars to the Reliance empire

Lakshmi Subramanian's book provides a sweeping view of Indian business history, from pre-modern trade to corporate giants like Reliance, highlighting entrepreneurs and industrial evolution

India Before the Ambanis: A History of Indian Business, Money and Economy

Author: Lakshmi Subramanian

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Pages: xxvi +250

Price: Rs 699

  India has had a long tradition of recorded business — covering the bazaars, foreign trade, transformation of merchants to entrepreneurs, building of a fairly substantial modern industrial sector in the late colonial period, the role of entrepreneurial groups such as the Parsis, Gujaratis, Marwaris, Chettiars and Tamil Brahmins, creation of new business organisations and hierarchies, expansion into new industries after Independence, and mastering the licence-control raj to create major business groups such as Reliance.

 

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