Capital interrupted: agrarian development and the politics of work in India

This book questions the most fundamental assumptions of capitalism. Gidwani rethinks the formation and consolidation of two massive givens of social existence today: capitalism and development. In the process, he unsettles established understandings of value, rationality, class, and the relationship of capital and history. The central Gujarat region of western India is home to the entrepreneurial landowning Patel caste, who have leveraged their rural dominance to become a powerful global diaspora of merchants, businessmen, industrialists, and professionals. Investigating the Patels intriguing ascent over time, Vinay Gidwani analyzes its broad implications for the nature of labour and capital, and how they take on different forms in different places around the world. Global capitalism, Gidwani argues, is not a seamless economic entity based on the smooth, consistent operation of underlying laws, but rather a composition of contingent and interrupted logics stitched together into the appearance of a deus ex machina. Following this line of thinking, he points to ways in which political economy might be freed of its lingering Eurocentrism; raises questions about the adequacy of postcolonial studies uptake of Marx and capitalism; and opens the possibility of situating capitalism as a geographically uneven social formation in which different normative or value-creating practices are imperfectly sutured in ways that enable profit and accumulation, but which could equally impair them. Theoretically astute and empirically rigorous, Capital, Interrupted recasts encrusted notions of staple human science concepts such as hegemony, governmentality, caste, and agency, and, ultimately, does nothing less than rethink the very constitution of capitalism.