Book Talk: Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry: How Capitalist Legitimacy Shaped Foreign Investment Policy in India

When: Thursday, November 6, 2025, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Where:

Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) book talk 

Is foreign capital an agent of economic growth in developing countries or a vehicle of extraction? Examining how Indian elites wrestled with this question in the late colonial and postcolonial periods, Jason Jackson argues that it reflects a false binary. Instead of simply choosing between domestic and foreign capital, Indian policymakers have long considered the business ethics of individual firms. Indian economic nationalism, in other words, has never been characterised by a straightforward preference for domestic over foreign capital.

Jackson demonstrates that Indian policymakers have sought to favour firms that they believe are most likely to advance industrial development and societal progress at home. In particular, official policy and discourse have sought to confer a kind of moral legitimacy on businesses that invest their profits in local professional development and technological innovation—practices deemed synonymous with economic modernisation. Meanwhile, firms seen as simply trading rather than producing, or as engaging in financial speculation and other allegedly regressive activities, have been viewed unfavourably. Jackson argues that these moral categories of capitalist legitimacy have shaped policymaking from the demise of the East India Company and rise of a new class of Indian industrialists in the late nineteenth century; to clashes between companies including Coca-Cola, Thumbs Up, Hero, and Honda in the twentieth; to more recent efforts to centralize political power through controversial market-governance projects.

An incisive look at the contested terms of capitalist self-interest and business ethics, Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry sheds new light on debates over investment policy and state-market relations in a global economy.

The Speaker 

Jason Jackson is Associate Professor of Political Economy and Director of the Political Economy Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Discussants will be Dr Noam Maggor, Dept of History, School of Society and Environment (QMUL) and Professor Tirthankar Roy (LSE)

The Organiser

The seminar, organised by HSS Research Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP), is open to all and free.