Tagung "Informal and Everyday Markets. Histories of Business and Entrepeneurship in India since the 19th century" in Göttingen vom 18. bis 20. Juni 2014

In June 1014, scholars from nine countries met in Göttingen to discuss how informal and everyday markets were constituted in India's economic history.


Einen Tagungsbericht von Sebastian Schwecke bei H-Soz-u-Kult finden Sie hier.


Conference Program


Opening remarks (Ingo Köhler, Göttingen)

Opening Remarks given by Ingo Köhler
From the left to the right: Ingo Köhler (Göttingen), Sadan Jha (Surat), Nishpriha Thakur (Surat), Jan Logemann (Göttingen).

Panel 1: Informality, Trust and Risk: Finance and Speculation

Chair: Jan Logemann, Göttingen

Ritu Birla (Toronto): The Informal, Illicit and Complicit: Speculation, the Futures Contract, and Genealogies of Neoliberal Governmentality

Sadan Jha and Nishpriha Thakur (Surat): Ethnography of Trust and History as Circulating Commodities in Chauta Bazar, Surat

Sebastian Schwecke (Göttingen): A "Tangled Jungle of Disorderly Transactions"? Informality and Trust in Quotidian Finance in Late Colonial and Present-day Banaras

Claude Markovits (Paris): South Asian Business Networks and Informal Markets - Reflections around an Equation

Lecture by Claude Markovits
From the left to the right: Claude Markovits (Paris), Ravi Ahuja (Göttingen), Sebastian Schwecke (Göttingen).

Die Zuhörer in der Paulinerkirche
The Audience in the Paulinerkirche.


Panel 2: Regulating the Informal

Chair: Ravi Ahuja, Göttingen

Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (Calcutta): Paving the Informal: The Archives of Street Vending in Postcolonial Calcutta

Sujeet George (Calcutta): Negotiating Multiple Languages of Trade: Regularizing the Salt Markets in the Bombay Presidency

Koyel Lahiri (New Delhi): The Politics of Hawking: A Reading of the Hawker Sangram Committee, Calcutta

Panel 3: Shapes and Sites of Informal Markets

Chair: Christina Lubinski, Kopenhagen

Saumyashree Ghosh (Calcutta): The Making of the mokam: Relations of Exchange in Railway Trading Marts, Bengal c.1870-1914

Anwesha Ghosh (Toronto): The Making of New Market: A Constitutive Paradox

Lucy Norris (Berlin): Secondhand Clothing Markets in India: An Anthropological Perspective on Exchange and the Transformation of Value

Panel 4: Local Capitalism: Clusters and Institutions of Small-Scale Business

Chair: Sebastian Schwecke, Göttingen

Suresh Bhagavatula (Bangalore): Recent Entrepreneurial History of Handloom Industry in Andhra Pradesh (1970-2013)

Yugank Goyal (Rotterdam): Understanding Trade Credit Institutions in Small Businesses: History and Sociology of the Informal Footwear Industry in Agra

Stefan Tetzlaff (Göttingen): Owner-Drivers Surveyed and Reformed: Life-Worlds and Business Activities of a Prominent Social Figure in Interwar India

Key note: Douglas Haynes (Dartmouth): Viewing Small-Scale Textile Producers through the Prism of Business and Labour History: Everyday Markets and Relations of Production in Western India, 1900-1960


Panel 5: Informality in Long-distance Trading Networks

Chair: Joachim Ahrens, Göttingen

Torsten Tschacher (Göttingen): Money-Making is Their Prime Concern: Markets, Mobility, and Matrimony among South Indian Muslims in Colonial Southeast Asia

Nisha Mary Mathew (Johannesburg): Migration, Smuggling and a Transnational Economy in the Making. Dubai's Indian Contexts of Urbanization

Informal and Everyday Markets - Day 3

Panel 6: Selling Modernity or Embedment of Goods and Consumer Identity

Chair: Ingo Köhler, Göttingen

V. Kalyan Shankar and Prof. Rohini Sahni (Pune): From "Black and White" To "Color" and the Grey Areas in Between: The Evolution of Local Markets for Television Sets in an Indian City, 1975-2010

Jason Petrulis (New York): From Temple Tonsure to Woman's Wig: Making Indian Hair Markets in the 1960s

Barbara Harriss-White: Local Capitalism and the Foodgrains Economy in Northern Tamil Nadu, 1973-2013 (Oxford)


Panel 7: Into the Global South. Foreign Agents in South Asia

Chair: Douglas Haynes, Dartmouth

Christina Lubinski (Copenhagen): On Race and Recruiting Practices in Foreign Firms in India: The Case of German Multinationals before 1947

Raman Mahadevan (Chennai): Wrangling over the Colonial Indian Market: The Untold Story of German Commercial Presence between the Wars

Panel 7
From the left to the right: Christina Lubinski (Copenhagen), Douglas Haynes (Dartmouth), Raman Mahadevan (Chennai).