Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry: How Capitalist Legitimacy Shaped Foreign Investment Policy in India
By Jason Jackson, associate professor in political economy and urban planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Harvard University Press · 2025
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, 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 characterized by a straightforward preference for domestic over foreign capital.
From Summer 2026 recommended reading from MIT (MIT News). Cover image via Google Books.
- Argumentation: The Key Concepts · Edward Schiappa, 2026
- Constructing Economic Nationalisms in Brazil and India · Jason Jackson, 2026
- The Handbook of Social Protection: Evidence and New Directions for Low- and Middle-Income Countries · Benjamin A. Olken, 2026
- The People Can Fly: American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time · Joshua Bennett, 2026
- American Independence in verse · Brad Skow, 2025
- Retrench, Defend, Compete: Securing America's Future Against a Rising China · Charles L. Glaser, 2025
- Rwanda's Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty · Delia Wendel, 2025
- The Colony and the Company: Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble · Malick W. Ghachem, 2025