The Worldmaking of Mobile Vernacular Capitalists: Tracing Entanglements Between Race, Caste and Capital

Abstract

This article traces the colonially inscribed spread of global capitalism through the lives and legacies of mobile vernacular capitalists in the Indian Ocean during the early-to-mid 20th century, centring the merchant-turned-industrialist-and-philanthropist Nanji Kalidas Mehta. Turning to a figure that shaped and challenged the infrastructures and outcomes of empire, but advanced forms of hierarchical differentiation – between capital and labour, and across race and caste – this article makes two interventions. First, it complicates literature on worldmaking by highlighting a figure in a register distinctive from the ‘progressive’ internationalisms associated with Bandung. Second, it reveals entanglements between race, caste and capital, illuminating how local hierarchies have been incorporated into differentiating logics of colonial capitalism. Considering sites, subjects and categories beyond an Atlantic frame lends to more capacious understandings of racial capitalism while challenging readings of caste as a subcontinent-bounded, feudal residue. This ultimately presents a more complex picture of global hierarchies shaping the (post)colonial present.