Everywhere a market: Rethinking embedded exchange in modern India

Abstract

All societies embody various forms of exchange. In South Asia, different mechanisms, including economic markets, have long engaged buyers and sellers in transactions involving goods and services for money or other goods and services. This assessment of Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction begins by briefly rehearsing Karl Polanyi’s formative ideas about the workings of precapitalist and capitalist economies. Although only a few of its 13 chapters explicitly reference Polanyi, his insights about embedded exchange represent a significant point of departure for the entire volume, as they often have for scholars in anthropology, economic sociology, geography, history, and even economics (at least those associated with institutional economics). All the essays in Rethinking Markets build on arguments about the intersections of economy and society that hark back to Polanyi’s seminal writings in the 1940s and 1950s about the market principle being foundational to the economic organization of modern society. For much of human history, transactions were largely negotiated through institutions and practices that he terms ‘reciprocity’ and ‘redistribution’. These modes of exchange predominated until the ‘great transformation’ ushered in by the Industrial Revolution led to the rise of a capitalist economy in the nineteenth century, first in Britain and Europe and subsequently in other world regions. Thereafter, the primary mode of economic integration was through a market economy whose participants behaved seemingly in accord with what Adam Smith and neoclassical economists assume to be an inherent human propensity to ‘truck, barter,