Book Reviews : CLAUDE MARKOVITS, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 327

Abstract

relations and institutions originating in Europe: direct and portfolio investment, European enterprise, associated laws of property and contract and forms of business organisation, and the normative practices associated with them. Non-western businesses and practices, their adaptations to new challenges and opportunities, their transmission of skills, capital and trade to other regions of the world, and their promotion of new networks of trade and enterprise have seldom attracted comparable levels of attention. In part, this is because debates about global historical processes focus on outcomes rather than on underlying processes and the institutional settings in which they are played out. Of singular significance here is the creation of a two-tiered international economic system comprising a hccute sphere whose institutions and agents mobilise and allocate capital efficiently, and a base sphere where both are absent and which is transformed and harnessed by the capital and enterprise of European agencies. Even if the two-tiered structure cap-