Community Origins of Industrial Development in Pre-Independence India

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• Bishnupriya Gupta (University of Warwick)
• Tuesday 07 May 2019, 17:00-18:30
• Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge: the Green Room.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Gareth Austin.

The paper is available for reading in advance: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/402-2019_gupta.pdf

Authors: Bishnupriya Gupta, Dilip Mookherjee, Kaivan Munshi and Mario Sanclement. Warwick Working Paper 2019.

Abstract: We argue that community networks played an important role in the emergence of Indian entrepreneurship in the early stages of the cotton textile and jute textile industries in the late 19th and early 20th century respectively, overcoming the lack of market institutions and government support. From business registers, we construct a yearly panel dataset of entrepreneurs in these two industries. We find no evidence that entry is affected by prior trading experience or price shocks in the corresponding upstream sector. Firm directors exhibited a high degree of clustering of entrepreneurs by community. The dynamics of entry is consistent with a model of network-based dynamics.

This talk is part of the Global Economic History Seminar series.

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• Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge: the Green Room
• Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge: the Green Room

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