The Social Life of Commercial Trust

The Social Life of Commercial Trust: Comparative historical perspectives from Asia, Africa and Europe, 1600-1950

The proposed research network intends to raise new questions to explore the social dimensions of commercial practice that has generally been compartmentalised into histories of European power and Asian backwardness in the high noon of imperialism in the 19^th century, or of Asian resilience and its subsequent economic miracle in the latter half of the twentieth century. While these frameworks of power and dependency, of centre and periphery have been productive and generated a considerable volume of scholarship, several omissions remain. In very broad terms, the focus area wishes to think innovatively not merely about the idea and languages of trust but also about concrete tools and devices that operated in the societies that we will review and where there were established traditions and mercantile and commercial practices that facilitated models and relations of reciprocity. 

Main Convenors: Lakshmi Subramanian, The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and Yannick Lemarchand, University of Nantes

The proposed research network intends to raise new questions to explore the social dimensions of commercial practice that has generally been compartmentalised into histories of European power and Asian backwardness in the high noon of imperialism in the 19^th century, or of Asian resilience and its subsequent economic miracle in the latter half of the twentieth century. While these frameworks of power and dependency, of centre and periphery have been productive and generated a considerable volume of scholarship, several omissions remain. For instance, we know relatively little about the social life of commercial practice, the rationale behind emerging protocols and processes, or indeed even normative attributes and assertions of rationality and reciprocity.  More recently, we have significant writings on merchant networks and their organisation, their investment in certain discrete practices loosely subsumed under the category of trust, on economies of obligation and service, and also on the close links between religion and commercial practice.

Reconciling the idea of reciprocity with the urge to profit is at the heart of all commercial enterprise, especially when oriented to the idea of gain and value in a market situation. This is however by no mean antithetical to trust and reciprocity even if the modalities appear to be challenging. The question that we can then start off with is how one maintains trust and reciprocity in an exchange between two or more partners where the idea is to benefit by the transaction. Grappling with this question has begun to generate a rich and productive conversation between the disciplines of economic anthropology, history and even institutional economics to try and make sense of how trade worked, flourished amidst strangers, occasionally broke down amidst shared kinship groups and engaged with intrusions of state institution in a variety of ways. Exploring the social life of what recently has been called ‘trusted conjunctions’ is at the heart of this project that hopes to ask new questions that remain relevant at a time the so called opposition between the informal/ anti-modern and formal/rational gets redrawn, when different models of exchange and business practice, of remittance and circulation persist going beyond law and legal sanctions and when non-European business enterprise models warrant sociological explanations. The idea is to invite ideas and develop them in the form of seminars/workshops on commercial practices and their specific technologies of accounting and book keeping, of subsequent business and management histories in the context of international protocols and processes, all of which would ideally serve as a launching pad for generating further question, or for identifying co-collaborators to develop a research project and or to come up with a joint paper. The network is not intended to come up with predictable or conventional results - if in fact it is able to contest received wisdom and suggest a new and fresh paradigm it will consider its work done.

In very broad terms, the network wishes to think innovatively not merely about the idea and languages of trust but also about concrete tools and devices that operated in the societies that we will review and where there were established traditions and mercantile and commercial practices that facilitated models and relations of reciprocity. These features however, do not figure in standard understanding of business and enterprise, partly because of the ways in which colonial knowledge reconstructed and reconstituted non-European mercantile behaviour as treacherous, unreliable and dishonest and partly because of the eclipse of Asian enterprise in the so called formal sector. And yet given that the informal sector in so many parts of the world not only worked and operated in the high-noon of imperialism, controlled and operated the intermediate market or the bazaar and represented themselves in terms of trust, credit worthiness and reputation, and continue to bolster world trade and remittance amidst asymmetries of power and benefit, it would seem somewhat incongruous to overlook those principles and dynamics that informed earlier commercial and business operations that hinged on vital practices of  accounts keeping that were complicated with more than one aspect, risk sharing and commercial mediation.  For instance, there were in many cases, two facets to accounting; accounting or counting , i.e.one,  registering transactions, credits and debts as a guide and reference tool for one’s own use, and the other as accountancy, i.e. rendering accounts to partners: commercial partners (buyers, sellers), risk sharing partners and capital providers etc. Studying this on a cross-cultural and comparative perspective could yield important insights both into the emergence of modern accountancy as an academic discipline yoked to governmentality and also into the workings of the sector that remained outside the formal trading sector.  The network intends to focus on practices of reciprocity and calculative rationality through a historical lens from the early modern period between the early seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, the period of formal colonial rule and that of decolonization, when the so called informal sector in several societies accounts for a vast proportion of commercial and manufacturing activity.

The Inaugural Workshop of the Focus Area "The Social Life of Commercial Trust: Comparative Historical Perspectives from Asia, Africa and Europe, 1600-1950", will take place at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study.

The conveners are Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences) and Prof. Yannick Lemarchand (University of Nantes).

The first and inaugural IEARN workshop (February 2018) on The Social Life of commercial trust: Comparative historical perspectives from Asia, Aria and Europe, 1600-1950 set a useful platform to probe new questions and approaches for understanding the salience and workings of trust as a conceptual device and as a practice in commercial transactions in the early modern and modern period. The importance of connected history approaches that emphasize the dense web of linkages between large areas of the world, the role of law stressed by the key note speaker Maria Fusaro was balanced by the relevance of regional approaches to economic experiences. The range of presentations on merchant networks, legal regimes across Asia, Africa and Europe helped revisit the larger question of capitalism in the singular, on the nature of sources and archives and on shared methodologies for studying trans-national business entities through the conceptual lens of trust and reciprocity. The group agreed that the next workshop could take the questions further and add to the existing palette, concerns about law and custom especially in the context of trust breakdown and deficit, focusing on actual concepts and technologies of trust like accounting for example.

It is with this intention that the second of the IEARN workshops is being planned around the theme Technologies of trust: Law, Custom and Procedure in historical and comparative perspective

Participants

• BARTOLOMEI ARNAUD, Associate Professor, University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis (France)
• CISSÉ CHIKOUNA, Associate Professor, University of Cocody-Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire)
• FRAAS MITCH, Curator, University of Pennsylvania, Kislak Center for Special collections (USA)
• FUSARO MARIA, Professor in Early Modern Social and Economy History, University of Exeter (UK)
• GERVAIS PIERRE, Professor, University Sorbonne-Nouvelle Paris 3 (France)
• HASAN FARHAT, Professor of History, University of Delhi (India)
• LEMARCHAND YANNICK, Professor Emeritus, University of Nantes (France)
• LEVI SCOTT, Associate Professor, Ohio State University (USA)
• MAHADEVAN RAMAN, Independent Researcher, Chennai and Bangalore (India)
• MARTIN MARINA, Research Fellow, University of Frankfurt (Germany) (indisposed)
• MATRINGE NADIA, Associate Researcher, LSE (UK) - ENS Paris (France)
• MCWATTERS CHERYL, Professor, University of Ottawa (Canada)
• SENGUPTA SANTANU, Assistant Professor, doctoral student, Calcutta University and CSSSC (India)
• SUBRAMANIAN LAKSHMI, Professor, CSSSC, Calcutta (India)

Second Workshop - Mumbai on 08-09 January 2020

The Second Workshop of the Focus Area "The Social Life of Commercial Trust: Comparative Historical Perspectives from Asia, Africa and Europe, 1600-1950", will take place at the Godrej Archives, Mumbai on 08-09 January 2020.

The workshop will revolve around : "Technologies of trust: Law, Custom and Procedure in historical and comparative perspective"

The conveners are Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences) and Prof. Yannick Lemarchand (University of Nantes).

Writing trust into the history of capitalism(s): histories of Asia, Africa and Europe in a comparative perspective.

In keeping with the larger mandate of the network, the proposed workshop hopes to bring together scholars working on the histories of capital and circulation in Eurasia, Africa and the Indian Ocean to revisit the idea of trust and its usefulness as a heuristic concept. While the first two workshops under the IEARN network focused on the discourse and practices and technologies of trust while remaining mindful of their limits, this workshop addresses the broader subject of capitalism in the plural and how societies, especially colonized underwent transition to achieve their version of commercial and industrial development wherein, law, property relations, community networks and custom worked in unexpected ways to create the necessary pre-conditions. 

The workshop will invite scholars to revisit the theme of the stages in the transition to capitalism and to debate on its local manifestations and to synthesize the existing state of the art on networks of trust and the workings of law to be able to provoke new questions and assumptions. These are expected to cover not just the older debate on law versus custom but to ask the larger question about capitalism being a universal given in the early modern period when especially in South Asia trust protocols confronted both aggressive military fiscalism from states as well as from the new ideology of European corporations and trading companies. The impact of the latter and of the new regulatory apparatus of the imperial system will form the other major focus so as to engage with the conceptual significance and potential of a category such as vernacular capitalism. The workshop hopes to continue with the productive conversation across societies, to write Africa and Asia more substantively in the history of capitalism so as to be able to develop a genuinely connected histories approach to the problematic of capitalism, its antecedents, manifestations and after-life.  

Sessions:

1. Capitalism in the plural: Reflections on vernacular capitalism
2. Law, Custom and trading networks: Europe, Asia and Africa
3. Recent trends in historiography on Oceans: comparing Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds
4. Recap session: On the IEARN network, a panel discussion

Participants

Scholars

• Santanu SENGUPTA, Assistant professor, Calcutta University, India
• Farhat HASAN, Professor, University of Delhi, India
• Scott LEVI, Professor, Ohio State University, USA
• Rusheed WADIA
• Lewis WADE, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Exeter, United Kingdom
• Jérôme SGARD, Professor, CERI, SciencesPo Paris, France
• Pierre GERVAIS, Professor, University Paris 3, France
• Cisse CHIKOUNA, Associate professor, University of Cocody, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire
• Ritu BIRLA, Associate professor, University of Toronto, Canada
• Ghulam NADRI, Professor, Director of Asian Studies Center, Georgia State University, USA
• Shweta BANERJEE, Vanier Doctoral Scholar, University of Toronto, Canada
• Meghna CHOWDHURY
• Najaf HAIDAR, Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
• Sudev SHETT