Provincializing the history of speculation from colonial South Asia

This article proposes that South Asia has produced rich histories of economic practices understood variously as hoarding, speculation, and extortion. This essay frames the discussion of speculation in South Asian history along these three axes. First, it puts the term speculation under scrutiny to look at its changing meanings within the colonial and metropolitan context in order to assess how the term enters the colonial archive of law and finance. Especially, it looks at how the colonial officials created and sustained (mis)translations between indigenous practices and Anglo‐European categories of economic crimes. Second, it looks at the early scholarship on 18th and 19th century indigenous commercial practices that were coded as hoarding, speculating, profiteering, hedging, and squeezing in an attempt to rescue the colonial bazaar and what has been called its “inside history” alongside the development of market practices. This body of scholarship remains primarily focused on trading activities under the Mughals and East India Company. In the third and final section, we turn to the recent histories that have returned to vernacular commercial practices and the historical roots of India's market society to raise critical questions about how speculation and calculation shaped late colonial capitalism and governmentality