The Incomplete Transition: Stunted Industrialisation and the Historical Development of India's Big Business Class

In many parts of the world, industrialisation has been an outcome of their capitalist development, with profit seeking capitalists serving as its agents. Differences in the characters of this class of agents, shaped by their origins and their mutual interaction with actual industrialisation processes, however, characterise different stories of capitalist development. This paper explores this theme in relation to Indian capitalism – examining how the colonial origins of the Indian industrial capitalist class imparted to it a specific character and the limited extent to which that legacy could be overcome by the subsequent relatively restricted industrialisation process. The case of the Reliance group is used to fortify and illustrate the argument.