We describe a unique institution used by 19th century Indian guilds to raise funds: The guild members agreed that on a particular day all but one of their shops would be shut. An auction would be held to determine which one shop would remain open, and the winning bid would go to the guild funds....

The East India Company’s conquest of various territories in India typically brought one issue to the forefront right away: How would land taxes, the principal source of governmental revenue, be collected? But taxation was not a thing unto itself; it was inextricably linked with “ownership”...

Contemporary historians usually attribute the East India Company's military success in India to its military strength, and to the mutual distrust of Indian regimes. We argue these explanations, though correct, are incomplete. The credibility of the Company's commitments, even though imperfect,...

Trade and export, it is argued, spur economic growth. This paper studies the microeconomics of exporting. We build a heuristic model of transactions between exporters and producers and relate it to East India Company operations in colonial Bengal. Our model and the historical record stress two...