The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947

The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947. By Claude Markovits. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xv + 327. Tables, maps, appendices, glossary, index. Cloth, $64.95. ISBN 0-521-62285-9.

Reviewed by Pradeep Barua

The title of this book, The Global World of Indian Merchants is misleading, as it is essentially a study of the Hindu Sindhi diaspora from Hyderabad and Shikarpur (both now part of Pakistan). Claude Markovits contends that his aim in writing the book is to dispel the "unitary notion" of the South Asian diaspora by demonstrating that South Asian migrants belonged to different social classes in the Subcontinent and followed different occupations. He also holds that these differences or identities were closely linked with their region and locality of origin. By extension, Markovits considers that the study of such migrant communities must move beyond even the regional level to the "subregional, microregional or even the local level" because that is where the identities of the migrants were defined. He believes that by concentrating on localities he can show how Sindhi merchants, from Hyderabad and Shikarpur, were able to establish themselves in a European-dominated world economy.

Has he succeeded? The answer would have to be partially. The problem is the lack of documentation from the families themselves. Instead, Markovits concentrates his analysis on two previously unexplored sources of official records, which he uncovered in the India Office Library: those of the British consular courts in Egypt and the records of the India Office concerning the Shikarpuri merchants who died in Russian Central Asia. However, these documents are still part of the same government archives that Markovits criticizes other scholars for relying upon exclusively. Whereas the newly uncovered documents do shed more light on the nature of the Sindhi merchant communities in Egypt and Central Asia, the author's reliance on them undercuts his own dictum regarding the superiority of local sources to official ones. There is a curious absence of local archival material from Hyderabad and Shikarpur, which may have offered a rich source of information about the merchants' origins. The author could have profitably supplemented his scrutiny of British consular records by examining the records of local governments in areas settled by the exile communities.

The book is divided into three sections, beginning with a discussion of the evolution of the two Sindhi trading networks and continuing with the history of these networks from the mid-nineteenth to the midtwentieth centuries. The third section, which examines the general characteristics of the two networks from a structural perspective, reveals a glaring discontinuity in the work, as the author undertakes only a cursory and token discussion of gender and problems of the communities"sexual economy."

This book will appeal to a specialized readership with an interest in the Sindhi merchant community, but it has less to offer those seeking a larger understanding of the South Asian diaspora.

Pradeep Barua is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is the author of the book The Army Officer Corps and Military Modernization in Later Colonial India (1999), and his current research focuses on the colonial and modern military history of India.