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Partners, Servants, or Entrepreneurs? Banians in the Nineteenth-Century Bengal Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2021

Michael Aldous
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Abstract

Banians acted as intermediaries for European merchants in Bengal. They were highly influential in the eighteenth century but their importance waned thereafter. This article reexamines their role in the nineteenth century and argues that their importance persisted but evolved in response to changes in the Bengal economy and issues of contracting and governance. It shows that the banians remained a nexus between the local and global economies, facilitating a bidirectional transfer of knowledge. They enabled the development of innovative Indian business forms and contributed to the emergence of a diverse ecology of organizational forms and ownership in Bengal at the end of the nineteenth century.

Keywords

Indiaintermediariesorganizational formsknowledgecorporate governance
Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 94 , Issue 4 , Winter 2020 , pp. 675 - 697
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2021

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the anonymous referees and editor Walter Friedman for comments that significantly improved the paper. Similarly, I am grateful to comments from Tirthankar Roy, John Turner, Chris Colvin, members of the Queen's University Centre for Economic History, and participants at the Business History Conference, Annual Meeting 2017, all of which positively shaped the paper.

References

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