Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T04:24:43.407Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘After Shaking his Hand, Start Counting your Fingers’: Trust and Images in Indian Business Networks, East Africa 1900-2000

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

Gijsbert Oonk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In this study, I examine how ‘ethnic’ trading networks are created and recreated, but may also fracture and fall apart. This occurred among some Indian groups in East Africa, who initially strengthened their economic and cultural ties with India by maintaining intensive trade relations and taking brides from the homeland. However, after just one generation, their economic focus was on East Africa, Japan and the UK. Many of today's well-off Indian businessmen in East Africa show little economic interest in India. In fact, Gujarati businessmen in East Africa created new, rather negative images of their counterparts in Gujarat. During the last century, their overall image of Indians in India was transformed from one of a ‘reliable family or community members’ to one of ‘unreliable, corrupt and, untrustworthy ‘others’.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , November 2004 , pp. 70 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bibliography of Works Cited

Honey, M., A History of Indian Merchant Capital (PhD thesis, University of Dar es Salaam, 1982).Google Scholar
Sheriff, A., The Rise of a Commercial Empire (PhD thesis, London School of Economics, 1971).Google Scholar
Bagchi, A.K., Private Investment in India, 1900–1939 (Oxford, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bannerjee, D., Colonialism in Action: Trade Development and Dependence in Late Colonial India (London, 2000).Google Scholar
Burton, R., Zanzibar: City Island and Coast Vol. 1 (London, 1872).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, R., Global Diasporas. An Introduction (London, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dobbin, C., Asian Entrepreneurial Minorities. Conjoint Communities in the Making of the World-Economy, 1570–1940 (Richmond, 1996).Google Scholar
Gregory, R.G., India and East Africa: A History of Race Relations within the British Empire 1890–1939 (Oxford, 1971).Google Scholar
Gregory, R.G.South Asians in East Africa. An Economic and Social History 1890–1980 (Boulder, 1993).Google Scholar
Gregory, R.G.Quest for Equality. Asian Politics in East Africa 1900–1967 (New Delhi, 1993).Google Scholar
Himbara, D., Kenyan Capitalists, the State, and Development (Nairobi, 1994).Google Scholar
Indian High Level Commission, Report on the Indian Diaspora (Delhi, 2000).Google Scholar
Kotkin, J., Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy (New York, 1992).Google Scholar
Lal, M.C., India's Missed Opportunity with the Non-Resident Indians (Aldershot, 2001).Google Scholar
Mamdani, M., From Citizen to Refugee: Uganda Asians come to Britain (London, 1973).Google Scholar
Markovits, C., The Global World of Indian Merchants 1750–1947. Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oonk, G., Ondernemers in Ontwikkeling. Fabrieken en Fabrikanten in de Indiase Katoenindustrie 1850–1930 [Entrepreneurs in Development. Mills and Mill Owners in the Indian Cotton Textile Industry] (Hilversum, 1998).Google Scholar
Pearce, F.B., Zanzibar, The Island Metropolis of Eastern Africa (London, 1967 [1920]).Google Scholar
Playne, Sommerset, East Africa (British): Its History, People, Commerce, Industries, and Resources (London, 1908/1909).Google Scholar
Ramchandani, R.R., Uganda Asians. The End of an Enterprise (Bombay, 1976).Google Scholar
Tinker, H., Separate and Unequal. India and the Indians in the British Commonwealth 1920–1950 (St. Lucia, 1976).Google Scholar
Tinker, H.The Banyan Tree: Overseas Emigrants from India Pakistan and Bangladesh (Oxford, 1977).Google Scholar
Vertovec, S., The Hindu Diaspora. Comparative Patterns (London, 2000).Google Scholar
Voigt-Graf, C., Asian Communities in Tanzania. A Journey Through Past and Present (Hamburg, 1998).Google Scholar
Butler, Kim D., ‘Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse’, Diaspora 10/1 (2001), 189–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clifford, J., ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology 9 (1994), 302–338.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morris, H.S., ‘The Indian Family in Uganda’, American Anthropologist 61 (1959), 779–789.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honey, M., ‘Asian Industrial Activities in Tanganyika’, Tanzania Notes and Records, 75 (1974), 55–69.Google Scholar
Nagar, R., ‘The South Asian Diaspora in Tanzania: A History Retold’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East', 16/2 (1996), 62–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oonk, G., ‘The Changing Culture of the Hindu Lohana community in East Africa’, Contemporary Asian Studies 13/1 (2004), 7–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudner, D., ‘Banker's Trust and the Culture of Banking among the Nattukottai Chettiars of Colonial South India’, Modern Asian Studies 23/3 (1989), 417–458.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Safran, W., ‘Comparing Diasporas: A Review essay’, Diaspora 8/3 (1999), 255–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schnapper, D., ‘From the Nation-State to the Transnational World: On the Meaning and Usefulness of Diaspora as Concept’, Diaspora 8/3 (1999), 225–254.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tölöyan, K., ‘Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Movement’, Diaspora 5/1 (1996), 3–37.Google Scholar