The Western educated Bengali intelligentsia was the first group of Indians to collaborate closely with the colonial regime in the governance of the country. As middle-ranking to minor functionaries they were to be found in all parts of the British territories from Burma to the North-western Frontier and as far south as the southernmost tip of the Madras Presidency. No other linguistic cultural group in the subcontinent was ever so extensively involved in the functioning of the Raj – Bengali professionals, doctors, teachers, journalists, lawyers and the like, also followed the flag to all parts of the Indian empire and later beyond its limits and were thus among the direct beneficiaries of Pax Britannica. The economic basis of their livelihood was a direct or indirect product of the colonial state. This was even more true of the new class of landed proprietors with their rights guaranteed by the Permanent Settlement. And then there were those who had collaborated with the Company and its servants in their commercial ventures and, in the process, founded some of the great fortunes of nineteenth-century Calcutta. As is well-known, these varied social groups were not mutually exclusive. Besides, their direct or indirect dependence on the colonial order created a basis for cohesion and a shared social ideology. For a long time that ideology was marked by an almost unqualified gratitude and admiration for the British empire and its creators

‘Given the circumstances facing Indonesian governments in the years 1950–57’, a standard history of Indonesia comments, ‘it is not surprising that the democratic experiment foundered, for there were few foundations upon which representative democracy could be built. Indonesia inherited from the Dutch and Japanese the traditions, assumptions and legal structure ofa police state. The Indonesian masses – mostly illiterate, poor, accustomed to authoritarian and paternalistic rule, and spread over an enormous archipelago – were hardly in a position to force politicians in Jakarta to account for their performance. The politically informed were only a tiny layer of urban society and the Jakarta politicians, while proclaiming their democratic ideals, were mostly elitists and selfconscious participants in a new urban superculture. They were paternalistic towards those less fortunate than themselves and sometimes simply snobbish towards those who, for instance, could not speak fluent Dutch. They had little commitment to the grass-roots structure of representative government and managed to postpone elections for five more years. A plant as rare as representative democracy can hardly grow in such soil.’

Among Third World countries, India stands out as having one of the most developed ‘big business sectors’, with a recent tendency by some firms to go multinational. This notwithstanding the fact that the public sector plays a major role in the Indian economy. Although the origins of some of India's business groups go back to pre-colonial times, most of them trace their beginnings to the 1850–1950 period, the ‘second colonial century’, during which India underwent a limited process of industrial growth as well as became a major exporter of some agricultural commodities to the world market (tea, jute, cotton, oilseeds, and, prior to 1910, opium and indigo). There are obvious parallels there with the developments in some Latin American countries, particularly Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Colombia, which also emerged as major suppliers of raw materials (coffee, sugar, wheat, nonferrous metals) while they built up manufacturing sectors of various magnitudes (with Brazil in the lead). However, the private business sector in these countries presents a picture which differs in many ways from the Indian case. It seems worth attempting a comparison between those two very different underdeveloped regions of the world, the Indian subcontinent and Latin America, in the hope of being able to put the Indian case in a broader perspective. Given the broad similarity in the constraints under which capitalist enterprise laboured in those two areas, a study of the differences in entrepreneurial responses might bring to light certain specificities in Indian entrepreneurial history which often go unnoticed.

A marked feature of the business and industrial élites of post-colonial India and Indonesia is the dominance within them of minority communities. An Indian government commission in 1965 reported that, of the top 75 business houses which controlled almost half of the non-governmental, non-banking assets in the country, Marwari houses occupied the apex with control of Rs 7.5 billion in assets, followed by the Parsis with Rs 4.7 billion and Gujaratis with Rs 3.8 billion. By 1980 the Parsi Tata group represented the largest industrial house in India, followed by the Marwari Birlas. In Indonesia it is the Chinese who overwhelmingly comprise the business and industrial ĺite. Despite problems with quantifiable data, it has been assessed that the Chinese own, at the very least, 70–75% of Indonesia's private domestic capital and that Chinese business conglomerates such as the Liem and Astra groups dominate medium and large-scale corporate capital.

About ten years ago Deepak Nayyar, an Indian economist, lamented on the sluggishness of industrial growth in India, which at the time had persisted for more than ten years, since the rate of industrial growth dropped sharply from an average annual rate of 7.7% during the period 1951–1965 to an average rate of only 3.6% during the decade 1965–1975. Seven years later, at a conference on industrialisation in East and Southeast Asia held at the Australian National University, Canberra, Professor Deepak Lai, a distinguished Indian economist teaching at University College, London, and a consultant to the World Bank, expressed a similar disappointment, describing the absolute level of industrialisation in India as well its contribution to per capita growth as disappointing, even dismal compared with the rapid industrial growth of the four East Asian newly-industrialising countries (NICs), namely South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Early modern Luso-Brazilian history is in a rut; and nowhere is that rut more evident than for the period between the late seventeenth century and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the period of the Brazilian gold rush. The mineral strikes made a profound impact on Portugal's society and economy: in both what changed and what remained the same. Yet surprisingly, this era remains one of the least studied periods in Portuguese history. There is not, for example, even a modern biography of Dom Joao V, whose forty-five-year reign encompassed the gold rush's most glittering moments. In what follows I will argue that several widespread perceptions of the lack of sources for early modern Luso-Brazilian history are incorrect and in need of substantial revision; and further that some traditional explanations of eighteenth-century economic history have been based on inadequate research more dependent upon ideology than sound scholarship.