The premise of Mircea Raianu's well-researched book Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism is that the Tata corporation is unique in the history of corporations because it survived through a long history of political economic changes. As Raianu puts it in the introduction, the equivalent of Tata in the United States would be “as though the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers themselves, not simply their modern equivalents, owned Amazon, Apple, and Google.” This anomaly indicates for Raianu that the “creative destruction” at the heart of capitalism's history has “stalled” in India (Raianu, p. 2). Using newly opened corporate archives, the Tata Central Archives in Pune and the Tata Steel Archives in Jamshedpur, which have been purposefully curated by the company itself to project and protect a public image, Raianu navigates both the self-making and the making of India's leading corporation exploring how Tata achieved this unique outcome.
Over the course of six chapters, the first three exploring the period before World War II and the second three the period after World War II through the 1970s in the main, the book explores themes of corporate and business history, control over land and resources, scientific and technocratic expertise and management, and Tata's overseas connections especially with the United States and East Asia. It asks what does the continuity and resilience of Tata over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tell us about the history of capitalism in India? The book is not simply a biography or even hagiography of a particular business entity nor simply a story of entrepreneurial rise and decline. Rather, it tries to disaggregate the unity of what we call Tata, following the way subsidiary entities and sub-corporations at times broke from the whole while at other moments coalescing ultimately into the brand we know today.
The first three chapters explore the period before World War II. The first chapter explores Tata's extraterritorial connections into East Asia and the United States through the cotton and opium trades often with intermediaries like the Marwaris to facilitate expansion. The first chapter's discussion of “becoming swadeshi” struggles to challenge the anachronism of thinking about national vs global operations. Raianu's analysis raises the question repeatedly of whether the Tata firms can be understood as national or global. Given the firm's courting of distant markets and its global financial connections, certainly seeing it as a national entity is misleading – that is a point well taken. But what does it mean to use these categories amidst competing and collaborating nineteenth century imperialisms which were by definition extra-territorial? Following the rise and decline of business fortunes, bank collapses, and so on, the Tatas eventually saved themselves by being flexible, even helping militarily to expand the British Empire by winning a contract “worth Rs. 40 lakhs to supply Sir Robert Napier's expeditionary force, deployed from British India against the ruler of Abyssinia in 1868” (Raianu, p. 22). In other words, although Raianu doesn't highlight this, the Tatas success was never predicated on a clear distinction between political and economic functions. Indeed the grandfather of Jamsetji Tata (born 1839) was a revenue clerk for an Inamdar (landholder) on the island of Salsette (Raianu, p. 20). Political and economic functions were deeply entangled and fueled one another from the beginning. In actuality it is part of a modern state-making exercise to establish legitimacy by separating out sovereign and economic functions, even though they are constantly entangled. That the Tatas would continue to enact quasi-sovereign functions is likely a continuation of this fact rather than its anomalous nature (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1991, Reference Mitchell2002).
The second chapter explores Tata's quasi-sovereign control over land, labor, and resources in the town of Jamshedpur when the TISCO, the Tata Iron and Steel Company Plant, found itself embroiled in everything from town planning to labor regulations to land acquisition, even helping form the colonial regime's ethos toward “the adivasi.” The third chapter explores Tata's charitable activities both as “swadeshi” and apart from swadeshi goals, when the Tata corporate entity cultivated networks of expertise that could display strategic philanthropy.
The second half explores the period after World War II. The fourth chapter looks at how the Tatas survived the transition from late colonialism to early nationalist development. Tata succeeded again through its overseas connections, this time enlisting foreign capital to their benefit once British power had declined, even approaching the World Bank in 1957. The fifth chapter looks at how Tata relied on “scientific expertise” to manage labor uprisings, including urban planners and psychologists. The large industrial strike of 1958 punctuates this chapter but is ultimately resolved through recourse to these measures. The sixth chapter looks at the emergence of Corporate Social Responsibility as the tension of the Indira Gandhi years between big business houses and government regulation came to a head. Overall, we get a story of very fortunate negotiations amidst changes spanning a century.
So how did the Tata Corporation survive and even lead in India in the same period in the United States where sectors and companies changed so very much? Part of the answer lies in the way in which Tata assumed quasi-sovereign functions, or was a state within a state, ultimately even opening its own business archives which is also a state-like function. At an important level, this book is a searching exploration of this boundary between corporate and sovereign functions. This boundary is explored by examining Tata's operations on a whole range between economic planning for a new nation-state to negotiations that undergird its international operations. However, what the book is less of is an exploration of how those boundaries are drawn and to what effect. In other words, we get less of how Tata explained its work to itself as opposed to how it explained itself to external audiences and in doing so how it helped create what we understand today as a distinction between political and economic functions, a distinction that is perhaps useful as an analytic in the disciplines of economics and political science, but a distinction a historian must recognize as constructed to achieve both the sovereignty of corporations while denying their political effects.
For instance, in the section “Cultivating the Corporate Self” (pp. 156–59) Raianu explores the way in which this corporate identity was created through the creation of a history etc. But the biggest question is simply this: is there one coherent story of the Tatas to be learned? This is not a question about the book but rather a broader question about which object we as historians choose to make the subject of the histories we write. In other words, is there something to be learned about the firm, from its history, its negotiations with various political junctures whether the 1947 moment or the Indira Gandhi regime that lends it a coherent and exclusive identity? Or is “Tata” a misnomer, a misidentification of various individuals acting and calculating on behalf of their own success who choose to fall under the umbrella of the corporate entity when doing so can provide shelter? Is it possible that in choosing to tell the story of the corporation rather than of corporate-making that Raianu has conceded the fact of a unified identity to the Tatas that would have been better fragmented?
Relatedly, what too often disappears is the substance of politics rather than politics as a problem to be managed or a historical arena inside of which the various Tata firms operate. For instance, in a rather cursory way Raianu asks in the beginning of the book, “What accounts for the gulf between the celebration of corporate giants like Tata as stewards of a prosperous economy and the condemnation of corporate greed as suffocating democracy?” (Raianu, p. 2) This question is indeed carried through especially the first, fourth, and sixth chapters as we learn of how Tata negotiated the politics of swadeshi, national development, and then the Indira Gandhi years after which performances of philanthropy secured Tata's image as a national leader, not the anti-national entity it had been accused of being in the pages of the Bombay Chronicle in the 1920s. Could it not be that what was meant by “swadeshi” in the 1870s was very different than what was “swadeshi” by the 1920s? In the 1920s, the Tatas came under intense scrutiny in the pages of the Bombay Chronicle (p. 40) for hardly being swadeshi, in fact much more anti-swadeshi. This changed again in the 1980s and 1990s when “nationalist” came to mean corporate prowess in the world rather than something like food for everyone or the dream of India as a place without hunger, the latter being a goal in the 1950s. (Siegel Reference Siegel2018)
I think an important question for the reader and future historians is to identify more clearly what the difference is between a business history and a history of capitalism. This can be done by asking the following question: what is the subject of each? Is it a corporation or relations between labor and capital? In Raianu's book, we learn that Tata successfully evaded regulations, co-opted “swadeshi” and nationalist rhetoric when it meant that the business' success could be framed as the nation's success but not when “swadeshi” came to mean wealth and resources for common people and not corporate elites, and even profited by provisioning supplies for military missions to expand the British empire as early as the 1860s. But while we learn all these things, there is rarely a sustained criticism of the way in which Tata both as a whole and in its parts acted with corporate and private interests rather than public ones. So what we don't get is how more often than not, Tata's success has been a failure for so many.
