Call for Papers | South Asian Capitalism(s)

Fall 2025 | A Conference on South Asian Capitalism(s)

This conference is the second in a sequence of events co-organized by three public universities: Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, University of California Berkeley, and University of Massachusetts, Amherst on the theme of the political economy of South Asia. Titled South Asian Capitalism(s), this Fall 2025 conference aims to investigate how capitalist accumulation is socially structured across South Asia. For instance, we are keen on exploring the varied emergent and consequential modes in which caste/kinship/ethnicity regulates the economy, polity and material life. These explorations have political urgency: they structure, inter alia, majoritarianism, new forms of social exclusion and inequality, crises of stagnation and unemployment. 

If scholars argue that contract, debt, and private property in the west are the “code of capital” (cf. Pistor 2019), there is a scholarship from South Asia  that shows how kinship networks take the place of contract (cf. Birla 2009). A couple of key animating questions for our conference are: how are social structures of accumulation like caste, biradari, and their other regional variations constitutive of the modern economy rather than being vestiges of the past? How does locating traditional patronage systems and networks at the heart of South Asian capitalisms alter our understanding of these societies beyond phrases like ‘crony capitalism’? These questions are especially urgent in thinking about the trajectories of capitalism and the future of democracy in South Asia.

For this workshop, we want to bring together mid- to advanced-graduate students and early career scholars from the across South Asia, whose work speaks to the following themes, including but not limited to:

• Postcolonial capitalism 

• South Asian capitalisms in global comparative perspective

• New approaches to South Asian capitalism

• (Comparative) social structures of accumulation across South Asia

• The impact of kinship/caste/biradari structures on firm-level accumulation strategies

• Dialectic of contract law and customary norms in governing economic actions/life

• The role of social structures of accumulation in regulating the informal economy

• How different markets in specific commodities, land, and credit are governed by social structures

• How does the family-owned nature of most businesses in the formal sector change the dynamics of South Asian capitalism?

• Caste, Kinship, and Regional Dynamics of Capitalist Accumulation in South Asia

Travel and accommodation for the accepted participants will be provided by the organisers, including those overseas.