Bombay’s People, 1860–98

Description

Caught in the web of global economic fluctuations, Bombay experienced a cataclysmic financial crisis in the 1860s. Before the crash the city’s economy was heavily dependent on the trade in cotton. By 1865 the price of cotton plummeted, and with it the fortunes of Bombay’s people. Even people not directly involved in the cotton trade were affected. Thousands declared themselves insolvent and sought the protection of the Bombay High Court. Drawing on almost twenty thousand petitions of insolvents, Asiya Siddiqi explores a crucial phase of transformations in Indian economy and society.
Situating her study in the early colonial period of constant negotiations between local, colonial, and global relationships, Siddiqi maps patterns of income, literacy levels, and connections between religion and occupation. She not only analyses the finances of the wealthy and the powerful but also of working people, including women insolvents—a majority of whom were courtesans and dancing and singing girls. From this scrutiny is revealed the workings of the complex and dynamic financial relationships among Bombay’s people in the late nineteenth century.

About the Author

Asiya Siddiqi is former professor, Department of History, University of Bombay, Mumbai. She is the author of Agrarian Change in a Northern Indian State (1973) and the editor of Trade and Finance in Colonial India, 1750–1860 (1995).

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Table of contents

List of Figures and Tables
List of Abbreviations
Foreword by Amar Farooqui
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Business and Social Relationships in Nineteenth-Century Bombay
2. The Bigger Merchants
3. Reading the Records: Literacy and Social–Occupational Stratification
4. Religion and Occupation
5. Insolvent Women
6. Ayesha’s World: A Butcher’s Family in Nineteenth-Century Bombay
Conclusion
Index
About the Author