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KEYNOTE LECTURE | RICHARD ROBINSON BUSINESS HISTORY WORKSHOP

Business history’s attention to kinship, informed especially by global research, offers a tool to crack the encryption of society as market wrought by a half-century of neoliberal policy-making. Addressing kinship as networks of valuation across calculative and affective registers, this lecture connects business history with new interdisciplinary histories of capitalism that have emerged since 2008. Business history’s fine-grained attention to “embeddedness” has challenged the abstractions of economics, from rational homo economicus to money’s universal equivalence. Between embedded worlds and such abstraction is the problem of governing, a defining focus of recent histories of capitalism that have detailed gendered processes of economization, financialization and the neoliberal framing of the family as investment vehicle, site of debt and human capital. Opening contemporary-relevant questions from the governing of debt and speculation in colonial and postcolonial India, I consider kinship as an analytical framework attentive to time-space imaginaries that challenge those of neoliberal financialization, and complicate ongoing reductive iterations of the culture/economy distinction.

is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto and former Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs. Weaving empirical expertise on India with social and political theory, Professor Birla’s broad range of interdisciplinary historical writing has built conversations on global approaches to capitalism and its gendered forms of governing self and society. Her analyses foreground the legal fictions that animate economic modernity—from the family, to the trust to the corporation—and their dynamics with the on-the-ground conventions of what she has called “vernacular” capitalism. A senior editor at the journal Public Culture, and author of the groundbreaking Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India, she is currently working on a manuscript solicited by Duke University Press on imperialism, financialization and the emergence of neoliberalism.