Ritu Birla
Biographic Data
| ID | 133687 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ritu Birla |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ritu |
| FAMILY NAME | Birla |
| SIGNATURE | BIRLA R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 132 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Short Circuits and Seizures
This essay explores the financialization of liberal governmentality through questions posed by cryptocurrency, especially in its relationship with the monetary coding of the globe since Bretton Woods. Contemporary Global South deployments of crypto foreground political performatives that can be characterized as attempts to short-circuit established global configurations. This modality of speedy bypassing, enabling volatility and seizure, fuels pr…
C=f(P)
With an interest in historicizing contemporary philanthropic formations such as corporate social responsibility, this article outlines the modern Indian governmental coding of charity as a function of profit. To do so, it charts a trajectory of legal-fiscal policy on charitable tax exemption in India, especially since the 1940s. Informed by the study of vernacular capitalism, research on economization and on epistemologies of calculation, the ana…
Failure via Schumpeter
The contemporary language of business innovation embraces failure and claims an origin in the thought of Joseph Schumpeter, which contemplated the end(s)—the failure, completion, limits, and fulfillment of capitalism. Attentive to empire and monopoly, Schumpeter represents a rich condensation of the global governmental imaginaries of his time, speaking to the Marxist temporizing of capital and the Weberian history of capitalism, neoclassical and …
Speculation Illicit and Complicit
First regulated as gambling, even as similar practices abroad were formalized in private exchanges and consolidated in boards of trade, vernacular futures trading in India foregrounds speculation as a problem of law and governing. This essay addresses the colonial management of vernacular speculative activities in a period of global financialization, demonstrating how market engagements with uncertainty that were previously criminalized were slow…
Jurisprudence of Emergence
Highlighting legal–governmental techniques by which the public is conceptualised as the market and market activity as public agency, this article poses India as a key site for a globalised analysis of neo-liberal governance. It opens a genealogy for India's ‘emerging market’ governance that extends back to colonial modernisation, highlighting ties between a coercive state, its benevolent performance and the making of a market society. Such a long…
Speculation
Speculation structures the unprecedented breadth and depth of contemporary global capitalism. We define it as an engagement with uncertainty that aims to materialize potential futures. Studies of economization and financialization have highlighted the production of value through transparent practices of calculation and have focused on the Global North. As an alternative, we use ethnographic and historical genealogical methods to explore predictiv…
Maine (and Weber) Against the Grain
This essay forges ties between postcolonial methodologies and the economic sociology of law, emphasizing the history, legal production, and governmental habitus of that modern abstraction called ‘the economy’. It pursues three interrelated sites to do so: the categories of government and economy, via Weber and Foucault; classical legal discourse on corporate or group life and its temporizing from status to contract; and the relationship between t…
Guest Editors' Letter
Might as Well Face It, We're Addicted to Gandhi
Gandhi's thematics of addiction mark him as acutely present in his time, even as they launch his temporal performativity. Publicized via transnational debates on the legality of opium and anxieties about the market as casino, the problem of addiction reflected the circulation of law and economy as global technologies and Gandhi's travels with them. At the same time, addiction named Gandhi's condemnation of modern civilization and its slavish rela…
Stages of Capital
In Stages of Capital, Ritu Birla brings research on nonwestern capitalisms into conversation with postcolonial studies to illuminate the historical roots of India's market society. Between 1870 and 1930, the British regime in India implemented a barrage of commercial and contract laws directed at the "free" circulation of capital, including measures regulating companies, income tax, charitable gifting, and pension funds, and procedures distinguis…
History and the critique of postcolonial reason limits, secret, value
This essay explores the challenges of radical history writing by elaborating three themes in the chapter on history in Spivak's A Critique of Postcolonial Reason : limits, the open secret, and value/transvaluation. Questions about the limits of history writing have been posed from within the discipline, particularly by scholars engaged with the dilemmas of writing postcolonial histories. Spivak's text is placed within this historiography and alon…
Stages of Capital
In Stages of Capital, Ritu Birla brings research on nonwestern capitalisms into conversation with postcolonial studies to illuminate the historical roots of India's market society. Between 1870 and 1930, the British regime in India implemented a barrage of commercial and contract laws directed at the "free" circulation of capital, including measures regulating companies, income tax, charitable gifting, and pension funds, and procedures distinguis…
Speculation
Speculation structures the unprecedented breadth and depth of contemporary global capitalism. We define it as an engagement with uncertainty that aims to materialize potential futures. Studies of economization and financialization have highlighted the production of value through transparent practices of calculation and have focused on the Global North. As an alternative, we use ethnographic and historical genealogical methods to explore predictiv…
Speculation Illicit and Complicit
First regulated as gambling, even as similar practices abroad were formalized in private exchanges and consolidated in boards of trade, vernacular futures trading in India foregrounds speculation as a problem of law and governing. This essay addresses the colonial management of vernacular speculative activities in a period of global financialization, demonstrating how market engagements with uncertainty that were previously criminalized were slow…
C=f(P)
With an interest in historicizing contemporary philanthropic formations such as corporate social responsibility, this article outlines the modern Indian governmental coding of charity as a function of profit. To do so, it charts a trajectory of legal-fiscal policy on charitable tax exemption in India, especially since the 1940s. Informed by the study of vernacular capitalism, research on economization and on epistemologies of calculation, the ana…
Failure via Schumpeter
The contemporary language of business innovation embraces failure and claims an origin in the thought of Joseph Schumpeter, which contemplated the end(s)—the failure, completion, limits, and fulfillment of capitalism. Attentive to empire and monopoly, Schumpeter represents a rich condensation of the global governmental imaginaries of his time, speaking to the Marxist temporizing of capital and the Weberian history of capitalism, neoclassical and …
Jurisprudence of Emergence
Highlighting legal–governmental techniques by which the public is conceptualised as the market and market activity as public agency, this article poses India as a key site for a globalised analysis of neo-liberal governance. It opens a genealogy for India's ‘emerging market’ governance that extends back to colonial modernisation, highlighting ties between a coercive state, its benevolent performance and the making of a market society. Such a long…
Maine (and Weber) Against the Grain
This essay forges ties between postcolonial methodologies and the economic sociology of law, emphasizing the history, legal production, and governmental habitus of that modern abstraction called ‘the economy’. It pursues three interrelated sites to do so: the categories of government and economy, via Weber and Foucault; classical legal discourse on corporate or group life and its temporizing from status to contract; and the relationship between t…
Might as Well Face It, We're Addicted to Gandhi
Gandhi's thematics of addiction mark him as acutely present in his time, even as they launch his temporal performativity. Publicized via transnational debates on the legality of opium and anxieties about the market as casino, the problem of addiction reflected the circulation of law and economy as global technologies and Gandhi's travels with them. At the same time, addiction named Gandhi's condemnation of modern civilization and its slavish rela…
Short Circuits and Seizures
This essay explores the financialization of liberal governmentality through questions posed by cryptocurrency, especially in its relationship with the monetary coding of the globe since Bretton Woods. Contemporary Global South deployments of crypto foreground political performatives that can be characterized as attempts to short-circuit established global configurations. This modality of speedy bypassing, enabling volatility and seizure, fuels pr…
Guest Editors' Letter
History and the critique of postcolonial reason limits, secret, value
This essay explores the challenges of radical history writing by elaborating three themes in the chapter on history in Spivak's A Critique of Postcolonial Reason : limits, the open secret, and value/transvaluation. Questions about the limits of history writing have been posed from within the discipline, particularly by scholars engaged with the dilemmas of writing postcolonial histories. Spivak's text is placed within this historiography and alon…
Stages of Capital
In Stages of Capital, Ritu Birla brings research on nonwestern capitalisms into conversation with postcolonial studies to illuminate the historical roots of India's market society. Between 1870 and 1930, the British regime in India implemented a barrage of commercial and contract laws directed at the "free" circulation of capital, including measures regulating companies, income tax, charitable gifting, and pension funds, and procedures distinguis…
Guest Editors' Letter
Might as Well Face It, We're Addicted to Gandhi
Gandhi's thematics of addiction mark him as acutely present in his time, even as they launch his temporal performativity. Publicized via transnational debates on the legality of opium and anxieties about the market as casino, the problem of addiction reflected the circulation of law and economy as global technologies and Gandhi's travels with them. At the same time, addiction named Gandhi's condemnation of modern civilization and its slavish rela…
Maine (and Weber) Against the Grain
This essay forges ties between postcolonial methodologies and the economic sociology of law, emphasizing the history, legal production, and governmental habitus of that modern abstraction called ‘the economy’. It pursues three interrelated sites to do so: the categories of government and economy, via Weber and Foucault; classical legal discourse on corporate or group life and its temporizing from status to contract; and the relationship between t…
Speculation Illicit and Complicit
First regulated as gambling, even as similar practices abroad were formalized in private exchanges and consolidated in boards of trade, vernacular futures trading in India foregrounds speculation as a problem of law and governing. This essay addresses the colonial management of vernacular speculative activities in a period of global financialization, demonstrating how market engagements with uncertainty that were previously criminalized were slow…
Jurisprudence of Emergence
Highlighting legal–governmental techniques by which the public is conceptualised as the market and market activity as public agency, this article poses India as a key site for a globalised analysis of neo-liberal governance. It opens a genealogy for India's ‘emerging market’ governance that extends back to colonial modernisation, highlighting ties between a coercive state, its benevolent performance and the making of a market society. Such a long…
Speculation
Speculation structures the unprecedented breadth and depth of contemporary global capitalism. We define it as an engagement with uncertainty that aims to materialize potential futures. Studies of economization and financialization have highlighted the production of value through transparent practices of calculation and have focused on the Global North. As an alternative, we use ethnographic and historical genealogical methods to explore predictiv…
Failure via Schumpeter
The contemporary language of business innovation embraces failure and claims an origin in the thought of Joseph Schumpeter, which contemplated the end(s)—the failure, completion, limits, and fulfillment of capitalism. Attentive to empire and monopoly, Schumpeter represents a rich condensation of the global governmental imaginaries of his time, speaking to the Marxist temporizing of capital and the Weberian history of capitalism, neoclassical and …
C=f(P)
With an interest in historicizing contemporary philanthropic formations such as corporate social responsibility, this article outlines the modern Indian governmental coding of charity as a function of profit. To do so, it charts a trajectory of legal-fiscal policy on charitable tax exemption in India, especially since the 1940s. Informed by the study of vernacular capitalism, research on economization and on epistemologies of calculation, the ana…
Short Circuits and Seizures
This essay explores the financialization of liberal governmentality through questions posed by cryptocurrency, especially in its relationship with the monetary coding of the globe since Bretton Woods. Contemporary Global South deployments of crypto foreground political performatives that can be characterized as attempts to short-circuit established global configurations. This modality of speedy bypassing, enabling volatility and seizure, fuels pr…
Sociology (11 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Political economy (6 works) · Market economy (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Capitalism (4 works) · History (4 works) · Law (4 works)