Meghnad Desai
Biographic Data
| ID | 87509 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Meghnad Desai |
| GIVEN NAMES | Meghnad |
| FAMILY NAME | Desai |
| SIGNATURE | DESAI M |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5451-7254 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 87 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 185 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 87 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1968 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
From India to Bharat: Nationalism in a multi-national polity
Buying Safety: Neoliberalism, Gendered Violence, and the Everyday State in South Africa
The rise of neoliberalism in postcolonial contexts such as Brazil, Nigeria, India, and South Africa has meshed with the legacies of colonialism and the deep social inequalities of race, class, and gender to create paradoxical gendered effects. A singular narrative of oppression and inequality, on the one hand, counterposed with aspiration and mobility, on the other, fails to capture the notably different experiences among women during such transi…
An Eventful Critique of Crisis Language in Historical Sociology
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Gendered Violence and India’s Body Politic
Falling demand for female labour and rising dowry thresholds as factors behind mounting attacks on women; gang-rape as an instrument of caste-oppression; a culture of impunity in conflict zones; son-preference, girl-aversion and the missing. Manali Desai surveys the modalities of violence against women since Independence
I ndia
The construction of Indian nationhood since independence in 1947 has had to contend with various alternative forms of belonging such as caste, religion, region, and language. Given that India was created through the partition of British Indian territory on religious grounds, an ethnic conception of nationhood retained its influence even though India was officially declared a secular nation. The postindependence constitution explicitly prohibited …
In Memory of Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri (8 May 1926–26 November 2014)
Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri, the eminent economic historian of India, had a special relationship with Australian scholars of South Asia. In 1969, he was a visiting professor at the University of W
The Economics of Karl Marx: An Analysis and Application
Book Review| June 01 2012 The Economics of Karl Marx: An Analysis and Application The Economics of Karl Marx: An Analysis and Application. By Hollander, Samuel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. >xvi; 532 pp.$75.00. Meghnad Desai Meghnad Desai Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (2012) 44 (2): 365–367. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-1571746 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook T…
Nicholas Kaldor
Book Review| November 01 2012 Nicholas Kaldor Nicholas Kaldor. By King, John E.. Great Thinkers in Economics. Thirlwall, A. P., series editor. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 250 pp. Cloth£72.00. Meghnad Desai Meghnad Desai Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (2012) 44 (4): 697–698. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-1811415 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permis…
The Resurgence of Asia
After a period of some 250 years in which Europe has been in the ascendency, the economic pendulum has begun to swing back towards Asia, “back” because until about 1750 it was Asia that dominated the Eurasian land mass with its large cities, sophisticated lifestyles and flourishing trade. Then Europe embraced the modernizations of the Industrial revolution and reaped the benefits. Now a dynamic Asia is modernizing very fast. Is it sustainable? Mu…
The Future of Globalization: Explorations in Light of Recent Turbulence. Edited by Ernesto Zedillo
The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India's Hidden Apartheid
Anand Teltumbde, THE PERSISTENCE OF CASTE: THE KHAIRLANJI MURDERS AND INDIA'S HIDDEN APARTHEID, London and New York: Zed Books, 2010, 169 pp., £18.99 (paper) In this important book, Teltumbde offer
Colonial Legacies and Repertoires of "Ethnic" Violence: The Case of Western India, 1941-2002
The post-colonial state is held to be a weak state whose ease of capture reduces its capacity to suppress violence. The focus on the state, however, risks neglecting the ways in which violence is deployed to render the state weak in popular perception. This perception in turn legitimates claims for a foundational shift in the basis of power. In this paper, the concept of "repertoire" as first used by Charles Tilly, is used to analyze continuities…
Political Articulation: Parties and the Constitution of Cleavages in the United States, India, and Turkey
Political parties do not merely reflect social divisions, they actively construct them. While this point has been alluded to in the literature, surprisingly little attempt has been made to systematically elaborate the relationship between parties and the social, which tend to be treated as separate domains contained by the disciplinary division of labor between political science and sociology. This article demonstrates the constructive role of pa…
Profit and Profit Theory
A theory of profit should address itself to at least three questions – about the size (volume) of profit, its share in total income and about the rate of profit on capital invested. Each of these three issues (size, share, rate, hereafter) can be examined at three separate levels of aggregation, the firm, the industry or the economy.
Evolution of Markets and Institutions: A Study of an Emerging Economy. By Murali Patibandla
Rethinking Islamism: The Ideology of the New Terror
"Despite increasingly frantic calls - especially after the London bombings of July 7, 2005 - for western leaders to 'understand Islam better', there is a still a critical distinction that needs to be made between 'Islam' as religion and 'Islamism' in the sense of militant mindset. As the author of this provocative new book sees it, it is not a more nuanced understanding of Islam that will help the western powers defeat the jihadi threat, but rath…
The Passive Revolutionary Route to the Modern World: Italy and India in Comparative Perspective
Most scholars argue that states are central to modernization in countries lacking a classic bourgeois social revolution. Through an analysis of Italian fascism and Indian nationalism, this essay explains a form of non-social revolutionary transformation that we call passive revolution, in which parties rather than states are the driving agents of change. We argue that India and Italy shared two conditions that led to a passive revolutionary route…
State Formation and Radical Democracy in India
State Formation and Radical Democracy in India analyzes one of the most important cases of developmental change in the twentieth century, namely, Kerala in southern India and begs the question of whether insurgency among the marginalized poor can use formal representative democracy to create better life chances. Going back to pre-independence, colonial India, Manali Desai takes a long historical view of Kerala and compares it with the state of We…
Global Civil Society and its Limits
Indirect British Rule, State Formation, and Welfarism in Kerala, India, 1860–1957
This article examines the relationship between a strong nineteenth-century welfarist expansion between the 1860s and early 1940s, in Kerala, India, under indirect British rule, and the “exceptional” antipoverty regime that democratically elected Communists implemented during the postcolonial (post 1947) era in the state. While much attention has focused on Kerala as a model of social development and on postindependence state policies in creating …
Will India ever catch up with China?1
The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in India
Engendering Violence: Boundaries, Histories, and the Everyday
States, Parties, and Social Movements
Studies of social movements and of political parties have usually treated them as separate and distinct. In fact they are deeply intertwined. Social movements often shape electoral competition and party policies; they can even give rise to new parties. At the same time, political parties and campaigns shape the opportunities, personnel, and outcomes of social movements. In many countries, electoral democracy itself is the outcome of social moveme…
Measuring the Technology Achievement of Nations and the Capacity to Participate in the Network Age
Disparities among countries in their capacity to create and use technology for development has persisted for a long time and are now huge. It is likely to become an increasingly significant factor in determining patterns of global development and poverty in the 21st century. The last decade’s technological transformations and the emergence of the global marketplace have raised the stakes for all countries to be technologically connected – to be a…
Political Articulation: Parties and the Constitution of Cleavages in the United States, India, and Turkey
Political parties do not merely reflect social divisions, they actively construct them. While this point has been alluded to in the literature, surprisingly little attempt has been made to systematically elaborate the relationship between parties and the social, which tend to be treated as separate domains contained by the disciplinary division of labor between political science and sociology. This article demonstrates the constructive role of pa…
The Passive Revolutionary Route to the Modern World: Italy and India in Comparative Perspective
Most scholars argue that states are central to modernization in countries lacking a classic bourgeois social revolution. Through an analysis of Italian fascism and Indian nationalism, this essay explains a form of non-social revolutionary transformation that we call passive revolution, in which parties rather than states are the driving agents of change. We argue that India and Italy shared two conditions that led to a passive revolutionary route…
The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India's Hidden Apartheid
Anand Teltumbde, THE PERSISTENCE OF CASTE: THE KHAIRLANJI MURDERS AND INDIA'S HIDDEN APARTHEID, London and New York: Zed Books, 2010, 169 pp., £18.99 (paper) In this important book, Teltumbde offer
The Relative Autonomy of Party Practices: A Counterfactual Analysis of Left Party Ascendancy in Kerala, India, 1934-1940
This article seeks to modify one of the dominant assumptions in the literature on political parties, namely that parties “reflect” the dominant cleavages of a given society. Instead, drawing on the distinction between the concepts of “class structure” and “class formation,” the main argument of this article is that party practices contribute to the formation of “cleavages” and in the process gain ascendancy and hegemony. A party's practices are, …
Capitalism, Conflict and Inflation
Journal Article Capitalism, Conflict and Inflation Get access Capitalism, Conflict and Inflation. By Bob Rowthorn. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980. Pp. 274. £8.50.) Meghnad Desai Meghnad Desai London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 90, Issue 359, 1 September 1980, Pages 650–652, https://doi.org/10.2307/2231949 Published: 01 September 1980
Party Formation, Political Power, and the Capacity for Reform: Comparing Left Parties in Kerala and West Bengal, India
This article discusses the concept of “party formation” that is, the historically evolved links between a party and the civil society from which its political power is derived. This concept is developed through an empirical analysis of differences in poverty eradication by leftist parties in the states of Kerala and West Bengal, India. The argument is made that the ostensibly common identity of a Communist party in the two cases conceals differen…
Surat in the Seventeenth Century: A Study in Urban History of Pre-Modern India
Engendering Violence: Boundaries, Histories, and the Everyday
States, Parties, and Social Movements
Studies of social movements and of political parties have usually treated them as separate and distinct. In fact they are deeply intertwined. Social movements often shape electoral competition and party policies; they can even give rise to new parties. At the same time, political parties and campaigns shape the opportunities, personnel, and outcomes of social movements. In many countries, electoral democracy itself is the outcome of social moveme…
Growth Cycles with Induced Technical Change
This paper concerns itself with two related topics: the relative shares of workers and capitalists in the national income and the labour augmenting bias of technical change. Both have been dealt with, in contrasting fashion, in two seminal papers on distribution theory. Kennedy (I964) attempts to explain the then observed constancy of relative shares with the help of the now famous invention possibility frontier. However, the wage and profit rate…
The Phillips Curve: A Revisionist Interpretation
Demand for Cotton Textiles in Nineteenth Century India
Debating the British disease: The centrality of profit
Agrarian Power and Agricultural Productivity
Development and Underdevelopment in Historical Perspective: Populism, Nationalism and Industrialisation
Journal Article Development and Underdevelopment in Historical Perspective: Populism, Nationalism and Industrialisation Get access Development and Underdevelopment in Historical Perspective: Populism, Nationalism and Industrialisation. By Gavin Kitching. London, New York: Methuen. 1982. 196 pp. Index. Pb. Meghnad Desai Meghnad Desai 1London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International …
Buying Safety: Neoliberalism, Gendered Violence, and the Everyday State in South Africa
The rise of neoliberalism in postcolonial contexts such as Brazil, Nigeria, India, and South Africa has meshed with the legacies of colonialism and the deep social inequalities of race, class, and gender to create paradoxical gendered effects. A singular narrative of oppression and inequality, on the one hand, counterposed with aspiration and mobility, on the other, fails to capture the notably different experiences among women during such transi…
Gendered Violence and India’s Body Politic
Falling demand for female labour and rising dowry thresholds as factors behind mounting attacks on women; gang-rape as an instrument of caste-oppression; a culture of impunity in conflict zones; son-preference, girl-aversion and the missing. Manali Desai surveys the modalities of violence against women since Independence
The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in India
Globalisation: Neither ideology nor utopia
This article calls for a different perspective on globalisation than hitherto deployed in the literature, and argues that globalisation must be seen as a renewal of the 19” century phase of capitalism. It traces the history of capitalism, and places globalisation in the context of a history of ideas as well as events. It contrasts two philosophies of social dynamics ‐ the mechanistic and the organicist ‐ proposing that the organicist view is the …
The Japanese Challenge: The Success and Failure of Economic Success
Journal Article The Japanese Challenge: The Success and Failure of Economic Success Get access The Japanese Challenge: The Success and Failure of Economic Success. By Herman Kahn and Thomas Pepper. New York: Crowell; London: Harper and Row. 1979. Meghnad Desai Meghnad Desai 1London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 56, Issue 3, Summer 1980, Page 558, https://…
Colonial Legacies and Repertoires of "Ethnic" Violence: The Case of Western India, 1941-2002
The post-colonial state is held to be a weak state whose ease of capture reduces its capacity to suppress violence. The focus on the state, however, risks neglecting the ways in which violence is deployed to render the state weak in popular perception. This perception in turn legitimates claims for a foundational shift in the basis of power. In this paper, the concept of "repertoire" as first used by Charles Tilly, is used to analyze continuities…
Indirect British Rule, State Formation, and Welfarism in Kerala, India, 1860–1957
This article examines the relationship between a strong nineteenth-century welfarist expansion between the 1860s and early 1940s, in Kerala, India, under indirect British rule, and the “exceptional” antipoverty regime that democratically elected Communists implemented during the postcolonial (post 1947) era in the state. While much attention has focused on Kerala as a model of social development and on postindependence state policies in creating …
Lectures on Advanced Econometric Theory
Journal Article Lectures on Advanced Econometric Theory Get access Lectures on Advanced Econometric Theory. By DENIS SARGAN and edited by Meghnad Desai. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Pp. x+175. £25.00 hardback. ISBN 0 631 14956 2.) Hedley Rees Hedley Rees University of Bristol Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 99, Issue 397, 1 September 1989, Pages 863–864, https://doi.org/10.2…
Men and Things
Pity poor Henry Hutchinson. There is not a room in his honour in these buildings, nor as far as I can recall a portrait of him anywhere in the LSE. But in some sense he had as much to do with the foundation of the school as others whose names are more easily recalled as founders. Hutchinson was the lonely unknown man who shot himself in 1893 and in his will left a large sum to the Fabian society so that they might apply the money 'to the propagan…
The Cambridge Economic History of India. Vol. 2: C. 1757-1970
Economic Analysis and Economic Policy
Methodology of Mathematical Economics and Econometrics
Some Issues in Econometric History
trouble with fiction, said John Rivers, that it makes too much Reality never makes sense. Never? I questioned. Maybe from God's point of view, he conceded. Never from ours. Fiction has unity, fiction has style. Facts possess neither. In the raw, existence is always one damned thing after another, and each of the damned things is simultaneously Thurber and Michelangelo, simultaneously Micky Spillane and Thomas 'a Kempis. The criterion of reality i…
The Economic Transformation of Cuba: A First-Hand Account
The Theory and Design of Economic Development
Essays on Economic Development
This dissertation consists in two chapters. In the first chapter I collected and digitized historical tax records from the Spanish colonial regime in Ecuador to estimate the long-run effects of a forced labor institution called concertaje on today’s economic performance. This institution allowed landlords to retain indigenous workers due to unpaid debts, and forced them to work as peasants in rural estates known as haciendas. In order to identify…
Vortex in India
A Socialist revolution in India would be an event of fundamental significance to the international class struggle. An immense population of 550 million whose rural and urban masses are plunged in abysmal misery and unemployment make India one of the great potential storm-centres within world capitalism. In the
An Econometric Model of Canada under the Fluctuating Exchange Rate
A Test of the Hypothesis of Disguised Unemployment
An Econometric Model of India, 1948-1961
Demand for Cotton Textiles in Nineteenth Century India
Social science goes to war: Economic theory and the pentagon papers
Pollution: Economy and Environment
This study, originally published in 1972, examines the connections between human society and the rest of the universe that are attributable to economic activity. These include the inputs from the environment to industry, such as oxygen, used in the combustion of mineral fuels. Also included are the industrial outputs which are fed back into the environment in the form of waste products. An attempt will be made to establish functional relations be…
The Phillips Curve: A Revisionist Interpretation
Marxian Economic Theory
Poverty and Progress: An Ecological Model of Economic Development
The Consolation of Slavery
The Transition to Socialist Economy.Charles Bettelheim , Brian Pearce
Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
Journal Article Free to Choose: A Personal Statement Get access Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. By Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman.. London: Seeker and Warburg. 1980. 338 pp. £7.95. Pb:£4.95. Meghnad Desai Meghnad Desai 1London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 56, Issue 3, Summer 1980, Pages 505–506, https://doi.org/10.2307/2617411 Published: 01 July…
The Japanese Challenge: The Success and Failure of Economic Success
Journal Article The Japanese Challenge: The Success and Failure of Economic Success Get access The Japanese Challenge: The Success and Failure of Economic Success. By Herman Kahn and Thomas Pepper. New York: Crowell; London: Harper and Row. 1979. Meghnad Desai Meghnad Desai 1London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 56, Issue 3, Summer 1980, Page 558, https://…
Capitalism, Conflict and Inflation
Journal Article Capitalism, Conflict and Inflation Get access Capitalism, Conflict and Inflation. By Bob Rowthorn. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980. Pp. 274. £8.50.) Meghnad Desai Meghnad Desai London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 90, Issue 359, 1 September 1980, Pages 650–652, https://doi.org/10.2307/2231949 Published: 01 September 1980
Marxian Economics
Journal Article Marxian Economics Get access Marxian Economics. By Meghnad Desai. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979. Pp. xii + 265. £15.00 hardback, £4.95 paperback.) Andrew L. Friedman Andrew L. Friedman University of Bristol Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 90, Issue 358, 1 June 1980, Pages 425–426, https://doi.org/10.2307/2231818 Published: 01 June 1980
Surat in the Seventeenth Century: A Study in Urban History of Pre-Modern India
Modelling the Ultimate Absurdity: A Comment on "A Quantitative Study of the Strategic Arms Race in the Missile Age"
Meghnad Desai, David Blake, Modelling the Ultimate Absurdity: A Comment on "A Quantitative Study of the Strategic Arms Race in the Missile Age", The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Nov., 1981), pp. 629-632
The Depression and the Developing World, 1914–1939
The Depression and the Developing World, 1914–1939 Get access The Depression and the Developing World, 1914–1939. By A. J. H. Latham. London: Croom Helm; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble. 1981. 230 pp.£12.95. Meghnad Desai Meghnad Desai 1London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 58, Issue 1, Winter 1981, Page 136, https://doi.org/10.2307/2618299 Published: 01 Janu…
Economics (53 works) · Political science (48 works) · Sociology (35 works) · Law (33 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Economic history (17 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · History (14 works) · Economic Theory and Policy (13 works)