1. Fortune and failure: The survival of family firms in eighteenth-century India.
- Author
-
Smith, Sheila
- Subjects
FAMILY-owned business enterprises ,FAMILY corporations ,BUSINESS enterprises ,BUSINESS - Abstract
This article discusses the survival of family firms in India during the 18th century. The indigenous family firm has traditionally been associated with India's trading interests and to the present day remains closely interlinked with the pattern of commercial life. In the 18th century too, merchant families traded within a commercial environment which, although it allowed for economic and even political gain, nevertheless involved adaptation and an accommodation of colonial interests. In Western India the involvement, primarily by Hindu merchants, in money-lending and banking, was integral to the development of commerce and allied itself to the growing influence of the British. Although their role in lending capital and acting as brokers was crucial to the growth of European expansion, the involvement of indigenous family firms in the trade of western India devolved around a diversity of interests and derived from far more than providing credit facilities or selling on a commission basis for Europeans.
- Published
- 1993
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