This monograph deals with the social and political context of commercial activity in early modern India - a period during which Eastern India (and Bihar) experienced the transition to British colonial rule. As a point of departure from existing scholarly literature that usually studies this transition in material terms. This volume uses an approach that takes into account the configuration of social relations and political connections within which, it argues, commercial activity was embedded.

Using merchants and bankers as its subjects, this book deals with the structure of trade and banking, the position of merchants in the cultural order and the role of the state in perpetuating this order.