An incisive account of the moral beliefs that have guided foreign investment policy in India since the late colonial period, with an eye toward their implications for the twenty-first-century global economy.

Is foreign capital an agent of economic growth in developing countries or a vehicle of extraction? Examining how Indian elites wrestled with this question in the late colonial and postcolonial periods, Jason Jackson argues that it reflects a false binary. Instead of simply choosing between domestic and foreign capital, Indian policymakers have long considered the business ethics of individual firms. Indian economic nationalism, in other words, has never been characterized by a straightforward preference for domestic over foreign capital.

Jackson demonstrates that Indian policymakers have sought to favor firms that they believe are most likely to advance industrial development and societal progress at home. In particular, official policy and discourse have sought to confer a kind of moral legitimacy on businesses that invest their profits in local professional development and technological innovation—practices deemed synonymous with economic modernization. Meanwhile, firms seen as simply trading rather than producing, or as engaging in financial speculation and other allegedly regressive activities, have been viewed unfavorably. Jackson argues that these moral categories of capitalist legitimacy have shaped policymaking from the demise of the East India Company and rise of a new class of Indian industrialists in the late nineteenth century; to clashes between companies including Coca-Cola, Thums Up, Hero, and Honda in the twentieth; to more recent efforts to centralize political power through controversial market-governance projects.

An incisive look at the contested terms of capitalist self-interest and business ethics, Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry sheds new light on debates over investment policy and state-market relations in a global economy.