Empire redrawn: territorial states, national economies and the partition of British India, 1940-1950

This dissertation examines economic implications of the decolonization of British India in August 1947 by way of a rushed and under-defined partition that established two nation-states: India and Pakistan. The transnational analysis is grounded in a microhistory of the late colonial financial weekly Commerce and archival records of a Bombay-based nationalist business organization, augmented by metropolitan archives including those of the Bank of England. In contrast to a seemingly inevitable political partition, the study finds that the economic division of the sizeable British Indian economy in 1947 surprised many economic actors and observers and that post-colonial monetary policies may not have been entirely anticipated by Whitehall. State-formation was an unstable process mediated by the re-inscription of layered sovereignties cultivated by the British Raj, which in turn transformed economic linkages across the sub-continent and re-shaped fundamental tenets of economic nationalism, or swadeshi.