Abstract

"Civilizing Business: The Imperial Origins of U.S. Business School Education and its Use in India"

Deonnie Moodie, University of Oklahoma (dmoodie@ou.edu)

In this paper, I mine the writings and textbooks of the first American university business school faculty and supporters between 1881 and 1899 (at Wharton, Berkeley, and Chicago) to uncover the origins of this institutional form in imperial praxis. I then explore how this institutional form and its imperial hierarchies of the “civilized” and “uncivilized” were adapted for the Indian context with the creation of the first College of Commerce and Economics at the University of Bombay in 1913.

While it is well-known that the discipline of political economy formed the foundation of the earliest schools at the turn of the twentieth century, (Epstein 2016, Sass 1982, University of Chicago 1998, Turner 1958, Van Overtveldt 2009), little scholarship has dealt with the imperial entanglements of that discipline and the impact of those entanglements on the creation of business schools and the knowledge they produce. Faculty lauded the industriousness of those who settled U.S. soil, thus civilizing or eliminating the existing “barbarian tribes.” They cited economists of the British East India Company, transposing their theories onto indigenous, black, and immigrant peoples in the U.S., and to those and others who comprised the labor force in American industrial organizations. Those on the west coast sought also to continue the civilizing mission of white Americans’ westward expansion to “the Orient.” Some served the American colonial project directly as U.S. Government administrators in the Philippines. This was no coincidence. Colonization was fundamental to the so-framed universal laws of economics that served as the building blocks for American business schools.

When Indian nationalists set out to create their own university-based commercial education programs, they took up this model. Instead of accepting the subordinate place in the civilized/uncivilized binary, they placed themselves in the top. Yet the binary itself was left intact.