"Producing Hindu Economicus: A Transimperial History of Higher Commercial Education"

In this paper, I provide a history of the productivist ideal through a transimperial history of business school education, first through higher commercial education programs steeped in the discipline of political economy, and then through the creation of management science. In the first half, I uncover arguments for the creation of faculties of commerce at Indian universities voiced by four moderate Indian nationalists that resulted in the first university business degree programs, Bachelor of Commerce in 1913. I demonstrate that these men produced “Hindu economicus” – an idealized productive Indian subject that was assumed to be Hindu – within the discourses of colonial political economy that idealized so-framed “productive Protestants” and juxtaposed them to “indolent Indians”; and colonial history that idealized an ancient Hindu civilization and juxtaposed it to a corrupted Indian present. The students would be reared in the works of John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall, just as students of commerce in British and American universities. But Indian students would be equipped to counter those economists’ claims that India was peopled by the barbarous or child-like by hearkening back a once-glorious Hindu past when Indians were great manufacturers and global traders. Indian advocates for higher commercial education identified with the “civilized”, just as British and American advocates for the same. The project of business school in India as across empires was to idealize and champion economic productivity, and to accumulate wealth for the nation. In the second half of this paper, I connect this history to early-twentieth-century productions of management as a science in the United States. I argue that the civilizational ethic outlined in the first half of this paper continued in the creation of this discipline, while the language of science sought to erase that ethic’s embeddedness in the imperial project in order to claim its universality.