A Local History of Global Capital

"Ali provides an accessible and highly original study of peasant involvement in jute production and its ramifications for agrarian culture and politics in eastern Bengal. Superbly written and thoroughly researched, A Local History of Global Capital. brings a series of fresh insights to the agrarian history of colonial South Asia. "-Douglas E. Haynes, author of Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870-1960. "This is a fantastic book. Ali shows how an agrarian society that bears many of the conventional markers of what development theory construes as 'backwardness'-peasant production, overt religiosity, illiteracy-must in fact be understood as squarely located in capitalist modernity. "-Andrew Sartori, author of Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History.