A Science of Society: Economic Thought in Colonial India

FAIN: FT-286514-22

Osama R. Siddiqui
Providence College (Providence, RI 02918-7000)

Completion of a book manuscript on how European economic thought was received and transformed in nineteenth-century colonial India, including through translation into Indian languages such as Urdu. 

"A Science of Society" is a study of the translation and circulation of economic ideas in colonial India in the nineteenth century. The book explores how liberal economic thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, and others were translated into Indian languages, particularly Urdu. Drawing on a previously unexplored archive of these translations, the book argues that the translation of liberal political economy into Urdu came to be mediated by early modern Indo-Persian intellectual traditions. In particular, Indian translators made sense of liberal economic thought by relating it to Indo-Persian conceptions of ethics, politics, household management, and alchemy. The book, thus, shows that liberal economic ideas found a new life in India by intermingling with early modern languages of wealth and statecraft.