Jainism and Commercial Capitalism: Ethno-religion, Commerce, and Historical Transformation

This paper argues for the centrality of an expanded concept of “commercial capitalism” for understanding both the economic practices of Jains in the early 20th century, as well as why this association persists to this day. Following the historian Jairus Banaji, I argue that capitalism is neither simply commercial activity (Adam Smith’s famous “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange”) nor reducible simply to heavy industry. Drawing on archival data from Sirohi, a small independent Rajput kingdom, in the late colonial period, this paper puts forward a theory of how commercial capitalists, mostly Jain, came to dominate agrarian production. I then argue, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in modern Rajasthan and Gujarat, that contemporary perceptions of Jains are still primarily structured by this form of capitalism.