The noted British historian G. M. Trevelyan observed that “without social history, economic history is barren and political history is unintelligible.” The autobiographical volumes of Prakash Tandon, one of twentieth-century India's great business leaders, have been hailed as extremely important works of social history. The Times Literary Supplement had this to say about Tandon's Beyond Punjab (1971): “Everyone who is interested in factors which have shaped India today should read this book.” But business historians have rarely cited Tandon's work. This is not entirely surprising, given the state of business history in India. Apart from a few scholars, including Dwijendra Tripathi and the authors in this special issue of Business History Review, research on business history has been limited. To some extent, politics has been the all-consuming passion in India. Yet Tandon's work contains remarkable insights into important aspects of business history, both in India and globally.

This article describes and explains three patterns in the entry of Indian entrepreneurs in large-scale industries in South Asia, 1850–1947. It begins with Marwari businessmen in the jute industry in Calcutta. Then I discuss the success of the Parsi community in the Bombay cotton industries, and, finally, Gujarati (mainly Hindu) industrialists in Ahmedabad. I focus on three variables that might explain the timing, degree, and social and cultural variations in the emergence of indigenous industrialists in these cities. These variables concern: first, the colonial attitude towards indigenous industrialists in this field; second, whether or not these men belonged to a (religious) middleman minority; and, finally, their social and, in particular, occupational background.

This article examines the impact of organizational structure on risk taking across different lines of property insurance (fire, marine, vehicle and specialized property insurance) in Sweden from 1913 to 1939. Based on the theoretical arguments whereby the mutual organizational form has a competitive advantage in underwriting homogeneous but unknown risk distribution, while the stock organizational form is more likely to underwrite more volatile and heterogeneous risk categories, we conclude that organizational form has a significant impact on risk taking. Our empirical analysis shows that the risk taking, measured as incurred claims to anticipated losses, was on average lower among mutual insurers. When comparing across lines of insurance, the analysis shows that the mutual form was more successful in keeping down risks in fire and marine, while less so in vehicle and specialized property insurance. Stock companies mitigated the higher risk by ceding more premiums to reinsurers and by diversifying more across different lines of insurance.