On 23 May 1944, Lord Keynes asked at the House of Lords, ‘Was it not I, when many of today's iconoclasts were still worshippers of the cult, who wrote that “Gold is a barbarous relic”?’ He was referring to his first book, Indian Currency and Finance, published before he joined the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance, headed by Austen Chamberlain, where he wrote: ‘A preference for a tangible gold currency is no longer more than a relic of a time when Governments were less trustworthy….’ (Keynes 1913: 73).

Keynes's observation reminds us of an era when national currencies required the backing of gold to gain trust and legitimacy. Even after currencies ceased to be convertible to gold, the latter has remained a store of value to which one turned in times of financial distress. The centrality of gold to Indian social, cultural and religious life goes back centuries, as the quote from the ancient Rig Veda (1500–1200 BCE) shows. Similarly, Kautilya's description in Arthashastra (c. 321–296 BCE) of the types of theft and fraud to guard against while dealing with gold underlines its connection with crime as well as its importance to Indian economy and trade (Kangle 1969: Parts 2.12–2.14, pp. 105–121). Over a century after Keynes called it a barbarous relic, gold remains of great cultural significance – as this volume shows. The links of gold with crime, especially in money laundering, have also endured.

This concise and interpretative book digs under the surface events of the Wars of the Roses to explore the underlying dynamics of a typical civil war. Beginning with a demonstration of why the well-worn storylines of the Wars are so misleading, it moves on to expose the pressure for reform that animated the conflict and helped to shape its outcomes. It continues by looking at the logics of division and the reasons why the Wars, once started, were so hard to resolve. It concludes by returning to debates long discussed by historians: the role of the economy in the conflict, and the interaction between English affairs and the politics of the British Isles and the near continent. Throughout, a central concern is to emphasise the fluidity and uncertainty of these civil wars: once authority broke down, anything could happen.

Hailed as a model state for its performance on the human development index, the state of Kerala somewhat paradoxically enjoys a robust reputation for its extreme affinity for gold jewellery. As an object of prestation and counterprestation from birth to death, gold is ubiquitous and indispensable in Malayali life. We focus on the role of gold as an object of gendered consumption among the Muslims of the Malabar region in Kerala. Gold is worn and displayed on the body as a form of adornment; it creates a distinct public presence, including status claims, notions of self and modes of identification. Moreover, gold has long been regarded as a safe form of investment, even safer than liquid cash and modern financial instruments. We show how, among the Muslims of Malabar, gold holds a special economic significance where religious censure confines their participation in modern banking and financial institutions.

In this context, gold jewellery binds together what are typically viewed as separate fields: the realms of investment and economic security, on the one hand, and aesthetics, family linkages, concepts of self and modes of belonging, on the other (Moors 1994).

This concise and interpretative book digs under the surface events of the Wars of the Roses to explore the underlying dynamics of a typical civil war. Beginning with a demonstration of why the well-worn storylines of the Wars are so misleading, it moves on to expose the pressure for reform that animated the conflict and helped to shape its outcomes. It continues by looking at the logics of division and the reasons why the Wars, once started, were so hard to resolve. It concludes by returning to debates long discussed by historians: the role of the economy in the conflict, and the interaction between English affairs and the politics of the British Isles and the near continent. Throughout, a central concern is to emphasise the fluidity and uncertainty of these civil wars: once authority broke down, anything could happen.

Visitors to Patna in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were invariably impressed with what they found there. As “the chefest marte towne of all Bengala,” Patna was among the largest cities in India.1 It struck travelers as “a very sweet city and honoured place … a place of perpetual spring, … [among] the best of the cities of Hind” and a fitting home for “many traders and comfort-loving men.”2 By the end of the nineteenth century, though, it had become a dilapidated provincial town, merely one among several middling, semiagrarian cities lining the Ganges. In this chapter, I show what Patna's decline meant for the city and its people. Patna's shifting fortunes were molded by its place within the wider region, and they shaped every aspect of the city's geography. As Patna became increasingly provincial in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of the consequences were felt most strongly in the older part of the city. The city's social landscape was restructured amid political contestations over health and sanitation, challenges to the nature of elite patronage and neighborhood leadership, and efforts—ultimately unsuccessful—to redirect the spatial changes taking place.

Nineteenth-century Patna was organized around two poles. In the east lay the historic Patna, built in the sixteenth century and renamed Azimabad in the early 1700s.

This chapter takes a specific example from the museum's narrative—the story of Baghel Singh's conquest of Delhi—to show the use of history paintings and the museum's narrative in contemporary heritage politics. The choice of this episode is relevant for several reasons. Bhai Mati Das Museum has four paintings dedicated to this story, and the event it describes unfolds at a site very close to the Gurdwara Sisganj and the museum, the Red Fort. Similar paintings on Baghel Singh appear in other Sikh museums too, including the Central Sikh Museum, Amritsar. Another prominent Sikh museum in Delhi, the Baba Baghel Singh Sikh Heritage Multimedia Museum (Baba Baghel Singh Sikh Virasat Multimedia Ajaibghar) at Gurdwara Bangla Sahib, not only includes this story but is also named after its main protagonist. Also, Dilli Fateh, or the Sikh conquest of Delhi, is a popularly known story and remembered with great pride in the Sikh community. And, in recent years, the story of Baghel Singh's victory over Delhi through his occupation of the Red Fort has acquired tremendous relevance in heritage politics. It is widely invoked and celebrated in prominent events (such as the Fateh Diwas celebrations at the Red Fort which began in 2014, and the historic Farmers’ Protests in Delhi in 2020–21). This claim and its symbolism are important to understand heritage politics in India today. This chapter includes a discussion of the different ways in which stories of the Sikh tradition are invoked. These ways of producing and consuming Sikh history offer insights into not only what the Sikhs think of their past but also what the Sikhs think of themselves today, of their place in contemporary India.

In India, the gold and jewellery market, already valued at USD 44 billion in 2023, is expected to streak ahead at a faster pace than other sectors of the economy to reach USD 134 billion by 2030 (Maximise Market Research 2024). As this volume shows, the gold sector remains largely dominated by small and medium-sized businesses. This is as true of trade as it is of industrial production.

Although it is difficult to estimate the number of jewel and gold traders in India due to the sector's fragmented and unregistered nature, trade groups estimate there to be 500,000–600,000 units, of which, according to the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council, 86,000 are registered for tax purposes (WGC 2022). But in many cases in the gold economy, production and trade are hard to distinguish in practice: gold traders may themselves be producers or directly in control of production, or they may commission production from others, and the gold sector remains dominated by small, independent shops and workshops. Many of the latter are ‘unorganised’ and not registered with the state, though they may be known to local business associations. In West Bengal alone, for instance, a knowledgeable member of the Swarna Shilpo Bachao Committee, a local trade association for goldsmiths and gold jewellery merchants, reported that the association had approximately 10,000 members. Gold ornament trading is going through rapid differentiation, however. A World Gold Council (WGC) study published in 2022 showed that while in 2017 fewer than 10 per cent of retail stores operated as registered, organised and large-scale facilities, by 2022 they had grown rapidly to 15–20 per cent (WGC 2022).

Over the millennia, gold has been an instrument of choice that has served as money or as an anchor for money. In the twentieth century, confidence placed in physical gold was gradually replaced by confidence in abstract constructs such as institutions (for example, central banks), rules (for example, IMF Articles of Agreement) and global regimes (for example, exchange rate regimes to maintain stability) as the idea of money transited from the real to the symbolic and the imaginary.

Contemporary money is essentially an abstract unit of account. It is typically issued as a central bank liability (Kumhof et al. 2020) and derives its value from government fiat (authoritative order). Today, money is once again being reimagined. Technology and private initiatives are contesting the idea of money as a central bank liability. Geopolitics is eroding the certainties of a rule-based order, impacting established institutions and regimes that govern international monetary relations. Furthermore, the overhang of excess liquidity arising from easy monetary policies initiated during the global financial crisis and pursued during the Covid pandemic portends inflationary pressures. In this context, gold is once again assuming a new significance.

In this chapter we seek to examine the Indian evidence for the increased attraction for gold from the perspective of the central bank and of individuals as an alternative to fiat money. To do so, we attempt a long view of gold in India's quest for monetary stability, delving into her monetary history. We try to locate the Indian experience in the global story of monetary gold and its evolving significance in a country that is home to the largest private holdings of gold in the world, estimated variously at about 23,000–25,000 tonnes (Government of India 2018: 84; WGC 2016b). We also focus on the use of gold as an anchor for money in India.

Not all rural lineages in southern Panjab made the transition from ra‘iyati origins to riyasat as successfully as did Gurbaksh and Jodh Singh. If the Kalsia household were amongst the still considerable pool of rural folk that carved out principalities for themselves in late Mughal Panjab, there was a far larger number of lineages that continued to jostle with each other in less successful bids at expansion and stratification. This chapter considers the ensemble of these communities in the early nineteenth century. Using James Skinner's Tazkirat al-Umara, it identifies a number of powerful ra‘iyati lineages that were dominant in the region in this period. Using early correspondence of the East India Company, which had formally annexed the region in 1803 and was slowly gathering local information, this chapter then considers the coalescence and internal organization of these rural lineages. It brings their shallow hierarchies into relief, highlighting the narrow and unstable differences in status and influence between lineage elites and other members. It suggests that this tenuous stratification was the counterpart of two paradoxical tendencies that animated such lineages: the necessity to cooperate to collectively manage resources, and the ambition amongst members to establish a position of superiority within the lineage.

The weak hierarchies within ra‘iyati lineages and the circumscribed localities within which these emerged both reflected and shaped the practice of caste in the early nineteenth century. The second half of this chapter uses a close reading of Skinner's Tashrih al-Aqwam to identify some of the key aspects of this practice.

This chapter reflects upon the conditions that made southern Panjab a political and ecological frontier. The region's nature as a borderland was particularly in evidence during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Mughal imperial control receded in tandem with an efflorescence of regional polities. This fragmentation is explicable with reference to two opposing trends—the growing prosperity of rural Panjab during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and its subsequent economic stagnation. This at once facilitated the rise of ambitious new rural elites and intensified their internecine competition, as each of these fledgling states fought to attract subjects to their domains and keep them there, and to protect precious resources such as pasture and watering holes from encroachment. Yet these efforts were consistently undermined: first, by the very processes of competition to which this political efflorescence owed. Political consolidation also came up short against ecological factors. The aridity and seasonal variability of southern Panjab lent husbanding in the region a hybrid, itinerant, and opportunistic nature, which was not conducive to centralization but rather to the dispersion of authority. To illustrate the interplay of these dynamics, this chapter alternates between an analysis of enduring ecological patterns and the political context of the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries.

Local Topologies

Southern Panjab is an arid, rolling plain that roughly corresponds with the Indo- Gangetic Divide. This is the belt of land separating the river systems of the Indus and the Ganga. It is bordered on the east and southeast by the Yamuna River and the Aravalli Hills and on the north and west by the Satlaj River.