Editors
- Himadri Roy Chaudhuri, Xavier School of Business (XLRI)
- Mark Tadajewski, University of York
- Andrew Perchard, Otago Business School, University of Otago
- Zoi Pittaki, University of Dundee School of Business
Description
This special issue examines Indigenous entrepreneurial agency under colonial rule, treating colonial institutions as both economic constraints and sociopolitical structures that shaped market access, legal standing and accumulation strategies.
It invites business historical accounts of how entrepreneurs in colonised societies navigated, contested and reworked the rules of commerce, especially where access to courts, licensing, property rights, banking and credit markets was restricted or selectively enforced.
Contributions drawing on primary sources such as company records, court records, licensing files, banking archives, trading accounts, petitions, newspapers and vernacular-language materials are particularly encouraged.
Potential topics
- Entrepreneurship under legal and financial exclusion: responses to constraints in courts, licensing, taxation, banking, property rights, labour regimes and credit markets.
- Institutional negotiation and boundary work: how entrepreneurial actors exploited institutional gaps, navigated plural legal orders, reinterpreted colonial rules and mobilised intermediaries or brokers.
- Resilience as strategy: cooperative, mutual-aid and associational forms; diasporic, kinship and inter-regional networks; and late-colonial economic nationalism and early decolonisation as sites of institutional reconfiguration.
- Innovation as resistance: technology adoption and adaptation through which entrepreneurs offered alternatives that subverted or circumvented colonial hegemony.
- Comparative or connected histories that use the shared conceptual lens across cases.
- Submissions may use archival research, oral history, biography, microhistory, and comparative or connected history, and may engage postcolonial scholarship, subaltern studies, and critical perspectives on firms, markets and institutions.