Spanning the period from 1850 to 1950, this dissertation is a study of three processes: 1) the religious and commercial institutions created by Indian Muslims to participate in circuits of regional and global capitalism; 2) intra-Muslim debates concerning Islamic law, customary practice, and the norms and institutions of modern capitalism; 3) the rise of an anti-capitalist discourse of ‘Islamic economics’ which provided the framework for the postcolonial birth of the Islamic finance industry. By situating Indian Muslim economic life in a geographic frame stretching from the Balkans to Burma, and using sources in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu, this dissertation represents a significant empirical intervention. At the same time, rather than resorting to the normative, ahistorical categories of Islam typical in studies of ‘Islam and capitalism,’ this dissertation utilizes the dual frameworks of political and religious economy to zoom in on the panoply of Muslim commercial and religious ‘firms’ that operated in this space. The study of these firms highlights the very real tensions - between law and custom, colonial capital and local enterprise, religious competition and appeals to Muslim unity - that modulated Indian Muslim commercial life.

Four arguments are deduced from the study of these firms. Firstly, there was substantial intra-Muslim economic disparities throughout the colonial period, which call into question the typical argument of a ‘Hindu-Muslim wealth gap,’ a formulation that ignores the economic links between Muslim and non-Muslims. Secondly, the success of select Indian Muslim firms was contingent upon the initial mobilization of local religious institutions needed to enter the market as a competitive player, followed by the creation of lasting relationships of trust with non-Muslims. Thirdly, there was immense internal disagreement among firms over whether the Islamic legal tradition must supply a benchmark for commerce, which spawned competing behavioral norms and institutional trajectories. Lastly, the rise of an all-India Muslim politics showcased the dissonance between different forms of Muslim capitalism. This precipitated a highly charged struggle over what an ‘authentic’ Muslim economic life entailed. Ultimately, these rival visions and the firms that espoused them were central to the so-called ‘Great Convergence,’ the process whereby the economic disparities perpetuated by nineteenth-century colonialism and globalization were negotiated and mitigated.

This dissertation focuses upon peripatetic, godly and technologically advanced Muslim miracle-workers or pawangs who operated upon and were pivotal to rice, mining, game and armed frontiers in 19th and early 20th century Malaya. It is written with an understanding that a study of miracle-workers is fruitful in terms of providing a microcosm of the characteristics of particular socioeconomic stratums and socioeconomic trends. Redressing the conspicuous academic silence on these key historical agents, this dissertation explores how a variety of socioeconomic activities in 19th and early 20th century Malaya were premised and dependent upon the miraculous expertise of pawangs; namely agricultural colonization, forest clearing, rice production, alluvial tin and gold mining, elephant trapping and the bearing of hand-held firearms. Moreover, this dissertation elaborates upon how such a historical analysis of miracles or miraculous expertise is revelatory of sophisticated cosmopolitan worlds wherein miracle-workers capitalized upon their predominance within subaltern communities as spectacular intercessors of eclectic supernatural beings, and the patronage networks of indigenous and non-indigenous entrepreneurs engaged in extracting the natural resources of the Peninsula.

My doctoral dissertation, “Knowledge-Migrants between South Asia and Europe: The Production of Technical and Scientific Ideas among Students and Scientists, 1919-1945,” analyzes the role of Afghan students and German scientists in producing and exchanging ideas about fine arts, medicine, political ideologies, and science. The main goal of my dissertation is to address, using case studies, what the role of travel and circulation was in producing ideas among Afghans in Germany and Germans in Afghanistan, how ideas emerged, which institutions and practices were involved in producing these ideas, and how these ideas circulated and impacted the social and intellectual fabric of Europe and South Asia. My dissertation argues that the resultant knowledge among these actors was neither fixed nor systematic, but rather a practical activity that was located in the routines of everyday life. These everyday practices are, in turn, important to examine because they uncover overlapping and shared intellectual, material, and political networks that circulated ideas further afield than just within the respective national bounds of Afghanistan, India, or Germany.