000			01772nam a22001457a 4500
999			_c514733 _d514733
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100			_aMathew, Nisha. _921646
245			_aAt the crossroads of empire and nation-state: Partition, gold smuggling, and port cities in the western Indian ocean
260			_aModern Asian Studies
300			_a 54(3), May, 2020: p.898-929
520			_aThis article investigates gold smuggling in the twentieth-century western Indian Ocean. It illustrates how gold, condemned as a ‘barbarous relic’ by international monetary economists and central banks in the immediate post-war period, created an economy in the intermediate zone between a retreating empire and emerging nation-states in India and the Persian Gulf. Bombay and Dubai—connected by mercantile networks, trading dhows, migrants, and ‘smugglers’—were the principal constituencies and key drivers of this trans-regional economy. Partition and the concomitant flight of Indian mercantile capital into Dubai becomes the key to unlocking the many dimensions of smuggling, including its social organization and ethnic constitution. Looked at in such terms, gold smuggling reveals a transnational side to both partition and the post-colonial history of Bombay which has drawn little critical attention from historians. Consequently, it expands the analytic space necessary to explain how Dubai was able to capitalize on the arbitrage possibilities offered by import regulations in India, tap into the global networks of trade and finance, and chart its own course of development as a modern urban space throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. - Reproduced
773			_aModern Asian Studies
906			_aSMUGGLING - INDIAN OCEAN REGION
942			_cAR