Mircea Raianu

I am a historian of capitalism and economic life broadly construed, with a primary focus on the intellectual and legal history of corporations as institutions. 

My current book project, tentatively entitled Giving Away the Company: Global Experiments with Common Ownership under Capitalism, explores the creation of alternative forms of corporate organization through transnational exchanges of ideas and legal techniques between the late 1920s and the early 1980s. It centers on the Scott Bader Commonwealth, a British chemicals company converted by its founder into an employee-owned enterprise, drawing in part on Mohandas K. Gandhi’s concept of “trusteeship.” Other case studies include utopian “communities of labor,” producer cooperatives, factory occupations and worker self-management, transfers of assets to philanthropic foundations, and employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), mainly in North America and Western Europe. Separately, I am working on a smaller project about the origins and evolution of “intermediate technology” from development critique to practices of resilience and innovation in the context of economic, energy, and climate crises. 

My first book, Tata: The Global Corporation that Built Indian Capitalism (Harvard University Press, 2021), examined India’s largest and most influential business group from the mid-19th to the late 20thc. It showed how private capital played a key role in the construction of the national economy, alternately acting in concert with and in opposition to the state. In parallel, I published a series of related journal articles and edited volume chapters on urban history, economic thought, and artistic production.

At Maryland, I teach courses on global capitalism, modern South Asia, and the Indian Ocean world. I have also been affiliated with the Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets at the Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Note to prospective graduate students: I am open to advising MA and PhD projects mainly in the history of capitalism. Applicants interested in South Asia must have a strong comparative or transnational aspect to their research.