Criminal Capital

Andrew Sanchez is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent, UK. After completing his PhD in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2009, he was LSE Fellow from 2009 to 2012, and Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology from 2012 to 2014. His writings on class, labour and corruption have been published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Critique of Anthropology, Modern Asian Studies and a number of reports and edited volumes. He is currently conducting an ethnographic study of the Indian scrap metal trade.

‘Criminalisation of politics and corruption are by far the most discussed, but least understood, topics in India. Andrew Sanchez has achieved a remarkable analytical tour de force in this masterfully researched and sharply insightful study that convincingly alters the way in which we conceive of the role of crime and the meanings of corruption in India's contemporary capitalism and democracy.’ — Nandini Gooptu, Associate Professor of South Asian Studies, University of Oxford‘Criminal Capital tells an Indian tale of global relevance — what happens when economic liberalisation encourages firms to focus on profit in an era of global competition. The result is workers with little hope of security, and unions, companies and politicians with little sense of obligation to anyone but themselves.’ — James Carrier, Research Associate, Oxford Brookes University‘Class and labour are back in vogue. Andrew Sanchez’s rich local ethnography of Jamshedpur, the quintessential company town around the Tata corporation, India, is shot through with global comparison and universalising insight. He shows how an ever more casualised local working class explains its condition with ideas of systemic corruption, and why those ideas make sense. A fantastic contribution to Indian labour ethnography as well as to global comparative class analysis.’ — Don Kalb, Professor of Social Anthropology, Central European University

• Part I: Class & Capitalism 1. Criminal Capital 2. Dispossession and the Class Concept in Industrial India Part II: Power & Enterprise 3. The Political Economy of Criminal Enterprise 4. The Decline of Collective Action Part III: Division and Change 5. Ethnic Violence and the Daily Politics of Labour 6. Continuity and the Casualisation of Labour Conclusion