How the Bohra, Khoja, and Memon communities of Gujarati Muslims became formidable at business

The fracturing of Mughal power over the course of the 18th century had assorted regional effects throughout the subcontinent, ushering in a volatile mixture of market expansion and rapid political turnover. As historians writing on late Mughal North India have shown, the weakening of central Mughal power fostered the conditions for an assortment of parvenu entrepreneurs and social groups to vie for abundant, albeit hotly contested, political and mercantile resources.6 Although conforming to patterns seen elsewhere on the subcontinent, Western India was arguably an exceptional case, for there a matrix of corporate merchant power, state fiscalism, and political polycentrism coalesced (and persisted, albeit to a lesser degree, after the colonial conquest), with few parallels in other parts of South Asia.

At the risk of oversimplification, while in the second half of the 18th century, the Mughal successor states in the north, south, and east of the subcontinent tended to be expansive entities covering large tracts of territory, in Western India the political map was far more disjointed. Alongside the heavies like the Afghans, the Marathas, the Sikhs, and the British East India Company stood innumerable smaller potentates of Rajput origin whose dynasties survived until the end of colonial rule as princes...

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