PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Tirthankar Roy is professor of economic history at the London School of Economics. Anand V. Swamy is the Willmott Family Third Century Professor of Economics at Williams College in Massachusetts. They are the coauthors of Law and the Economy in Colonial India, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Many works have studied the impact imperial institutions had on the economies and legal systems of ex-colonies, but the analysis is usually carried out at the level of aggregate outcomes. Rarely, though, do we get to see how these relationships survived the political change at independence, nor how they persisted in post-independence politics. With this book we do, and the connections-among politics, the legal system, the legacy of colonial institutions, and economic endowments and outcomes-all become clear in vivid detail. Roy and Swamy manage to do all that, yet they never lose sight of the big picture-a real achievement. -- Philip T. Hoffman, California Institute of Technology
