Locked in Place

Vivek Chibber's Locked in Place is a brilliant, benchmark study of the developmental state and its dilemmas. Over the past two decades there has been a steady move away from systematic class analysis of state strategies toward state-centric approaches. Chibber decisively "brings class back in" in a nuanced and penetrating investigation of how class strategies constrain and intersect the institutional logics of developmental states. -- Erik Olin Wright, University of Wisconsin, author of "Class Counts" and "Class, Crisis and the State" A truly outstanding book. Chibber presents a novel, powerful, and controversial central thesis that will be of great interest to scholars in the field. He beautifully elaborates the expected consequences of this thesis for comparative historical cases, and presents two critically important, contrasting cases to great effect, with lucidity and elan. The empirical matter is substantial, but is always presented economically and with modesty. The text is extremely well written. The provocative conclusions will, as they should, unquestionably stimulate a raft of further questions and new research. -- Robert Brenner This book is an excellent piece of scholarship and an important contribution both to the ongoing comparative debate on the role of the state in development and to our understanding of India as a significant and weighty case within that debate. Marked by careful, detailed historical research and unrelenting engagement with general analytical issues, it will be an invaluable resource for future scholars trying to understand the emergence of the post-colonial state in India. -- Peter Evans, author of "Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation"

Why were some countries able to build developmental states after World War II while others were not? This book argues that the critical factor was the reaction of domestic capitalists to the state-building project. It shows that the insufficient state capacity stemmed mainly from Indian industrialists' campaign against a developmental state.Why were some countries able to build "developmental states" in the decades after World War II while others were not? Through a richly detailed examination of India's experience, Locked in Place argues that the critical factor was the reaction of domestic capitalists to the state-building project. During the 1950s and 1960s, India launched an extremely ambitious and highly regarded program of state-led development. But it soon became clear that the Indian state lacked the institutional capacity to carry out rapid industrialization. Drawing on newly available archival sources, Vivek Chibber mounts a forceful challenge to conventional arguments by showing that the insufficient state capacity stemmed mainly from Indian industrialists' massive campaign, in the years after Independence, against a strong developmental state. Chibber contrasts India's experience with the success of a similar program of state-building in South Korea, where political elites managed to harness domestic capitalists to their agenda. He then develops a theory of the structural conditions that can account for the different reactions of Indian and Korean capitalists as rational responses to the distinct development models adopted in each country. Provocative and marked by clarity of prose, this book is also the first historical study of India's post-colonial industrial strategy. Emphasizing the central role of capital in the state-building process, and restoring class analysis to the core of the political economy of development, Locked in Place is an innovative work of theoretical power that will interest development specialists, political scientists, and historians of the subcontinent.