Ripples of Partition

Abstract Widely understood as the culmination of anti-colonial struggle, the establishment in August 1947 of territorial formulations of India and Pakistan sundered economic linkages across and beyond the subcontinent. In Bombay, typically not considered an important locus for violence related to imperial retreat, the nationalist Indian Merchants’ Chamber (IMC), regrouping a range of trading interests, continued to lobby well after August 1947 for the continuation of commercial and economic relations across the postcolonial borders of India and Pakistan. Concomitant efforts to preserve IMC members’ economic linkages to Burma and British East Africa point to Bombay businessmen's concerns about the curtailment of British India's extraterritorial economic space, which had developed during the colonial period.