Manufacturing Power: The Everyday Politics of Privilege Among the Pakistani Business Elite

Abstract

This thesis interrogates the operation of modern capitalism within a context of political instability and economic inequality. In doing so, it examines the relationship between power, instability, informal processes, and the accumulation of vast amounts of capital. Specifically, this thesis is about the process of acquiring, maintaining, and wielding economic power in Pakistan – an industrialising economy beset by high levels of political change and economic insecurity. Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis examines the group of families who occupy the upper-most tier of the economic and social structure, the means through which they have acquired and protected power and influence, and the challenges non-elite individuals face in attaining upward social mobility in developing countries. In contrast to studies that examine the ways in which global economic integration creates new avenues for the capture of wealth, privilege and political influence, my research demonstrates that forms of “hyper-capitalism” have not come to dominate markets globally. Rather, in many contexts, commerce remains governed by highly personalised and intimate relations determined by local cultural practices. I show that business in Pakistan has remained resiliently “local,” and dependent upon deeply rooted familial, ethnic and class structures. Localised elite business practices remain substantially independent from the “international standards” of business propagated by multinational corporations, international investors, and the international market. In this context, the resilience of local forms of business constitutes not only a site of interlinked personal, gendered and economic processes, but also a site of post-colonial assertiveness. This thesis explores the informal means through which elites navigate their social, marital and business environments to reconstitute their power in line with shifting economic and political conditions. Despite the economic transformations that have taken place in Pakistan over the past seventy years, and the shifts in social structure these changes have engendered, the Pakistani elite has routinely fortified and reconstituted the power and privilege of its members in a shared pursuit of profit and market dominance. The resilience of these modes of doing business reflect the inability of international forms of global capital to successfully re-colonise local markets and extract the nationally- generated wealth now held by domestic elites.