This book chronicles how the concept of organizing people to serve economic ends emerged in early modern and colonial India. It examines rules of cooperation, why people decided to join forces, how disputes were settled, and how cooperative communities became increasingly unstable in more modern times. It focuses on five dimensions: actor, agent, time, purpose, and region. '[A] real tour de force .. a creditable attempt to present a connected and conceptualized narrative of the great transition in the Indian economy from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.' Claude Markovits (Economic History Review)