Laura Bear is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics, UK. For nineteen years, she has carried out archival and ethnographic research in India, especially West Bengal. She is the author of Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy and the Intimate Historical Self (2007), the forthcoming Navigating Austerity: State Debt and Speculation on a South Asian River (2014), and the novel The Jadu House (2000). She is a member of the Core Editorial Board for Economy and Society. This volume developed from her leadership (with Professor Stephan Feuchtwang) of the Economic and Social Research Council-funded research network and seminar series ‘Conflicts in Time: Rethinking “Contemporary” Globalization’.