Ritu Birla is an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto. With expertise on South Asia, she works on histories and theories of capitalism, law, and governing; postcolonial genealogies of market society; and the legal fictions that make modern economic subjects and socialities. She is the author of Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (2009), winner of the 2010 Albion Book Prize awarded by the North American Conference on British Studies.