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Ignored both by the literature on international migration and by the literature on immigrant entrepreneurship, highly skilled immigrants from India do not see themselves as “ethnic” entrepreneurs using “ethnic” resources to set up and expand their business ventures. Instead, they view their actions as “being no different from the native population,”1 in the words of an Indian software Entrepreneur.
Chapter 2, “Science, Technology and the Indian State: Colonial Policies and Postcolonial Aspirations,” takes a step back in the sequence of chapters in order to move a step ahead. An anomalous feature of India’s development policies is that the country produces both the highest number of science and technology personnel of any developing society while simultaneously making India hold the ignominious position of the nation with the largest number of illiterates anywhere in the world. The answer to the anomaly lies in the aspirations of postcolonial India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to set India on a course of importsubstitution development, with vigorous promotion of heavy industries, and a concomitant emphasis on creating governmentsponsored institutions of higher learning in science and technology. The imperative behind the postcolonial embrace of Western science was the British colonial project.
Chapter 3, “Transnationalism Among Indian Software Entrepreneurs: New Modes of immigrant Adaptation,” places the rise of Entrepreneurship among Indian immigrants within the emerging and growing body of literature on transnationalism. Focusing on the new ways in which immigrant entrepreneurs are engaging with their origin and destination countries, thereby altering traditional modes of immigrant incorporation, research on transnationalism has moved the field in line with issues of globalization, since immigrant business practices are increasingly being conducted in more than one local, and even national, context.