Sheetal Chhabria's Making the Modern Slum requires the reader to dismiss a core assumption behind much of urban history. This is the assumption that the city—any city—is a preformed object, something through which power “operates,” a spatial container with pregiven insides and outsides, self-contained enough to be a “character in a plot” (8–9). In five well-argued chapters, Chhabria instead shows how Bombay, the “city,” was produced as an “effect” of contingent, iterative processes driven by the needs of capital (179).

Early in the book Chhabria argues that precolonial Bombay was a long-standing node in an extensive “rurban complex” (historian Frank Perlin's term), one that stretched across premodern Eurasia, linking “agrarian and industrial functions, monetary production and credit, documentary practices and organizational forms” in such a way as to provide institutional continuity to the movement of people, goods, and political authority (28). Though the East India Company built a walled fortress...

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