Colonial mimicry and organizational learning: Historical imprints on Indian and Chinese indigenous business groups

This study adopts a historical-comparative lens to show how colonial legacies matter for international business. Different colonial regimes produced distinct market structures that continue to shape the market intermediaries and internationalization templates of contemporary business groups. Under mercantilist logic, chartered monopoly companies operated through a concentrated, vertically organized market structure that channeled fiscal and commercial rents to the metropole and projected diaspora merchant networks across imperial trade corridors. Under the imperialism of free-trade logic, rival imperial powers opened consumer markets through treaty-port regimes and a compradorial system of merchandising that stitched fragmented, horizontally competitive markets together without full territorial annexation. We theorize colonial mimicry as the transmission mechanism. Comparing Indian and Chinese indigenous business groups, we develop propositions showing how colonial market structures and regimes imprinted persistently distinct patterns of liability-of-foreignness mitigation, transaction governance architecture, and internationalization logic, advancing the "history matters" agenda from macro correlation to firm-level mechanism.