invited similar questions more than a century earlier, as they built the canals and railroads and steamships through which America grew. In their own eras all were pilloried as corrupt and avaricious. Over time, all have gradually been rehabilitated as masters of new technology and pioneers of industrial change rather than robber barons – the embodiment of what economist Joseph Schumpeter would later call ‘the perennial gale of creative destruction’.55 In time Ambani and his fellow Bollygarchs may come to be viewed in this way too, as the details of their methods fade but the scale of their
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