Making Meritocracy

Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School and the first director of Harvard's Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute.Michael Szonyi is Frank Wen-hsiung Wu Professor of Chinese History and Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.

• Acknowledgements IntroductionTarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi Philosophical 1. Political Theologies of Justice: Meritocratic Values from a Global Perspective Michael Puett 2. Merit in the Mirror of Democracy: Caste and Affirmative Action in India Ashutosh Varshney 3. Political Meritocracy in China: The Ideal versus the RealityDaniel A. Bell Historical 4. Locating Meritocracy in Early Modern Asia: Qing China and Mughal India Sudev Sheth and Lawrence LC Zhang 5. Meritocratic Empires? South Asia c.1600-1947Sumit Guha 6. Meritocracy and the Making of the Chinese Academe Redux, 1912-1952James Lee, Bamboo Yunzhu Ren, and Chen Liang (Nanjing University) Contemporary 7. The Origins and Effects of Affirmative Action Policies in India Ashwini Deshpande 8. Merit and Caste at Elite Institutions: The Case of the IIT Ajantha Subramanian 9. The National College Entrance Examination and the Myth of Meritocracy in Post-Mao ChinaZachary M. Howlett Prospective 10. The Singaporean Meritocracy: Theory, Practice and Policy Implications Vincent Chua, Randall Morck, and Bernard Yeung 11. The Merits and Limits of China's Modern UniversitiesWilliam C. Kirby 12. Reimagining Merit in India: Cognition and Affirmative ActionD Shyam Babu, Devesh Kapur, and Chandra Bhan Prasad 13. Meritocracy Enabled by Technology, Grounded in Science Varun Aggarwal AfterwordTarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi

This remarkable series of essays examines the central issue of meritocracy from a broad yet complementary set of perspectives, from the historical to the contemporary and into the future. This novel and holistic approach allows for a much deeper and more nuanced understanding of this complex topic. I highly recommend this thought-provoking book as a must-read publication for both specialist and generalist readers.