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Dhirubhai Ambani, a village schoolteacher's son from Chorwad in Gujarat, worked in Aden for A. Besse & Co., a trading firm that distributed Shell products. He returned to Bombay in 1958 with little capital and began trading yarn and spices. Within about three decades he had built Reliance into one of India's largest private companies, running from textile mills through polyester, petrochemicals and eventually oil refining.
In a licence-permit economy, profit depended heavily on securing the right quota, duty classification, capacity approval or timing of a policy change, not only on efficient production. McDonald shows Reliance reading, anticipating and shaping ministry decisions in Delhi as a central part of its rise, alongside its ability to build and run plants quickly.
Reliance moved step by step from weaving cloth to polyester fibre and yarn, then feedstocks such as PTA, then petrochemicals and finally refining. At each stage it captured margins that tariffs and licensing gave domestic producers of that input. Each new plant also required its own government approvals, so its dealings with policymakers grew alongside its scale.
Reliance's 1977 public issue and later debenture issues drew millions of small investors into equity. Annual meetings were held in stadiums, and share prices were treated as a public good. That mass shareholder base let Reliance raise capital outside the state-controlled bank credit system. It also made any official action against the company look like an attack on ordinary savers.
In 1982 a group of Calcutta-based brokers short-sold Reliance shares, expecting that under the carry-forward system settlement could simply be deferred. Buyers allied with Reliance demanded physical delivery and cash settlement, turning the short sellers' position into a squeeze. The Bombay Stock Exchange closed for three days. The episode showed that controlling the counterparty side of a trade can defeat a bet on falling prices.
In the early 1980s, companies registered in the Isle of Man and similar places, some with names like Fiasco and Crocodile, bought large blocks of Reliance shares under schemes for non-resident Indian investment. The book argues that the owners and source of these funds were never convincingly shown. Loosened foreign-investment rules thereby became a channel through which money of uncertain origin could support a favoured company's stock.
Reliance's rivalry with Nusli Wadia of Bombay Dyeing, including over a competing polyester feedstock plant, merged with a sustained Indian Express campaign under Ramnath Goenka against Reliance's dealings. That campaign coincided with V.P. Singh's finance ministry pursuing investigations and raids. The conflict showed that under the licence raj, business rivalry was fought through newspapers, investigating agencies and ministerial allies rather than on price.