Debt, Trust and Reputation: Extra-legal Finance in Northern India

Debt, Trust and Reputation: Extra-legal Finance in Northern India
Starting in the late nineteenth century, colonial rule in India took an active interest in regulating financial markets beyond the bridgeheads of European capital in intercontinental trade. Regulatory efforts were part of a modernizing project seeking to produce alignments between British and Indian business procedures, and to create the financial basis for incipient industrialization in India. For vast sections of Indian society, however, they pushed credit/debt relations into the realm of extra-legality, while the new, regulated agents of finance remained incapable (and unwilling) of serving their needs.
Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, the book questions underlying assumptions of modernization in finance that continue to prevail in postcolonial India, and delineates the socioeconomic responses they produced, and studies the reputational economies of debt that have emerged instead – extra-legal markets embedded into communication flows on trust and reputation that have turned out to be significantly more exploitative than their colonial predecessors.

Author/Editor

Sebastian Schwecke

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

ISBN

978-1-316-51726-0

Publication date

1 Jan 2022 – 30 Nov 2022

Specialisation

Social Sciences

Theme

Society
Other
History
Economy

Region

South Asia
India