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

Combining history and ethnography, it traces the evolution of extra-legality in modern Indian finance and its socioeconomic ramifications.

Sebastian Schwecke (Author)

9781316517260, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 June 2022

384 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.8 cm, 0.64 kg

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.

List of tables
List of figures
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Part I. A Tangled Jungle of Disorderly Transactions: 1. Introduction
2. Contract
3. Discretion
4. Containment
Part II. Debt in Banaras: 5. Trust
6. Obligation
7. Disappearance
8. Reputation
9. Conclusion
List of references
Index.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Political economy [KCP], Development economics & emerging economies [KCM], Sociology [JHB], Sociology & anthropology [JH], Development studies [GTF]