About the Book: Debt, Trust, and Reputation
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