Financing Development: Capital and Languages of Self-Improvement in South Asia

About

Talk by Meghna Chaudhuri (History, Davidson College)

In this talk, I will present research that clues us into reframing the agrarian in colonial, and early post-colonial South Asia - as not merely a space where material production of grain and food occurs but as a key site of experiments with finance capital going back to the 1870s. If we all understand the agrarian as the object of “development”, whether from a post-World War II moment or earlier, in the 19th century as I argue – then we also must wonder why this “development” sits alongside an ever-increasing immiseration of rural populations across the global South. I argue that the 1870s marks a shift towards financial logic of governance in South Asia. The talk will zoom in on attempted experiments by the colonial state with Agricultural Banks in the late-nineteenth century and on South Asian vernacular political economy and its argument for swadeshi banks in the early-twentieth century. By focusing in on the languages of self-improvement that connected these disparate developments, this talk outlines my larger argument about the crucial interrelation between the agrarian and finance-led global development. In fact, the paradoxical coming together of a new financial logic of extractive accumulation with the language of developmentalism discloses the hidden logics tying impersonal, abstract structures of the global economy to ideological and intellectual trends.

Meghna Chaudhuri is James B. Duke Assistant Professor of History at Davidson College and is a fellow at the Davis Center for Historical Research at Princeton University for 2026-27. She is currently working on her book Invisible Attachments: Finance, Development and Subjectify in South Asia, 1830-1950. She completed her PhD with Distinction at NYU in 2020. Her research interests lie at the intersection of histories of science, political economy and historical capitalism. She is particularly interested in fictitious capital, and the question of representation that materializes itself, as often seems to be the case with financial value. Coming out of her first project, her second book project will explore Bombay’s historically shaped form of urbanism and the consistent relationship between its spatial expanse and financial foundation through land reclamation schemes and financial bubbles over two centuries.

Cosponsored by the Cañizares Center for Emerging Markets, Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition, and Department of Economics.