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

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 population