‘Some real stake in their country’: racial financial statecraft and colonial capitalism in crisis

This paper examines continuities between the present-day ‘financialization of daily life’ and a longer history of colonial interventions. Efforts to cultivate responsible financial behaviors are often analyzed as reflecting recent trends of financialization. These kinds of analyses tend both to obscure the longer history of similar interventions, and to miss out the constitutive role of race in shaping them. In pointing to these longer continuities, the paper highlights a failure-prone, yet durable, modality of ‘racial financial statecraft’. Empirically, these arguments are fleshed out by tracing out three episodes from the British Empire across the first half of the twentieth century – debates about agrarian indebtedness, efforts to build post-office savings banks, and postwar efforts to promote local purchases of colonial government bonds. Across these initiatives, British officials attributed various social, economic, and monetary problems to the supposedly deficient financial behaviors of colonized subjects, and sought to address them by encouraging greater thrift, saving habits, or responsible investment. The history traced here suggests both a need to analyze such efforts, past and present, to inculcate particular kinds of financial behavior as forms of capitalist statecraft, and a need to grapple with the constitutive role of race in shaping these interventions.