000			02025nam a22001577a 4500
999			_c514447 _d514447
008			201102b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100			_aWarner, H. William. _920810
245			_aThe kabuliwalas: Afghan monenylending and the credit cosmoplis of British India, c. 1880-1947
260			_aThe Indian Economic And Social History Review
300			_a57(2), Apr-Jun, 2020: p. 171-198
520			_aImmortalised in Rabindranath Tagore's short story The Kabuliwala, the Afghan moneylender has appeared in many studies about rural and urban India as an unwanted interloper. This article presents an alternative picture. From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, Afghans regularly visited the financial frontiers of British India where they offered collateral-free loans with high interest rates to urban and rural communities on the fringes of respectable creditors, such as banks, cooperative societies and banking networks. More than simply predatory, Afghan moneylenders provided a micro-financial service when and where no one else would. As a result, Afghan money lending operations, considered as a whole, provide insight into the cosmopolitan nature of credit relationships among the working poor in the colonial era and how social and cultural notions informed not only those relationships but also how the imperial government and its allies understood them. Beginning with the Great Depression, novel legal regimes emerged around the subcontinent aimed at eradicating Afghan moneylending and solving the social problems associated with it. In the process, the intrusion of the state into informal finance via regulation hampered deep historical patterns of interregional social connectivity and redefined the cosmopolitanism of credit relations in the informal sectors of the economy.- Reproduced
650			_aMigration; Frontiers, Borderlands; Money lending; British India _919130
773			_aThe Indian Economic And Social History Review
906			_aMONEY LENDING
942			_cAR