Cover
Debt, Trust, and Reputation
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Tables and Figures
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Part I A Tangled Jungle of Disorderly Transactions
1 Introduction
Outline of the book
A brief note on transliterations and translations
Notes
2 Contract
Trust, shame, and the reputational credit contract
Abolishing usury
The credit contract, contractual law, and capitalist finance in modern India
The reputational credit contract and liberal contractual law Towards the withdrawal of liberal contractual law from petty finance
Conclusion
Notes
3 Discretion
Damdupat and the emergence of the doctrine of unconscionable bargains
The Usurious Loans Act
Notes
4 Containment
Improper transactions
Artisanal credit
Recovering interest
The failure of cooperative credit
The dangers of facile credit
The decline of 'indigenous' banking and the struggles of 'organized' finance
Conclusion
Notes
Part II Debt in Banaras
5 Trust
Community and alien moneylenders
Trusting pests and parasites The 'most perfectly organised' model of extra-legal finance
Trust and the 'future of Indian banking'
Conclusion
Notes
6 Obligation
Shooting a lion
obligation, mercantile decline, and reputational resilience
Becoming 'old' money
The resilience of strong social ties beyond hinterland towns
Conclusion: from sakh to vishvaas
Notes
7 Disappearance
The moneylenders' vanishing act
Pristine purity of banking conceptions
Money lending as scandal
Conclusion
Notes
8 Reputation
The production of a monetary outside
The monetary outside in Banaras Pawn-broking
Petty money lending
Displacement, and getting rid of a moneylender
On the perimeters of the monetary outside
Artisanal credit in contemporary Banaras
Amateurization and sophistication
extra-legal trade credit
Gossip, trust, and reputation
Sophisticated moral hazards
Socio-spatial dimensions of the reputational economy of debt
Conclusion
Notes
9 Conclusion
Notes
Glossary
References
Index

"This book studies the evolution of financial markets operating beyond the reach of the law and without recourse to legal practices, predominantly in an urban north Indian setting centering on the city of Banaras in North India. It straddles the divide between social and economic history and economic anthropology, and is based on archival and ethnographic research conducted between 2011 and 2019. The author emphasizes the role of the Indian state in shaping credit markets and creating the division between a juridically-procedurally defined 'capitalist,' and a reputationally defined extra-legal financial market. Also highlighted is the reactions by market participants to the disappearance of both the legal and the 'traditional' enforcement mechanisms for contractual obligations, and the resulting emergence of a reputational economy dependent almost comprehensively on trust"