The Kabuliwalas: Afghan moneylending and the credit cosmopolis of British India, c. 1880–1947

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-198
Author(s):  
H William Warner
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British India ◽  
Informal Finance ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Banking Networks

Immortalised 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 moneylending 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.

Late Nineteenth-Century American Retardation: A Neoclassical Analysis

1973 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-607 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey G. Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
Output Growth ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Real Output ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Nominal Interest Rates ◽  
Late Nineteenth

English growth experience from the 1860's to the 1890's has been the source of continued research and debate. Judged by the recent contributions of McCloskey, the intensity of the debate has diminished little over the past seventy-five years. The period has long been identified in the literature as the “Great Depression.” It has been well established that the decades up to 1896 were characterized by declining general price levels, declining nominal interest rates, and serious retardation in aggregate real output growth. These are not merely figments of historical research since they were subjects of contemporary observation as well.

TURNING FARMERS INTO SOCIAL FARMER ENTREPRENEURS FOR DISADVANTAGED PEOPLE

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Remus Runcan
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Physical Work ◽  
Healthy Environment ◽  
Rural And Urban Areas ◽  
Rural Development Programme ◽  
Rural And Urban

According to Romania’s National Rural Development Programme, the socio-economic situation of the rural environment has a large number of weaknesses – among which low access to financial resources for small entrepreneurs and new business initiatives in rural areas and poorly developed entrepreneurial culture, characterized by a lack of basic managerial knowledge – but also a large number of opportunities – among which access of the rural population to lifelong learning and entrepreneurial skills development programmes and entrepreneurs’ access to financial instruments. The population in rural areas depends mainly on agricultural activities which give them subsistence living conditions. The gap between rural and urban areas is due to low income levels and employment rates, hence the need to obtain additional income for the population employed in subsistence and semi-subsistence farming, especially in the context of the depopulation trend. At the same time, the need to stimulate entrepreneurship in rural areas is high and is at a resonance with the need to increase the potential of rural communities from the perspective of landscape, culture, traditional activities and local resources. A solution could be to turn vegetal and / or animal farms into social farms – farms on which people with disabilities (but also adolescents and young people with anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide, and alexithymia issues) might find a “foster” family, bed and meals in a natural, healthy environment, and share the farm’s activities with the farmer and the farmer’s family: “committing to a regular day / days and times for a mutually agreed period involves complying with any required health and safety practices (including use of protective clothing and equipment), engaging socially with the farm family members and other people working on and around the farm, and taking on tasks which would include working on the land, taking care of animals, or helping out with maintenance and other physical work”

Local Color, World-System; or, American Realism at the Periphery

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-118
Author(s):  
Mark Storey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sarah Orne Jewett ◽  
Local Color ◽  
The Core ◽  
Hamlin Garland ◽  
Peripheral Position

This chapter employs recent approaches to the study of world literature to offer a new reading of nineteenth-century American regionalism. The huge body of texts usually included in the regional or “local-color” genre often take rural communities as both subject matter and foregrounded setting, communities that are held in a structurally “peripheral” position within the combined and uneven world economy of the late nineteenth century. This chapter argues that such a position is registered in the genre’s distinctive oscillation between realist and “irrealist” literary modes—between the professionalized and ascendant cultural standard of the core and the persistence of nonrealist generic devices and registers. Calling on two of the genre’s quintessential representatives, Hamlin Garland and Sarah Orne Jewett, the chapter ultimately makes a case for reading local-color writing as a form of (semi)peripheral realism within world literature’s expanded geographical and temporal horizons.

Locating the politics of a Sierra Leonean chiefdom

Africa ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 558-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Fanthorpe
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Sierra Leonean ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Breeding Grounds ◽  
Primary Means

The chiefdoms of Sierra Leone are institutions of colonial origin but nevertheless continue to serve as local government units in the post-colonial state. The prevailing view among scholars is that these institutions have little basis in indigenous political culture, and have furthermore become breeding grounds of political corruption. This view has tended to elide anthropological analysis of internal chiefdom politics. However, it is argued in this article that such conclusions are premature. With reference to the Biriwa Limba chiefdom of northern Sierra Leone, it is shown that historical precedent, in many cases relating to prominent political figures of the late nineteenth century, continues to serve as a primary means of ordering local rights in land, settlement and political representation. This phenomenon is not a product of innate conservatism but emerges rather as a pragmatic response to the persistent failure of successive Sierra Leone administrations to extend modern measures of citizenship to the bulk of the rural populace. Rights and properties have become progressively localised in villages originally registered for tax collection in the early colonial era. Here one finds one of the most telling legacies of the British policy of indirect rule in post-colonial Sierra Leone.

scholarly journals Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant": Reflections on Imperialism and Neoimperialism

IIUC Studies ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 55-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed Sarwar Alam
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
World History ◽  
George Orwell ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World ◽  
Ultimate Objective

Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over last four or five centuries. The world has moved from the colonial to post-colonial era or neoimperialism. Throughout the period, the imperialists have changed their grounds and strategies in imperialistic rules. But the ultimate objective has remained the same- to rule and exploit the natives with their multifaceted dominance-technological, economic and military. Through dominance with these, they have been, to a great extent, successful in establishing their racial and cultural superiority. George Orwell is popularly known to be an anti-imperialist writer. This paper, I believe, will lead us to an almost different conclusion. Here, we discover the inevitable dilemma in a disguised imperialist. We discover the seeds of imperialism under the mask of anti-imperialism. In this regard, it studies his revealing short story "Shooting an Elephant". It also humbly approaches to refute Barry Hindess' arguments supporting neoimperialism.   doi: 10.3329/iiucs.v3i0.2664   IIUC STUDIES Vol. - 3, December 2006 (p 5-62)  

scholarly journals The Gendered Path for Girls in Rural Communities: The Impact of COVID-19 on Youth Presenting at Juvenile Detention Facilities

2021 ◽  
pp. 001112872110226
Author(s):  
April N. Terry ◽  
Ashley Lockwood ◽  
Morgan Steele ◽  
Megan Milner
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Juvenile Justice ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Juvenile Detention ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems ◽  
Court Processing ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Detention Facilities

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, girls and women represented one of the fastest growing populations within the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Since the spread of COVID-19, suggestions were provided to juvenile justice bodies, encouraging a reduction of youth arrests, detainments, and quicker court processing. Yet, the research comparing peri-COVID-19 changes for girls and boys is lacking, with an oversight to gender trends and rural and urban differences. This study used Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center (JIAC) data from a rural Midwestern state to look at rural and urban location trends for both boys and girls. Results suggest rural communities are responding differently to girls’ behaviors, revealing a slower decline in intakes compared to boys and youth in urban areas.

The Development of the National Money Market, 1893-1911

1976 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 878-897 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. James
Keyword(s):  
Interest Rates ◽  
Capital Requirements ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capital Asset Pricing ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Asset Pricing Model ◽  
Minimum Capital ◽  
Commercial Paper ◽  
National Bank ◽  
Portfolio Selection Model

In this article the convergence of U.S. interregional interest rates in the late nineteenth century is examined and two major hypotheses are tested in the framework of a bank portfolio selection model based on the capital-asset-pricing model. Both the spread of the commercial paper market and the lowering of entry barriers through the reduction of national bank minimum capital requirements are rejected as principal explanations. The erosion of local monopoly power is shown to have been of central importance, and this development was due to the growth of state rather than national banks.

scholarly journals Shifts in US Federal Reserve Goals and Tactics for Monetary Policy: A Role for Penitence?

2013 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julio J Rotemberg
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Policy ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Federal Reserve ◽  
Bank Loans ◽  
The Great Depression

This paper considers some of the large changes in the Federal Reserve's approach to monetary policy. It shows that, in some important cases, critics who were successful in arguing that past Fed approaches were responsible for mistakes that caused harm succeeded in making the Fed averse to these approaches. This can explain why the Fed stopped basing monetary policy on the quality of new bank loans, why it stopped being willing to cause recessions to deal with inflation, and why it was temporarily unwilling to maintain stable interest rates in the period 1979–1982. It can also contribute to explaining why monetary policy was tight during the Great Depression. The paper shows that the evolution of policy was much more gradual and flexible after the Volcker disinflation, when the Fed was not generally deemed to have made an error.

scholarly journals Barn Adaptation: A Proposal To Protect Rural Architecture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley D. Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Greater Toronto Area ◽  
Area Of Interest ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Precious Resource ◽  
Suburban Development ◽  
Prime Farmland ◽  
Rural Architecture ◽  
Development Approach

The countryside that surrounds the Greater Toronto Area possesses a significant amount of Canada's prime farmland. However, to accommodate urban growth, this precious resource is being converted to provide urban developments. The area of interest for this thesis is the rural-urban fringe, a zone of transition between working farms, rural communities and urban residential developments. The developments that are built in this area illustrate a common development approach, the elimination of all obstacles, including farmland and rural architecture. This thesis introduces the concept of an alternative approach for suburban development, one that presents a compromise between rural and urban needs. At the heart of this concept is the design project, the adaptive reuse of a barn that serves as a tool to communicate the unique qualities of these monumental buildings. It also identifies the need to rethink suburban development approaches to include the preservation of rural architecture and prime farmland.

scholarly journals The reality of rurality : parent experiences with best start in two rural communities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerri Graham
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Service Delivery ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Care Service ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Systems Perspective ◽  
Parent Experiences ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Rural Service Delivery

Human services literature from a variety of disciplines demonstrates that rural and urban communities pose different challenges and opportunities for service delivery; however, little research specifically explores early learning and care service delivery in rural communities. This qualitative study draws on a critical ecological systems perspective to examine the experiences of rural parents accessing services through a specific service delivery strategy, Best Start networks. Thematic analysis was used to analyze data gathered from two rural communities as part of a larger study examining parent experiences with Best Start in three communities across Ontario (Underwood, Killoran, & Webster, 2010). Three themes emerged that related specifically to the rural experience: (a) Opportunities for Social Interaction; (b) Accessibility of Services; and, (c) Impact of Personal Relationships. Results indicate that certain factors related to rural life and location affected parents' experiences with Best Start services. Drawing on the broadly defined concept of accessibility, implications for rural service delivery are discussed and recommendations for practice and future research are presented.

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