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Book Review: Local Suppliers of Credit in Third World, 1750-1960
Working paper
Karla Hoff
April 1995 |
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As Douglass North and Robert Thomas argued in The Rise of the Western World (1973), “innovation,economies of scale, education, capital accumulation . . . are not causes of growth; they are growth.” In this view, the research agenda in development economics should be to uncover the sources of the development of institutions that make growth possible.
This timely book edited by Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara contains nine papers on the role of moneylenders and local and regional bankers in the modern economic history of Asia,Africa, and Latin America. It is intended as a critique of ahistorical assumptions about the ‘unorganized’ or ‘informal’ sector of credit suppliers, which depict it as static and incapable of fostering large-scale development. Approximately the first third of the book discusses indigenous lenders in India, Japan, and West Africa before those areas were subject to colonization. The next third covers European settlers who set up financial institutions local
large-scale in West Africa, Natal, and Argentina. The last third of the book describes regional suppliers of credit suppliers of credit within the Third World across political frontiers of whom the most notable are the Chettiar caste of Indian moneylenders in Southeast Asia. |
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| Last updated on: 12/21/2006 |
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