A Critical History of Poverty Finance: Colonial Roots and Neoliberal Failures by Nick Bernards

PART I
 Poverty finance and the antinomies  
of colonialism

1

A colonial problem
 This chapter argues that the origins of the uneven development of 
financial markets across the Global South are intrinsically linked to the 
durable social, ecological, and political regimes underpinning colonial 
and neocolonial extractivism. This analysis picks up from two impor-
tant points highlighted in the discussion of neoliberalism and the 
construction of markets in the introduction. First, efforts to construct 
‘markets’ as such are embedded in deeply uneven patterns of production 
and accumulation. Transactions between nominal equals in financial 
markets obscure from view, yet fundamentally rely upon, ‘everything 
that happens in between’ the issuance of debt and its repayment (to use 
Marx’s terms, cited above). Second, financial markets are material and 
spatial. Financial transactions happen in, or between, particular places 
and through infrastructures bundling together routinised social prac-
tices and material objects. Contemporary efforts to redeploy financial 
capital into overlooked social and spatial spheres, including through new 
forms of poverty finance, are shaped and constrained not only by what 
goes on in those places, but also by the spatial and material configuration 
of existing infrastructures.
 The argument here is that colonial legacies matter a good deal on both 
fronts. Extractive forms of accumulation have left many people in the 
postcolonial world with limited assets and incomes. Financial infrastruc-
tures are also unevenly developed in ways profoundly linked to the social 
and spatial dynamics of colonial capitalism. There have been, at several 
points from the 1950s onwards, significant forays by financial capital 
into peripheral territories – but, as subsequent chapters will show, these 
have primarily taken place in spaces with the most densely-built finan-
cial infrastructures already in place. What’s critical here is that colonial 
political economies, as I’ll show further below, depended in various ways 
on uneven access to formal credit. Colonial subjects were frequently in 
debt, and that indebtedness was a crucial organising element in colonial 
political economies, but small farmers and workers were very rarely 
indebted to formal financial institutions directly. Debts were often a 

A Critical History of Poverty Finance: Colonial Roots and Neoliberal Failures by Nick Bernards