COLFIN: Colonial Financial Infrastructures

COLFIN develops a new approach to understanding and responding to the colonial durabilities in modern financial infrastructures. The starting point is that the relation between finance and colonialism is infrastructural, not purely related to individual families or companies. Financial innovation co-evolved with colonial expansion and vice versa. The longer time horizons, transnational payments and novel uncertainties of colonial expansion are at the heart of modern financial innovation. Academic literatures acknowledge this but largely write colonial violence out of the history of finance. The aim of COLFIN is to understand and analyse how the experimental beginnings and development of financial instruments were shaped by and through colonial exploitation and appropriation. The novel approach is to focus on financial infrastructures, understood as socio-technical and historically durable ways of organizing political-economic life. The key question of COLFIN is: How are modern financial infrastructures, including credit, currency and collateral, shaped by and through colonial practices of exploitation and appropriation? COLFIN focuses on four infrastructural elements: (1) material technologies; (2) circulation; (3) adverse inclusion; (4) practices of temporality. COLFIN breaks new ground because (1) it offers systemic analysis of a largely neglected part of the history of political economy and finance; (2) it shows how present financial infrastructures indirectly entail refashioned colonial practices and routes. It is urgent because it reconnects the account of financial innovation to the history of colonial exploitation, to generate new avenues of accountability in the present. It is feasible because of the availability of newly digitized archives of early modern public-private colonial companies including the Dutch and British East India Companies. COLFIN develops new methodological approaches to digitized colonial archives, while being attentive to their silences