Webinar: Before Islamic Finance

Before Islamic Finance: Muslim Banking in South Asia and the World, 1880–1975

This webinar examines the varieties of, and challenges to, Muslim private banking in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. It studies this phenomenon against the backdrop of two processes. The first are the parallel efforts by Muslim communities in North Africa and Eurasia to develop their own banks. The second are the economic experiences of South Asian Muslims living under colonial rule. That experience was marked by intra-Muslim economic stratification, a strong showing in trade and industry, but a poor performance in banking, the rise of Islamic economics as an academic discipline, and the gradual shift of regulatory environments from colonial to postcolonial law. In a more general sense, by centring South Asia as a site for the production of novel forms of finance, the talk reflects on how we can write histories of financialisation outside the 'capitals of capital'.

This event is supported by the School of History and the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at ANU.

Mike O'Sullivan is an Assistant Professor of South Asian History at UNC, Chapel Hill and Senior Research Fellow for CAPASIA, an ERC project based at EUI in Florence, Italy. He is the author of No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities, 1800–1975 (Harvard University Press, 2023).