The state and rural credit markets in south India, 1930-1960

This thesis contributes to a central theme in the economic history of India: state intervention to protect peasants from market fluctuations, especially, interventions in the credit market. With novel material drawn from the Madras region in late-colonial and early post-colonial times, the thesis asks why unregulated credit markets did not supply enough credit and why regulations exacerbated the problem. Private moneylenders controlled the supply of rural credit in colonial India. Officials believed that rich moneylenders exploited poor peasants in non-competitive credit markets, raising borrowing costs and default rates, restricting investment and widening rural inequality. Based on that understanding, governments in the provinces enforced laws to protect borrowers. The government in Madras adopted two policy approaches to rural credit that were specific to the province. First, from 1904 it established cooperative banks to compete with private lenders. Second, from 1937 it enforced an artificial price ceiling on loans from moneylenders. This thesis aims to show that intervention failed owing to the nature of the agricultural economy and the political-economic ideology that privileged equity over efficiency. The first and second substantive chapters critically discuss the view, voiced by government officials and some historians, that exploitation drove high borrowing costs and defaults. By looking at the costs borne by the moneylender, the chapters show that the frequency of crop failure and inefficient courts explain restricted credit supply as well as default and interest rate patterns. The third chapter evaluates the impact of credit intervention and demonstrates that the price ceiling failed to deliver equity gains and triggered losses in market efficiency as credit supply contracted and moneylenders evaded the law. The outcome was limited credit supply and lending at illegal rates of interest. The fourth chapter analyses the performance of cooperative banks in rural Madras. The chapter shows that regulatory design explains the failure of the cooperative model. The rich refused to cooperate with the poor while bank managers embezzled and falsified accounts

Touts and Despots

Diese Dissertation folgt Fernando Pó Arbeitskraftanwerbern wohin sie auch gingen dort, wo sie zwischen den 1860er und 1920er Jahren den gesamten Golf von Guinea überquerten und hauptsächlich Kru von Liberien und Fang von Rio Muni, Kamerun und Gabon anwarben; und dort, wo sie ab den 1930er bis 1960er Jahren vor allem um die Bucht von Biafra eine noch nie dagewesene Anzahl an Vertragsarbeitern, vor allem Igbos und Ibibios aus dem südöstlichen Nigeria auf die florierenden Kakaoplantagen der Insel brachten. Die Anwerber tauchten vornehmlich als eine Modalität auf, die ich als ‘tout’ beschreibe und theoretisiere. Diese operierten fast ausschließlich mittels eines Exzesses an Sprache und Geld mittels Täuschung und informellen Vorschüssen. Zwar agierten sie ‘außerhalb’ des Rechts, doch erlaubte genau die Vertragsform von Fernando Pó, die langfristig und unwiderruflich zur Arbeit zwang, den Anwerbern die Ausübung ihrer Techniken. Eine Reihe an unerlaubten Verdrehungen wurden geschaffen und durchgereicht: Quasi-Versklavung durch Täuschung in Form von Kidnapping, Quasi-Schuldknechtschaft mittels informellen Lohnvorschüssen, die die Verträge ermöglichten sowie die grenz- und Arbeitsort überschreitende Migration einer relativ freien, allerdings flüchtigen Arbeitskraft. Der anhaltende Blick auf die ambivalenten Praktiken der Anwerber legt eine Reihe an Nebeneinandern von ‚frei’ und ‚unfrei’ offen, was kreative Potentiale für deren Intensivierung und Auflösung schuf, und über einzelne Punkten entlang eines Spektrums der freien-unfreien Arbeit hinausgeht.This dissertation follows Fernando Pó’s labour recruiters wherever they went— between the 1860s and 1920s recruiters traversed the entirety of the Gulf of Guinea and enlisted mostly Kru from Liberia and Fang from Rio Muni, Cameroon and Gabon; between the 1930s to 1960s they gathered particularly around the Bight of Biafra and brought an unprecedented number of contract workers into the island’s booming cacao plantations, mostly Igbos and Ibibios from south-eastern Nigeria. Recruiters tended to appear in a modality that I will describe and theorize as ‘touts’. They operated almost exclusively with an excess of language and money—deceit and informal advances. They operated ‘outside’ the law and the regulated, yet it was only the shape of the contract on Fernando Pó—forced, long and irrevocable—that allowed recruiters to deploy their techniques. Recruiters created and relayed a series of wholly impermissible twists: quasi-enslavement through fraud that was a form of kidnapping, quasi-debt bondage with informal wage advances enabled by the contracts, and even a movement of really quite free but fugitive labour across borders and work-sites. A sustained attention on the ambivalent practices of recruiters reveal a series of juxtapositions of free and unfree that produced creative potentials for intensification and unravelling, rather than single points along a ‘free-unfree’ labour spectrum

Two wheeled lunar dumptruck

The design of a two wheel bulk material transport vehicle is described in detail. The design consists of a modified cylindrical bowl, two independently controlled direct drive motors, and two deformable wheels. The bowl has a carrying capacity of 2.8 m (100 ft) and is constructed of aluminum. The low speed, high HP motors are directly connected to the wheels, thus yielding only two moving parts. The wheels, specifically designed for lunar applications, utilize the chevron tread pattern for optimum traction. The vehicle is maneuvered by varying the relative angular velocities of the wheels. The bulk material being transported is unloaded by utilizing the motors to oscillate the bowl back and forth to a height at which dumping is achieved. The analytical models were tested using a scaled prototype of the lunar transport vehicle. The experimental data correlated well with theoretical predictions. Thus, the design established provides a feasible alternative for the handling of bulk material on the moon

October 25, 1951

https://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/arbn_50-54/1015/thumbnail.jp

The Western Mistic, September 21, 1934

https://red.mnstate.edu/western-mistic/1084/thumbnail.jp

The mentoring of first-time leaders in the church

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/1877/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, April 29, 1993

Volume 100, Issue 57https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/8415/thumbnail.jp