M019: Shifting Sentiments and Credit: Reworked Moral Economies in Late Nineteenth Century Asia

Organizer(s)

• DY

  Dong Yan

  School of Economics
  Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

Chair(s)

• 

  C. Patterson Giersch

  Wellesley College, United States

Paper Presenter(s)

• DY

  Dong Yan

  School of Economics
  Shanghai University of Finance and Economics
• MO

  Michael O'Sullivan

  Harvard University, United States
• ER

  Elizabeth Reynolds

  Washington University, St. Louis, United States
• QH

  Qianqing Rory Huang

  University of California, Los Angeles, United States

Discussant(s)

• 

  C. Patterson Giersch

  Wellesley College, United States

Session Abstract: The quickening pace of growth and commodification in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Asia prompted local societies to reassess long-held notions of moral economy. In particular, existing discourses and institutions mediating credit, interest, and taxation in these communities came under challenge and reassessment. Current historiography often placed these reassessments under the rubrics of modernization, where pre-modern culturalist notions were cast aside for dis-embedded and amoral discourses of political economy.

This panel seeks to present a less linear view of moral economy, by examining how disparate local communities in South and East Asia reworked their stances towards credit, interest, and taxation. The processes included critiques of prevailing moral economies, but did not lead to wholesale adaptation of disembodied notions of market and economic rationality. Instead, we suggest that what emerged were new configurations of moral economy that sustained new regimes of production, exchange, and accumulation.

Our accounts begin in colonial India, where Michael O’Sullivan uncovers fusions of Islamic law with European political economy by Muslim salariat, as they sought to reduce predatory moneylending and encourage interest-banking among Muslim communities. In the Dargye Monastery across the Himalayas, Elizabeth Reynolds demonstrates how “traditional” Tibetan economic institutions were crucial in facilitating new capital flows along Sino-Tibetan borderlands. Down in the Sichuan basin, Dong Yan examines bifurcating attitudes on what constituted as a tolerable tax/debt burden by local peasants and merchants in early twentieth century. Qianqing Huang concludes with a history of community banking initiatives and political activism by burakumin in Meiji Japan.

Presentations:

• A Just Amount of Burden: Popular Reponses to Tax and Debt in Late Qing Sichuan
  

  Paper Presenter: Dong Yan – Shanghai University of Finance and Economics
• The Indian Muslim Salariat, Usury Laws, and the Moral Economy of Moneylending, 1857-1914
  

  Paper Presenter: Michael O'Sullivan – Harvard University
• The Monastic Moral Economy: Capital Accumulation in 20th Century Tibet
  

  Paper Presenter: Elizabeth Reynolds – Washington University, St. Louis
• The Bank of Our Own: Burakumin and Japan's Modernisation, 1870 - 1920
  

  Paper Presenter: Qianqing Rory Huang – University of California, Los Angeles