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In the past decade, financial inclusion has emerged as a leading international development paradigm to tackle poverty. It seeks to integrate all unbanked (adults) into the global financial system through credit and other financial services. From a political economy perspective, the rhetoric of financial inclusion has been criticised, among other things, for masking the financialisation of social reproduction in which (a) the unbanked become a new market segment for international capital and (b) households with low and insecure incomes must increasingly organise their precarious living conditions through debt. This paper builds on the critique of neoliberal development policy and supplements it with a materialist-postcolonial lens that examines the historical interconnectedness of the indebtedness of subaltern classes, colonial rule, and capitalist development in the context of India. It shows that financial inclusion/exclusion from the 19th century onwards was the response to a structural subsistence crisis that was decisively shaped by both British colonial rule and capitalist (class) relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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