Abstract:

This essay deals with the late eighteenth century political economy of North Malabar, with a focus on the historical aspect of a speculative economic activity, i.e. mercantile surety or the havālātti. Credit money, in its most ubiquitous form of cash advances, was deeply implicated in early modern political practice, both of its kingly and the anti-king verities. The merchants, especially those we find involved in transacting agrarian produce, used it to enhance their economic hold in the countryside by fabricating a convergence with the landholding, locally dominant peasant proprietorships. The inter-dispensational years witnessed a process of the merchant surety tilting away from the kingly world to the agrarian countryside. The local infrastructure of credit money and its better half, the interest-bearing capital, were successful in creating, what this paper calls; the commodity frontier. It represents a spontaneous situation of economic dispossession on the one hand and social hierarchies of market bound commodity on the other. When placed against the historiography of ‘the great (colonial) transformation’, it is found that the economic transition in the region was a slow and predictable process till the credit crisis of 1830s.