Gopalan Balachandran, Professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute, has been awarded a grant by the SNSF for a two-year project entitled “Currency and Conquest: The Rupee and British Colonial Expansion in Asia and the Indian Ocean, c. 1880–1930s”, due to start in October 2016.

This study proposes to research a neglected aspect of an otherwise well-researched history of Britain’s late nineteenth and early twentieth century expansion in Asia and the Indian Ocean, i.e. the process of monetary restructuring that accompanied and followed this expansion. Monetary restructuring was a crucial aspect of British rule in every colony in this part of the world. In colony after new colony, this initially took the form of the introduction of the Indian rupee. It was, however, rarely a one-off event, but more a process marking both the entry of British power into new territories, and its culmination in a specific form of colonial consolidation.

The underlying motivations varied over time. A new currency served to finance and facilitate the advance of colonial power, with its assorted officials, agents, and camp followers, deeper into the interior. It could be put to use to mobilise labour, or mobilise and remit agricultural surpluses and revenue. A new currency could also be used to expand or transform a colony’s trade and mesh it more tightly with colonial or British commerce. Despite its evident importance, historians of British colonial rule in Asia and the Indian Ocean have passed over monetary restructuring in relative silence, because of the rather abstruse nature of this subject. Accounts of British colonial expansion regularly remark on currency changes in newly colonised territories, and a limited scholarship exists on “currency reforms” under colonial rule. But there has been little systematic effort to study the contexts, logics, challenges, patterns, processes, or implications of monetary restructuring under colonialism.

The use of the Indian rupee at various times and for varying durations in British East Africa, Aden, Mesopotamia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the six original Trucial States, Burma, Ceylon, the Straits Settlements, Mauritius and Seychelles was not merely an aspect of economic or currency “reform”. It was part of a wider modality of British colonial expansion, which, as a growing literature reemphasises, involved conscripting the resources of the British Indian empire, the enterprise of Indian merchants, the staff and the official oversight of colonial governors in Bombay or Calcutta, an Indian labour force, and not least the colonial Indian army with its force of auxiliary labour. It also involved transplanting “administrative structures” from colonial India, including some of its laws and judicial administrative practices.

Thus, in contrast to the traditional focus in monetary histories on individual colonies, a meso-colonial perspective on monetary restructuring complements and reinforces an approach that has already been used to fruitfully explore other dimensions of British colonial expansion. Further, this perspective allows us to understand how historical links within Asian and Indian Ocean commerce developed or adapted under colonial rule, including in response to the entry of colonial and metropolitan capital and the emergence of an Atlantic-centred world economy.