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14 - Central Banking and Colonial Control

India, 1914–1939

from Part II - Specific

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2023

Barry Eichengreen
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Andreas Kakridis
Affiliation:
Bank of Greece and Panteion University, Athens
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Summary

In the 1920s, the Bank of England promoted central banking to preserve London’s control over Indian financial policies and insulate those policies from political changes sweeping the colony. This chapter traces India’s deepening distrust of London in the monetary sphere, and the role envisaged by the Bank of England for an Indian central bank operating under its tutelage. After the failure of efforts to create a central bank in the 1920s, the Bank of England and Whitehall insisted on a privately owned, ‘independent’ central bank as a precondition for Indian constitutional reform. In the end, notions of an independent central bank did not stand up to the vicissitudes of colonial bureaucratic politics. Efforts of the colonial government and the Bank of England to curb the independence of the Reserve Bank of India offer important insights into the early history of central banking in India, but also shed new light on the role central banks in economies undergoing the transition from colonialism to independence.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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