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1 results

  • 14 - Central Banking and Colonial Control

  • from Part II - Specific
  • Edited by Barry Eichengreen, University of California, Berkeley, Andreas Kakridis, Bank of Greece and Panteion University, Athens
  • Book:
    The Spread of the Modern Central Bank and Global Cooperation
    Published online:
    02 November 2023
    Print publication:
    16 November 2023, pp 383-405

  • 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.