This chapter presents the five major colonial wars that figure as the main case studies of this book: the 1896–1897 war against the Ndebele and Shona in Rhodesia (also known as First Chimurenga or Second Matabele War), the so-called ‘Hut Tax War’ in Sierra Leone (1898), the German–Herero and German–Nama War as well as genocide in German South West Africa (1904–1908), the Maji Maji War in German East Africa (1905–1907), and finally the Aceh War in the Netherlands East Indies (1873–ca. 1914). Their specifics notwithstanding, all these cases are typical to an extent for the large-scale ‘wars of colonial penetration’ that increasingly came to the fore around 1900. The empirical descriptions of these cases give an impression of the practice of colonial war, as well as provide the necessary background for the following chapters. A summary at the end highlights the practices and discursive patterns that connect all these cases and leads towards the analysis of these phenomena in the coming chapters.

Three types of experiments were carried out in colonial India that made a long-term impact on the future of agrarian modernization in sovereign India. One was the colonial state’s investment in irrigation canals that spurred the rise of three distinct agrarian regions. The agriculture in these regions was supported by a new wave of scientism in colonial policy in the early twentieth century as the colonial state utilized Mendelian science to develop and propagate better varieties of wheat in north India. Towards the end of colonial rule, the colonialists also experimented with a project of intensification wherein select districts were provided concentrated inputs to raise yield. On the margins of colonial patterns, the American missionaries set up an agricultural institute in the United Provinces that experimented with rural uplift through a program of teaching, research, and low-cost innovations. This program did not just showcase an alternate program in rural modernization in the colony, but also served as a precursor to the import of Americanist agrarian ideals into India after independence.

Chapter 8 emphasises that the transition to financialised banking was no easy shift and only saw exceptional profits for a limited amount of time for European banks, if compared to US banks. This challenges accounts of financialisation that see the transition to US investment banking as a straightforward shift towards higher profits compelled by securities markets. The chapter documents the problems and contradictions that banks experienced internally and externally, and the resistance of Deutsche Bankers to the practices of liability management (LM) as they experienced losses of their traditional power and autonomy over banking practices. This chapter thus shows how unlikely it was initially for Deutsche to transform so thoroughly towards US finance. It argues that LM is better understood as a necessity to accommodate the higher costs, risks and logics of banking in US money markets. While the financial calamity of 2008 propelled a rethink of Deutsche’s path, financialised banking is not easily reversed, and German banks continue to struggle with the need to raise USD funding. As such, we should worry about banks’ USD funding gap as key source of vulnerability and risk. While a few select US banks have excelled in mastering LM as a powerful technique to flexibly (mis-) match their balance sheets, everyone else suffers from the fallout of the relentless near crisis mode of global finance.

Chapter 7 traces Commerzbank’s trajectory of financialisation to highlight how its extroverted strategies differed from those of Deutsche Bank. Commerzbank is a less-likely actor of financialisation as it is a smaller bank and has historically focused on the European SME sector. Commerzbank attempted a transformation without major relocation, and redirected fewer resources to its strategies of liability management (LM). While it established the first German foreign branch in the US in 1971, it never bought a major US or British institution. Commerzbank’s more hesitant approach meant that the bank failed to uphold itself in US money markets several times. The chapter shows that Commerzbank’s significant US immersion only happened during the GFC when it bought the larger Dresdner Bank during the 2008 financial crisis but could not manage Dresdner’s heavy exposure to US RMBS, eventually resulting in a public bailout. Commerzbank’s alternative story demonstrates that the rise of US finance made LM a transformative but differentiated concern for non-US banks.

Why have European banks embarked on a radical transformation in which they became deeply dependent on US financial markets, a relationship they are ill-equipped to manage and less likely to overcome? This chapter introduces and summarises the book. It outlines the debates about the Americanisation of global finance and presents the concept of extroverted financialisation to help explain US-led financialisation outside the US.

The agricultural practices associated with the green revolution assumed their fullest form in the state of Punjab and are commonly associated with the launch of HYVs in 1964-66. But in reality, Punjab had been undergoing a process of agrarian transformations for a long time. Punjab developed as the subcontinent’s most productive agrarian region during colonial times. Though the partition disrupted the region’s agricultural infrastructures, the state embarked upon a massive phase of rebuilding under the leadership of a handful of bureaucrats with a technocratic vision. These efforts were tailored to build a system of productive agriculture to restore the province’s pre-partition preeminence. The pursuit of productivity trumped every other agenda in Punjab and a spell of regional technocracy took hold. The American experts arriving under the Indo-US treaties and those sent over by the American foundations believed that the modernization of Indian agriculture must start from Punjab. When the HYVs arrived, Punjab was readier than any other region.

Development scholars have honed their theories on notions of state-led programs and projects in which the subjects of development are mere recipients of state bequest under elitist planning and implementation. In contrast, the nationwide community development project launched in India in 1952 under the umbrella of the Indo-US treaty of technological cooperation aspired to build participation in planning and development from below. This bureaucracy-led program envisioned instilling a “will to improve” among communities. The notion of “community” had a wide currency in India at a time when refugees from Pakistan were streaming into the nation after partition and officials were engaged in the conjoined task of organizing refugees and organizing rural populace into productive communities. The program was laced with technocratic principles of communitarian sociology. While the program met the metrics of development in the initial pilots, the nationwide spread of community blocks seemed to languish, calling into question the program’s principles and methods.

Chapter 5 lays out the institutional grounding for global financial markets and their currency, the USD. This provides an answer to an ongoing puzzle on the origins of the 2008 financial crisis. Scholars of the global banking glut hypothesis recognise that European banks were deeply connected to US finance but do not fully account for why this was the case. By contrast, this chapter demonstrates that, despite their global nature, US and Eurodollars are thoroughly grounded in US financial institutions, which has given US banks an additional competitive edge over other banks. The complex institutional infrastructure made US financial markets exceptionally deep and liquid so that US banks could flexibly fund their practices of liability management (LM) in US money markets and arbitrage between Euro- and USD markets. By contrast, European banks’ money markets were ill-equipped for LM while foreign banks faced heavy restrictions to bank in the US until the 1970s. This posed a key constraint to the international practices of the European banks. In response, German banks expanded their offshore funding practices to access more USDs to be able to compete against US banks.