Chapter 3 starts the recalibration of financialisation by telling an alternative history of German finance. It zooms in on the struggles over deposits to provide the historical and institutional backdrop to appreciate the key differences and overlaps in US and German financial markets, and to understand those financial developments that set them apart from the 1960s onwards. This chapter examines the development of the Pfandbrief (covered bond) from the eighteenth century onwards to establish that market-based funding practices have a long history in Germany. After the devastation of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), banks and the state (the Prussian prince and its gentry) together sought new ways to boost lending and borrowing with the help of financial securities and collateral. This chapter shows that German housing finance was historically much more market-based than in the US. While the Pfandbrief has been a key financial security promoting long-term lending, it was used predominantly by specialised mortgage and public savings banks. Universal banks only entered the fray in the 1970s when their corporate deposits declined. Chapter 3 shows that German banking was geared towards market-based finance but different to the one that emerged as part of US-led financialisation.

Chapter 4 situates the beginnings of extroverted financialisation at the time when US banks started to dominate the Eurodollar markets from the 1960s onwards. The Euromarkets are an important turning point for financialisation, but their impacts on European finance are rarely examined. During this time, however, German banks had their first contact with new US innovations, which fundamentally links the German post-WWII political economy with global offshore markets, significantly before the 1990s, when many accounts date the impact of financial globalisation. Identifying a gap of international funding for its developing export sector, this chapter shows that the making of the German coordinated market economy was already bound up with global financial markets. Tracing the financial innovations of German banks, this chapter argues that the transformative impact of US finance is not market expansion or regulatory evasion by going offshore per se. Instead, financialisation has posed distinct imperatives in relation to the rise of liability management that induced a qualitative change. Liability management fundamentally differs from the German banks’ original international strategies, which drove the banks' turn to the Eurodollar markets in order to meet the US challenge.

This chapter charts how the rise of modern racism came to racialize colonial warfare over the nineteenth century, and touches on the role of imperial anxiety and colonial masculinity in such warfare. The extreme violence that was part of colonial warfare might once have rested on structural circumstances, but constant explanation and justification of such violence through racial categories meant that over time racialized notions came to precede the event, becoming generators of violence themselves. The chapter also offers general observations on the nature of colonial war and colonial armies and on the relationship between knowledge and Western militaries. The main point is that detailed knowledge on colonial warfare was largely absent in formal military education at the time, and that such knowledge was largely gathered through (practical) experience and remained concentrated in relatively small groups of ‘experts’. The chapter closes with a description of the manuals of colonial warfare published between 1829 and 1920 in the Dutch, British and German empires, presenting their general characteristics and a chronology and briefly discussing their use as historical sources.

A constructed racial otherness of the enemy distinguished colonial warfare from other modes of fin-de-siècle warfare, while it constituted at the same time a unifying element across different empires. It gave rise to a general culture of permissiveness and the fashioning of an imagined ‘native mind’, two preconditions for a specific body of knowledge on colonial warfare to emerge. This featured specific prescriptions as to what colonial warfare was to do, denoted here as the five ‘basic imperatives’: colonial warfare had to generate a ‘moral effect’ on the opponent, it had to be ‘bold and offensive’, it had to create a ‘lasting peace’ by using heavy force first, it had to ‘punish’ and, increasingly, it had to produce high death tolls (the ‘big bag’). The chapter explains how all these imperatives pushed towards extreme violence and demonstrates how all were present in very similar forms in the British, German and Dutch empires. For each, the origins, development and empire-specific appearance are discussed. With a transimperial corpus of colonial manuals as main source base, it is also shown that there was a further convergence in this body of knowledge around 1900.

In the state of Uttar Pradesh, the political elites tried out land reform as a viable, competing strategy of agrarian modernization. This was an alternate vision of modernization rooted in the freedom movement that put trust in creating a land of healthy peasant proprietorship where efficient, productive cultivators would produce for the market. This reform-based approach came to be personified by a regional peasant leader, Chaudhary Charan Singh. Meanwhile, as part of the Indo-US treaty of 1954, the American land grants helped set up India’s very first agricultural university in the state, the Uttar Pradesh Agricultural University (or UPAU). The new agriculture university showcased a technological approach to enhancement of yield. The central state introduced a new program of productive agriculture around Mexican HYVs in 1964-66 and partnered with the technocrats at UPAU to help facilitate its spread in the state. Charan Singh broke ranks with the Congress party in 1967 whose government at the center was the sponsor of the HYV-program.

The current understandings of the green revolution are captive to short-term analyses that focus on the introduction of the new technology of high yielding variety seeds (HYVs) under a new agricultural strategy in 1964-66. Such a perspective cannot account for the fact hiding in plain sight that HYVs were progressively introduced into other areas on the subcontinent where they did not succeed. This book instead embeds the green revolution into a history of agrarian modernization patterns in three sub-regions of north India. It considers the colonial past, the post-independence rebuilding programs, and the wider influence of global forces of modernization to account for the birth of the green revolution.