I have published on a range of issues around labour, finance, and governance including colonial histories, agrarian finance, informal economies, technological change, and international labour regulation. I did most of the work of writing this book during what turned out to be a very strange year. I owe an enormous debt to Laura and Max. Both were around for much more of the writing process than any of us anticipated. Both provided (usually) welcome distractions, to which, in retrospect, I owe the fact I finished writing the book (mostly) sane. Max has been a nearly endless source of joy. I could not ask for a better friend or partner than Laura. This book is dedicated to them both. Acronyms The Global Governance of Precarity: Primitive Accumulation and the Politics of Irregular Work Link opens in a new window, Routledge/RIPE Series in Global Political Economy. I started working on what would eventually become this book as part of a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship at Queen’s University, Canada. Thanks are due to SSHRC for financial support, to the Departments of Political Studies and Global Development Studies at Queen’s for giving me space to start working on it, and, especially, to Susanne Soederberg for her support as supervisor.

A much-needed book that should be read by anyone interested in the expansion of finance into everyday life. Rich with empirical details and comprehensive in its theoretical engagement with the interrelationship between finance and social justice, it throws into sharp relief how impoverished the conception of poverty reduction is when it relies on financial inclusion to improve welfare of people' This book takes a hard look at several such stories, notably about microfinance, microinsurance and fintech banking. It chronicles their ballyhooed rises, their unmasking, re-branding or substitution by yet other tonics for the poor. Intriguing are the accounts of futile efforts by the cure-all salespeople, the “professional associations, consultants, academics, philanthropies, and international organisations” to get global finance on board, “to coax capital into doing things it’s not particularly interested in doing.”Today’s critics of poverty capital must come to terms with why people desire credit, as many borrowers are eager financial actors. Colonial financial infrastructures and Kenya's uneven fintech boom Link opens in a new window', Antipode 54 (3): 708-728 Waiting for the market? Microinsurance and development as anticipatory marketization Link opens in a new window', Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 54 (5): 949-965. Colonial banks, in this context, specialised in lucrative, low-risk activities like facilitating funds transfers between colonised and metropolitan territories. They made comparatively few loans in general, almost entirely to colonial governments, large merchant firms, and to expatriate plantations, farms, or mines where these were present. The infrastructures that banks built up to facilitate these activities centered on branch networks overwhelmingly concentrated on a handful of key commercial centres. While Bernards says little about women, Meyerowitz foregrounds the significance of gendered notions of uplift and empowerment in remaking international aid.

The result is that millions of small businesses in the Global South are one accident away from failure. A broken piece of equipment or unexpected weather can sink many of them. The microcredit industry says ‘give them a loan’ which simply leaves such businesses as exposed as they were before, but with more debt as well. Anthropologists have more successfully wrestled with microfinance as something that people might turn to for their own purposes, not only as victims of aggressive lending or dire need. Their work offers less political clarity—since not every loan is a Faustian bargain—but it better explains why poverty capital has the reach it does. Juli Huang, for instance, lived with Bangladeshi women who took out loans to work as “iAgents,” information brokers with smartphones and tablets. In navigating the move out of their homes to market-mediated livelihoods, these women struggled not only to repay their debts but to maintain their standing within the community. But it wasn’t all coercive pressure; they were also drawn to new opportunities. In Huang’s approach, women’s lives are not merely shaped by poverty nor are they reduced to subjects of neoliberalism. Rather, they are pulled in multiple, sometimes competing directions, making do in situations characterized by ambiguity. At once daughters and wives, traveling salespersons, and NGO representatives, they face competing expectations and respond through the “strategic juggling of multiple, simultaneous, and often conflicting” actions. My first book, The Global Governance of Precarity (Routledge, 2018), examines the governance of irregular forms of labour in sub-Saharan Africa through a historical study of the activities of the International Labour Organization. I draw together analyses of ILO policy towards forced labour, unemployment, and social protection for irregular workers in sub-Saharan Africa from 1919-present to make a wider argument about the political constitution of class and the contested boundaries of the working class. Critics of microfinance in the Global South would do well to demand not the end of finance, but a radical transformation of credit, savings, and insurance.The changing technological infrastructures of global finance Link opens in a new window', special issue of Review of International Political Economy, 26 (5). [co-edited with Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn] The absurdity of Baron Munchausen grasping his hair to lift himself and his horse out of a bog has long amused young and old. In this short blog post, I want to make the case for why a critical study of ‘poverty finance’ is crucial to understanding neoliberalism and its limits, following the publication of my new book A Critical History of Poverty Finance. The book draws in places on archival research funded by the British International Studies Association, through their Early Career Small Research Grants scheme. I’m grateful to BISA for this support.