Project description
Colonialism formation and endurance in modern financial infrastructures
Finance and colonialism are deeply interconnected since modern finance emerged with colonial expansion and exploitation. While this link has been recognised in academia, the violence of colonialism is often overlooked in financial history. The ERC-funded COLFIN project asks: how are modern financial technologies, including credit, currency and collateral, shaped by and through colonial practices of exploitation and appropriation? COLFIN understands financial infrastructures as socio-technical and historically durable frameworks, with four distinct elements: material technologies, circulation, adverse inclusion and temporality. It uses mixed methods including digital financial forensics and qualitative case studies and draws on newly digitised archives from transnational colonial companies including the Dutch and British East India Companies. Ultimately, COLFIN reveals how colonialism endures within modern financial infrastructures.
Objective
COLFIN develops a new approach to understanding and responding to the colonial durabilities in modern financial infrastructures. The starting point is that the relation between finance and colonialism is infrastructural, not purely related to individual families or companies. Financial innovation co-evolved with colonial expansion and vice versa. The longer time horizons, transnational payments and novel uncertainties of colonial expansion are at the heart of modern financial innovation. Academic literatures acknowledge this but largely write colonial violence out of the history of finance. The aim of COLFIN is to understand and analyse how the experimental beginnings and development of financial instruments were shaped by and through colonial exploitation and appropriation. The novel approach is to focus on financial infrastructures, understood as socio-technical and historically durable ways of organizing political-economic life. The key question of COLFIN is: How are modern financial infrastructures, including credit, currency and collateral, shaped by and through colonial practices of exploitation and appropriation? COLFIN focuses on four infrastructural elements: (1) material technologies; (2) circulation; (3) adverse inclusion; (4) practices of temporality. COLFIN breaks new ground because (1) it offers systemic analysis of a largely neglected part of the history of political economy and finance; (2) it shows how present financial infrastructures indirectly entail refashioned colonial practices and routes. It is urgent because it reconnects the account of financial innovation to the history of colonial exploitation, to generate new avenues of accountability in the present. It is feasible because of the availability of newly digitized archives of early modern public-private colonial companies including the Dutch and British East India Companies. COLFIN develops new methodological approaches to digitized colonial archives, while being attentive to their silences
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities history and archaeology history
- social sciences economics and business economics political economy
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG
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1012WX Amsterdam
Netherlands
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