Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance

Author: Daromir Rudnyckyj
Publisher: NUS
ISBN: 9789813250123
Weight: 400gsm
Pages: 288pp
Year: 2018
Price: RM110

Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. This realization has led to cries for change—yet there is little popular awareness of possible alternatives. 
 
Beyond Debt describes efforts to create a transnational economy free of debt. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the state, led by the central bank, seeks to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur “the New York of the Muslim world”—the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Rudnyckyj shows how Islamic financial experts have undertaken ambitious experiments to create more stable economies and stronger social solidarities by facilitating risk- and profit-sharing, enhanced entrepreneurial skills, and more collaborative economic action. Building on scholarship that reveals the impact of financial devices on human activity, he illustrates how Islamic finance is deployed to fashion subjects who are at once more pious Muslims and more ambitious entrepreneurs. In so doing, Rudnyckyj shows how experts seek to create a new “geoeconomics”—a global Islamic alternative to the conventional financial network centered on New York, London, and Tokyo. A groundbreaking analysis of a timely subject, Beyond Debt tells the captivating story of efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.  
Apart from providing vita] insights into Dutch policy and strategy, the documents translated in this colleaion also furnish new and valuable information on the social and political structures of SoutheaSt Asian polities—including information about key leaders and their diplomatic maneuverings, their political agency. The documents allow the reader to eavesdrop on discussions between Matelieff and leading Malay personalities of the day, revealing clashes of priorities, expectations, and values. One example is the strikingly high value placed by Malay leaders on the preservation of life—which contrasted with the little value they attached to land or territorial ownership. The Dutch found such understandings difficult to grasp.

The birth of the Dutch Republic, its protracted war against Spain, and its shifting attitudes toward Portugal, are crucial for appreciating the backdrop against which the VOC and its relations with Asian polities would develop. This historical setting serves to contextualize the observations expounded by Matelieff—a perceptive analyst determined to seize business opportunities and grasp the political and economic structures of Asia. At a time of Europe’s rapidly growing engagement with this part of the world, Matelieff sought to assess the ways Europeans could and should deal with local rulers. In doing this, he helped to forge a primordial structure to VOC endeavours in Asia—a structure that, as it turned out, was to endure for the next two centuries.