A comprehensive historical tracing of how the contemporary finance-poverty-development nexus emerged.

'The definitive account of the history of poverty finance' - Susanne Soederberg

Finance, mobile, and digital technologies - or 'fintech' - are being heralded in the world of development by the likes of the IMF and World Bank as a silver bullet in the fight against poverty. But should we believe the hype?

A Critical History of Poverty Finance demonstrates how newfangled 'digital financial inclusion' efforts suffer from the same essential flaws as earlier iterations of neoliberal 'financial inclusion.' Relying on artificially created markets that simply aren't there among the world's most disadvantaged economic actors, they also reinforce existing patterns of inequality and uneven development, many of which date back to the colonial era.

Bernards offers an astute analysis of the current fintech fad, contextualized through a detailed colonial history of development finance, that ultimately reveals the neoliberal vision of poverty alleviation for the pipe dream it is.

Nick Bernards is Associate Professor of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The Global Governance of Precarity: Primitive Accumulation and the Politics of Irregular Work.

'Nick Bernards has crafted the definitive account of the history of poverty finance, skilfully revealing its entanglements with the uneven development of capitalism'
Susanne Soederberg, Professor of Global Political Economy at Queen's University, Canada

‘In this outstanding history of poverty finance, Nick Bernards show that financial exclusion persists not because of a lack of design or fancy technology but because the problem of uneven development is persistent and structural’
Andrew Leyshon, Emeritus Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham, co-editor of ‘Money and Finance after the Crisis: Critical Thinking for Uncertain Times’ (2017) and author of ‘Reformatted: Code, Networks and the Transformation of the Music Industry’ (2014)

'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'
Johnna Montgomerie, Professor of International Political Economy at King's College London