Book Review Symposium

Ananya Roy , Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development , London : Routledge , 2010 . ISBN 978-0-415-87673-5 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-87672-8 (cloth) . Support for “financial inclusion” has gained incredible political traction across the world over the past two decades. The formal end of the Cold War and the increasing liberalization of financial markets has seen places and populations re-scripted in relation to the perceived opportunities, or risks, they present to global capital flows. In tandem with this macro rollback of global financial regulation has been a rolling out of all sorts of newly financialized systems of social regulation. Governments have been pressured by bond-rating agencies to reign in budget deficits and remove barriers to the free circulation…