This chapter analyses the political economy of Rwanda’s financial sector. It presents the evolution of Rwanda’s national banking sector and the ways the Rwandan Patriotic Front has sought to mobilise domestic resources to invest in strategic sectors. It provides an overview of how African financial sectors have been transformed in varied ways through adapting to three kinds of financial sector reforms: policies influenced by the market-led consensus, developmentalist strategies and the influence of offshore sectors. Rwanda, in its attempt to transform Kigali into a financial sector while mobilising state-driven investments for strategic investments and adopting ‘best practice’ financial sector reforms, encapsulates the contradictions associated with being influenced by these three sets of policies concurrently. Next, the chapter describes how the Rwandan government has innovatively mobilised domestic resources to fund strategic investments. Innovations include its pension fund, the Rwanda Social Security Board. The chapter concludes by discussing how elite vulnerability has constrained the capacity of the Rwandan government to concentrate resources and financial expertise in one specific financial institution, thereby inhibiting the effectiveness of strategic investments.

This chapter describes the evolution of agriculture sector policies during the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rule. Most Rwandans still live in rural areas, and agriculture continues to employ most Rwandans. Prior to RPF rule, the Grégoire Kayibanda and Juvénal Habyarimana governments presented their parties as prioritising rural interests, as well as the production of cash crops for export (particularly coffee). However, since the RPF assumed power, policy priorities have shifted to diversifying agriculture exports (including producing higher-value coffee and tea) and encouraging the market-oriented commercialisation of agricultural production. The RPF’s attempts at reorganising rural society has been characterised by rural resistance and increasing inequality. However, there have been some successes, which have been driven by RPF-affiliated firms, sometimes in partnership with philanthropic investors. Successes include upgrading primary commodities and diversifying agricultural exports. However, agrarian policies have also been marked by increased land differentiation and rural inequality. Ultimately, sustained structural transformation is inhibited by elite vulnerability. The chapter highlights that there are few signs of the emergence of leading domestic agrarian capitalists.

This concluding chapter reiterates the main contributions of the book. Growth in most African countries has been characterised by a transformation from low-value agriculture to low-value services. As a result, structural transformation has remained largely elusive within Africa. Services has been the fastest-growing sector on the continent. Rwanda is unique among rapidly growing African countries in explicitly focusing on becoming a services hub. Using the case of Rwanda, this book shows that contemporary late development, which is more dependent on services, results in more transnational forms of dependence and political contestation than experienced in prior experiences of late development. The book ends with thoughts about the future of Rwanda. It argues that in the immediate short term, any instability will depend on what happens in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In the long term, Rwanda’s political stability depends not on the government’s capacity to contain domestic popular mobilisation alone but on the capacity of transnational coalitions of dissident elites and external actors capitalising on existing horizontal inequalities to challenge the Rwandan Patriotic Front rule.

In August 1914, when the First World War broke out in Europe, the Indian Branch of the St. John Ambulance Association (ISJAA) immediately started to organise relief provisions for the British Indian Army troops. With the sizable expansion of its pre-war ambulance and first aid agenda during the war, this non-state organisation ventured into various fields of humanitarian war work in the following four years; these fields were usually linked to, or seen as, ‘Red Cross work’. In colonial India, where until 1920 no ‘national’ Red Cross society formally existed, the ISJAA strikingly decided to fill the void. In 1914, it identified itself as the Red Cross representative in India.

This chapter shifts the focus to the humanitarian work undertaken by the ISJAA, calling for a more nuanced examination of the historical contexts surrounding the so-called Red Cross humanitarianism. Existing research has emphasised the global reach and significant impact of the Red Cross movement during the First World War, while often failing to acknowledge the contributions of other humanitarian actors who played a crucial role in providing relief.1 Historian Rebecca Gill has powerfully reminded us to ‘acknowledge the relevance of a multi-levelled history of the local, national, imperial, and international’ when it comes to understanding humanitarianism. However, she erroneously refers to the war participation of a Red Cross society in India when she actually means the ISJAA.2 By focusing on the latter's relief work, the chapter illustrates the existence of alternative humanitarian actors of significance in the provision of relief to soldiers during wartime in the British Empire.

State of the Art

The global Second World War caused major humanitarian catastrophes that necessitated relief for soldiers, military and civilian prisoners of war, as well as for other victims of the war, including refugees and displaced persons in Europe and in non-European war zones, particularly in Asia. To assist the ever-increasing needs of these diverse groups became a major task for established humanitarian actors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), various national Red Cross Societies, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Quakers. They could resort to organisational knowledge and experienced staff, and professionalised more and more their war-related relief work in the course of the ongoing conflict. However, just like during, and in the aftermath of, the First World War, the present global conflagration also saw the emergence of new humanitarian organisations, such as Oxfam and the Catholic Relief Service, that mobilised for special concerns or helped to facilitate potential political alliances. Regardless of whether the humanitarian organisation was an established or a new one, non-state relief agencies entered into close, often co-dependent relationships with states during the war. States understood aid as significant due to moral concerns, but also to safeguard their political, economic and strategic interests, and hence strove to control, guide and coordinate humanitarian activities during and in the aftermath of the war

After almost three months of providing medical relief work, shortly before their departure from the country in August 1946, Rajabali Jumabhoy (1898–1998), a prominent businessperson and philanthropist of Indian origin, praised the Congress Medical Mission at a tea party in Singapore for being a promoter of Indo-Asian unity. One year later, a book titled Congress Mission to Malaya was published by C. Siva Rama Sastry, one of the mission's members. The Indian National Congress (INC) politician and mission organiser Bidhan Chandra Roy (1882–1962) provided the foreword. Roy stated, ‘We the people of India, feel proud of their [the mission members’] achievement and appreciate with gratitude the services they rendered in the name of the Congress.’ In both instances, the work of the Congress Medical Mission to Malaya was presented as successful; this success was based partly, but not exclusively, on the mission's effective promotion of domestic and foreign policy objectives of the INC.

In the history of humanitarianism, the Congress Medical Mission to Malaya has been forgotten. It does not figure in the research on the transitional period between the end of the global Second World War, late colonial rule, and early decolonisation in South Asia, nor does it figure in the standard accounts of Indian nationalism, although it is at times mentioned in passing in the histories of Malaysia. Nevertheless, examining the humanitarian undertaking of the INC, the anticolonial organisation that would soon become the party leading India's postcolonial government, is crucial, as the mission represents the last instance of Indian non-state nationalist humanitarian aid provided to civilians in need outside the South Asian subcontinent during the period of colonial rule.

The Congress Medical Mission to Malaya was the last Indian non-state relief initiative that was sent abroad to provide humanitarian aid during late colonial rule and in the early postcolonial years. Whereas South Asian humanitarian initiatives had provided comprehensive aid for Indian and Allied soldiers at various fronts during the world wars and had given assistance to war victims in China and Malaya, the summer of 1946 became a turning point for their work when in mid-August, Calcutta was ravaged by the communal violence that broke out between Hindus and Muslims. Trapped in the riotous city for a few days was Dr C. Siva Rama Sastry, who was part of the Congress Medical Mission that had just returned from Malaya. When Sastry was finally able to return home to south India, he had to leave all his belongings behind.

After the so-called Great Calcutta Killings, the violence spread throughout British India, leading to riots and massacres in East Bengal, Bihar, Bombay, the United Provinces, Punjab and in other places before reaching its climax with partition. The end of colonial rule with the formation of two new nation states, India and Pakistan, in August 1947, was accompanied by large-scale violence that may have caused up to 1 million deaths and led to the displacement of approximately 12 million people.3 The unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in South Asia, however, did evoke a mixed international response. Several non-state humanitarian organisations from around the globe forwarded aid in cash and kind; some also sent relief workers to South Asia or already had volunteers on-site.

State of the Art

Eurocentrism has long dominated historical scholarship on the First World War. Apart from the literature that explores the entry of the United States (US) into the conflict in 1917, research on the First World War has ignored, as Oliver Janz has pointed out, the war's global dimension(s). During the last years, however, research into the history of the First World War has witnessed a global turn. Fuelled by the war's 100-year commemoration, First World War studies have been expanded both spatially and content-wise. The entanglement of the world war with non-European conflicts, the war's transition into a worldwide economic battle, and the complex ramifications it has had on all world regions have since then become topics explored by historians of the First World War. This research has developed such that the First World War is now understood as a moment of global mobility that caused mass movements of people across national borders, including soldiers, prisoners of war, labour forces, refugees and displaced people. Humanitarian initiatives and organisations, which tried to alleviate the war-caused suffering of the people, are part of the history of these mass movements.

In response to the circulation of news items and publicity campaigns that depicted the suffering of people in other parts of the globe, a myriad of local, regional and national aid committees were established from the outset of the conflict in Europe in August 1914. The activities of these committees often became integrated into border-transcending support networks of global reach.