The production of a monetary outside in Banaras rested on two interlinked developments – the establishment of credit markets suitable for the expansion of capitalism and the responses by market participants in the segments that could not be served by capitalist credit. The former delineated the inside of the larger market by excluding from its outside the crucial principle that allowed for the aggregation of substantial credit flows necessary for mature capitalist accumulation, a conglomeration of regulatory practices establishing the common capitalist intelligibility of the credit contract as an instrument that fixed the enhanced uncertainty of credit relations in favour of the creditor. Faced with its incapacity to extend these regulatory mechanisms to credit practices serving the needs of vast segments of the Indian population – and with its unwillingness to provide the capital that would have sufficiently improved socio-economic conditions for them to participate in it – the Indian state eventually tolerated the prevalence of extra-legality by largely ignoring its existence.

The responses of market participants, in turn, shaped what had been delineated as a monetary outside. The delineation process of improper transactions never considered how credit markets were operating beyond the state's reach – apart from caricaturist portrayals of greed, violence, and the supposedly insurmountable informational advantage of ‘the moneylender’. Market participants did not need to shape only a market that necessarily operated extra-legally but one that needed to operate in the absence of what had been the predominant forms of making extra-legality work. The reputational credit contract in India in the nineteenth century rested on the employment of social ties and/or elaborate systems of mercantile ethics rooted in the ability of the market's apex to incentivize emulation. The collapse of these mechanisms was facilitated, even if indirectly, by the project to delineate the monetary inside, although its roots also related to larger socio-economic developments.