The susu, known elsewhere as partner or box, is a savings club whose members pay in regularly and take the whole fund in turn. Bonnett follows the institution from the Caribbean to Brooklyn and argues that it works as a structural shield, giving immigrants shut out of bank credit a way to raise deposits on houses, start businesses, send remittances and bury their dead without recourse to a public grave. He expects reliance on it to fall between the first generation and the second, as American-born children gain access to ordinary finance. The Brooklyn material rests on interviews with ten organizers and a mailed questionnaire answered by fifty-five users and forty-eight non-users. Around this sits a comparative survey of similar clubs in China, Japan, Korea, Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria and southern Africa, and an assessment of attempts in Jamaica, Guyana and Trinidad to fold such associations into national banking systems.