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Literature on “racial capitalism” exhibits a tension between the term’s evocative power and its conceptual imprecision. This article navigates this tension by developing the mid-level concept of “capitalist racialization,” which specifies the role of capitalist abstractions in the construction of racial hierarchies. I elaborate this notion around the racialization of Chinese migration in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia. I focalize the figure of the “Chinese colonist” as an index of the capitalist standards by which British observers ordered colonial populations in their reflections on imperial political economy. I argue that the racial stereotype of “the Chinese” as a commercial, industrious, and “colonizing” people emerged from the subsumption of colonial land and labor under capital. Their “colonizing” capacity rendered Chinese migrants simultaneously an economic asset to the British Empire and a potential threat to the white world order. “Capitalist racialization” therefore highlights new inroads into the entwined histories of capitalism, racism, and empire.
Deprovincializing Racial Capitalism: John Crawfurd and Settler Colonialism in India, American Political Science Review 116:1 (2022): 144-160. Open Access.
Recent literature on racial capitalism has overwhelmingly focused on the Atlantic settler-slave formation, sidelining the history of European imperialism in Asia. This article addresses this blind spot by recovering the aborted project of British settler colonialism in India through the writings of its most prominent advocate, John Crawfurd. It is argued that Crawfurd’s vision of a liberal empire in India rejected slavery and indigenous dispossession yet remained deeply racialized in its conception of capital, labor, and value. Crawfurd elaborated a “capital theory of race,” which derived racial categories from a civilizational spectrum keyed to the capitalist organization of production. His proposals accordingly revamped the conventional terms of colonization by representing India as overstocked with labor but vacant of capital and skill that only European settlers could provide. The article concludes with the broader implications of a trans-imperial analytic framework for writing connected histories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism.
This article contributes to theorising colonialism and capitalism within the same analytic frame through a critical engagement with the uses of colonial history in new institutional economics (NIE). The “colonial turn” in NIE holds significant diagnostic value because although it incorporates colonialism into its account of the “great divergence,” it maintains a liberal conception of capitalism predicated on private property, competitive markets, and the rule of law. It is argued that NIE achieves this effect by admitting colonialism into its history of capitalism while excluding it from its theory of capitalism. By filtering colonialism through the dichotomy between “inclusive” and “extractive” institutions, NIE upholds the categorical association of capitalist growth with inclusive institutions. Drawing on critical theories of political economy, the article shows the limits of the NIE framework by identifying forms of colonial capitalism that do not resolve into a stylised opposition between inclusion and extraction. Colonial slavery, commercial imperialism, and settler colonialism strain the inclusive/extractive binary by highlighting (1) the interdependence of inclusive and extractive institutions in imperial networks accumulation, and (2) the violent expropriations at the origins of inclusive institutions, above all private property. Proposing to view NIE’s critique of colonialism as a “liberal critique of capitalist unevenness,” the article concludes on broader questions about inclusion and exclusion under “actually existing capitalism.”
Recent scholarship has claimed Adam Smith’s frontal attack on the mercantile system as a precocious expression of liberal anti-imperialism. This paper argues that settler colonialism in North America represented an important exception and limit to Smith’s anti-imperial commitments. Smith spared agrarian settler colonies from his invective against other imperial practices like chattel slavery and trade monopolies because of the colonies’ evidentiary significance for his “system of natural liberty.” Smith’s embrace of settler colonies involved him in an ideological conundrum insofar as the prosperity of these settlements rested on imperial expansion and seizure of land from the indigenous peoples. Smith navigated this problem by, first, predicating colonial “injustice” on conquest, slavery, and destruction, and second, describing American land as res nullius. Together, these conceptual definitions made it possible to imagine settler colonies as originating in nonviolent acts of “occupation without conquest” and embodying “commerce without empire.”
Abstract: This paper attempts to elaborate a political theory of capital’s violence. Recent analyses have adopted Karl Marx’s notion of the “primitive accumulation of capital” for investigating the forcible methods by which the conditions of capital accumulation are reproduced in the present. I argue that the current scholarship is limited by a certain functionalism in its theorization of ongoing primitive accumulation. The analytic function accorded to primitive accumulation, I contend, can be better performed by the concepts of “capital-positing violence” and “capital-preserving violence.” In coining these new concepts, I first refine the conceptual core of primitive accumulation as the coercive capitalization of social relations of reproduction, which falls into sharpest relief in the violent history of colonial capitalism. I then elucidate this conceptual core with reference to Carl Schmitt’s account of European colonial expansion and Walter Benjamin’s reflections on law-making and law-preserving violence. The resultant concepts of capital-positing and capital-preserving violence, I conclude, can illuminate both the historical and the quotidian operations of the politico-juridical force that has been constitutive of capitalism down to our present moment.
Abstract: Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought has recently been reclaimed as a robust, albeit short-lived, cosmopolitan critique of European imperialism. This essay complicates this interpretation through a study of David Hume’s reflections on commerce, empire, and slavery. I argue that while Hume condemned the colonial system of monopoly, war, and conquest, his strictures against empire did not extend to colonial slavery in the Atlantic. This was because colonial slavery represented a manifestly uncivil institution when judged by enlightened metropolitan sensibilities, yet also a decisively commercial institution pivotal to the eighteenth-century global economy. Confronted by the paradoxical “commercial incivility” of modern slavery, Hume opted for disavowing the link between slavery and commerce, and confined his criticism of slavery to its ancient, feudal, and Asiatic incarnations. I contend that Hume’s disavowal of the commercial barbarism of the Atlantic economy is part of a broader ideological effort to separate the idea of commerce from its imperial origins and posit it as the liberal antithesis of empire. The implications of analysis, I conclude, go beyond the eighteenth-century debates over commerce and empire, and more generally pertain to the contradictory entwinement of liberalism and capitalism.
Abstract: This essay engages with the question of how to construct modern economic relations as an object of political theorizing by placing Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx’s writings in critical conversation. I contend that the political aspect of capitalism comes into sharpest relief less in relations of economic exploitation than in moments of expropriation that produce and reproduce the conditions of capitalist accumulation. To develop a theoretical handle on expropriation, and thereby on the politics of capitalism, I syncretically draw upon Marxian and Arendtian concepts by, first, examining expropriation through the Marxian analytic of “primitive accumulation of capital” and, second, delineating the political agency behind primitive accumulation through the Arendtian notion of “power.” I substantiate these connections around colonial histories of primitive accumulation wherein expropriation emerges as a terrain of political contestation. From this perspective, I conclude, such putatively “economic” questions as dispossession, exploitation, and accumulation appear as irreducibly political questions.
Abstract: This essay offers a critical reexamination of the works of Friedrich List by placing them in the context of nineteenth-century imperial economies. I argue that List’s theory of the national economy is characterised by a major ambivalence, as it incorporates both imperial and anti-imperial elements. On the one hand, List pitted his national principle against the British imperialism of free trade and the relations of dependency it heralded for late developers like Germany. On the other hand, his economic nationalism aimed less at dismantling imperial core-periphery relations as a whole than at reproducing these relations domestically and expanding them globally. I explain this ambivalence with reference to List’s designation of imperial Britain as the prime example of successful economic development and a model to be emulated by late industrialisers. List thereby fashioned his ideas on national development out of the historical experience of an empire whereby he internalised its economic logic and discourse of the civilising mission. Consequently, List’s national economy culminated in an early vision of the global north-south relations, in which the global industrial-financial core would expand to include France, Germany, and the Unites States, while the rest of the world would be reduced to quasi-colonial agrarian hinterlands.
Abstract: This essay stages a theoretical intervention in the growing literature on “global land grabs.” The triple crisis of finance, food, and energy in 2008 has prompted powerful transnational actors to acquire massive expanses of farmland in the Global South. Recent critical analyses of this process have variously invoked global capitalism and neocolonialism to account for this trend. One line of inquiry approaches land grabs as instances of “primitive accumulation of capital” whereby lands in the Global South are “enclosed” and brought within the ambit of global capitalism. Another perspective invokes the history of Anglo-American colonialism for critiquing the developmentalist discourse that depicts Africa as the “last frontier” to be tamed by the techno-industrial civilization of the North. This essay integrates these two perspectives by elaborating capitalism as an irreducibly colonial formation with global inceptions. I begin with a discussion of “primitive accumulation” and, counter to many, question the suitability of “enclosure” for interpreting land grabs. The second section delves into the theoretical origins of primitive accumulation, proposing to situate it in a global and colonial genealogy of capitalism. A final section charts the theoretical and historical contours of this global genealogy and arrives at a more capacious reconceptualization of primitive accumulation. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of contemporary land grabs for in situ displacement, the fungibility of land, and new enclosures in the contemporary reconfiguration of global value chains.
Abstract: This essay examines the tensions between liberalism and capitalism through an analysis of Edmund Burke’s works on eighteenth-century liberal political economy and, specifically, the challenges posed by colonial capitalism. When criticizing the East India Company, Burke attempted to fortify “commercial” principles, on which British self-image rested, against the “rapacious” policies of British imperialism in India, which threatened this liberal self-image. His denunciation of the Company thus can be construed as an index to broader contradictions between the liberal self-image of capitalism and the coercive processes of colonial displacement and extraction that were an integral part of capitalism’s emergence. The article, in its conclusion, outlines some theoretical and methodological issues that arise from situating Burke’s writings in their colonial and capitalist contexts.
Abstract: John Locke’s theory of property has been the subject of sustained contention between two major perspectives: a socio-economic perspective, which conceives Locke’s thought as an expression of the rising bourgeois sensibility and a defense of the nascent capitalist relations, and a theological perspective, which prioritizes his moral worldview grounded in the Christian natural law tradition. This essay argues that a closer analysis of Locke’s theory of money in the Second Treatise can provide an alternative to this binary. It maintains that the notion of money comprises a conceptual area of indeterminacy in which the theological universals of the natural law and the historical fact of capital accumulation shade into each other. More specifically, the ambiguity of the status of money enables Locke to navigate an antinomy within the natural law to the effect of establishing a relation of necessity between the divine telos and accumulative practices.