Capital and Colonialism
Capital and Colonialism

Author: Klas Rönnbäck

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-07-11

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 3030197115

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This book engages in the long-standing debate on the relationship between capitalism and colonialism. Specifically, Rönnbäck and Broberg study the interaction between imperialist policies, colonial institutions and financial markets. Their primary method of analysis is examining micro- and macro-level data relating to a large sample of ventures operating in Africa and traded on the London Stock Exchange between 1869 and 1969. Their study shows that the relationship between capital and colonialism was highly complex. While return from investing in African colonies on average was not extraordinary, there were certainly many occasions when investors enjoyed high return due to various forms of exploitation. While there were actors with rational calculations and deliberate strategies, there was also an important element of chance in determining the return on investment – not least in the mining sector, which overall was the most important business for investment in African ventures during this period. This book finally also demonstrates that the different paths of decolonization in Africa had very diverse effects for investors.

Capital and Imperialism
Capital and Imperialism

Author: Utsa Patnaik

Publisher: Monthly Review Press

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1583678905

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A comprehensive survey of capitalism's colonialist roots and uncertain future Those who control the world’s commanding economic heights, buttressed by the theories of mainstream economists, presume that capitalism is a self-contained and self-generating system. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this pathbreaking book—winner of the Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award—radical political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik argue that the accumulation of capital has always required the taking of land, raw materials, and bodies from noncapitalist modes of production. They begin with a thorough debunking of mainstream economics. Then, looking at the history of capitalism, from the beginnings of colonialism half a millennium ago to today’s neoliberal regimes, they discover that, over the long haul, capitalism, in order to exist, must metastasize itself in the practice of imperialism and the immiseration of countless people. A few hundred years ago, write the Patnaiks, colonialism began to ensure vast, virtually free, markets for new products in burgeoning cities in the West. But even after slavery was generally abolished, millions of people in the Global South still fell prey to the continuing lethal exigencies of the marketplace. Even after the Second World War, when decolonization led to the end of the so-called “Golden Age of Capitalism,” neoliberal economies stepped in to reclaim the Global South, imposing drastic “austerity” measures on working people. But, say the Patnaiks, this neoliberal economy, which lives from bubble to bubble, is doomed to a protracted crisis. In its demise, we are beginning to see—finally—the transcendence of the capitalist system.

The Economics of Empire
The Economics of Empire

Author: Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-30

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 1000293858

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The Economics of Empire: Genealogies of Capital and the Colonial Encounter is a multidisciplinary intervention into postcolonial theory that constructs and theorizes a political economy of empire. This comprehensive collection traces the financial genealogies associated with the colonial enterprise, the strategies of economic precarity, the pedigrees of capital, and the narratives of exploitation that underlay and determined the course of modern history. One of the first attempts to take this approach in postcolonial studies, the book seeks to sketch the commensal relation—a symbiotic "phoresy"—between capitalism and colonialism, reading them as linked structures that carried and sustained each other through and across the modern era. The scholars represented here are all postcolonial critics working in a range of disciplines, including Political Science, Sociology, History, Peace and Conflict Studies, Legal Studies, and Literary Criticism, exploring the connections between empire and capital, and the historical and political implications of that structural hinge. Each author engages existing postcolonial and poststructuralist theory and criticism while bridging it over to research and analytic lenses less frequently engaged by postcolonial critics. In so doing, they devise novel intersectional and interdisciplinary frameworks through which to produce more greatly nuanced understandings of imperialism, capitalism, and their inextricable relation, "new" postcolonial critiques of empire for the twenty-first century. This book will be an excellent resource for students and researchers of Postcolonial Studies, Literature, History, Sociology, Economics, Political Science and International Studies, among others.

Creating A World Economy
Creating A World Economy

Author: Alan K. Smith

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-04-02

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0429710429

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This is an exploration in world history that examines complex and intriguing questions concerning the origins of the first truly global economy, centered in Europe, which served in turn as a solid basis for the later emergence of the modern world system. Professor Smith first examines the remarkable progress achieved by many cultures around the world, achievements that for some time far exceeded anything then found in Europe. The study then probes beyond "traditionalism" as a sufficient explanation of the inability of these societies to maintain the economic momentum that had begun so auspiciously and carefully examines the experience of European societies by way of comparison, finding that remarkably similar processes tended to unfold at first: regions of Europe that made the earliest gains in material progress were, like other parts of the world, unable to sustain these advances. Still, in some parts of Europe–particularly the Netherlands and England–a new alignment of social forces was yielding the social system that would eventually evolve into capitalism. This breakthrough allowed for continued dynamic material progress, particularly for the English. Able to establish an unprecedented commercial dominance in vast reaches of the world, the British found themselves at the hub of a new world economy much more complex than any earlier intercultural commercial system. The book delineates the systemic roles assumed by the various regions of the world and by European merchant capital and explains the tensions within this system that ensured its continued dynamism and eventual transformation into the current world economic system. Creating a World Economy combines an epic sweep with a mastery of historical detail and is sure to stimulate discussion among sociologists and historians interested in questions of a global nature.

Colonialism and Foreign Ownership of Capital (Routledge Revivals)
Colonialism and Foreign Ownership of Capital (Routledge Revivals)

Author: Bharat Hazari

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-12-22

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 1317243684

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First published in 1982. Foreign control of capital is a major problem for many developing countries and can lead to the exercise of a form of colonial control whereby capital is provided for political rather than economic reasons. This book discusses the implications of this phenomenon for trade theory and the amount of pressure that foreign countries can exert. The opening chapter examines the themes of de-industrialisation, of stagnation after an initial spurt in economic activity, and the premise that inflows of capital do not necessarily generate growth and expansion. These initial discussions are developed in the subsequent chapters where the effects of foreign ownership on the host country’s economy and trade are dealt with fully. This work would be of interest to students of economics and development.

Alien Capital
Alien Capital

Author: Iyko Day

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2016-03-11

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0822374528

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In Alien Capital Iyko Day retheorizes the history and logic of settler colonialism by examining its intersection with capitalism and the racialization of Asian immigrants to Canada and the United States. Day explores how the historical alignment of Asian bodies and labor with capital's abstract and negative dimensions became one of settler colonialism's foundational and defining features. This alignment allowed white settlers to gloss over and expunge their complicity with capitalist exploitation from their collective memory. Day reveals this process through an analysis of a diverse body of Asian North American literature and visual culture, including depictions of Chinese railroad labor in the 1880s, filmic and literary responses to Japanese internment in the 1940s, and more recent examinations of the relations between free trade, national borders, and migrant labor. In highlighting these artists' reworking and exposing of the economic modalities of Asian racialized labor, Day pushes beyond existing approaches to settler colonialism as a Native/settler binary to formulate it as a dynamic triangulation of Native, settler, and alien populations and positionalities.

The Changing Face of Imperialism
The Changing Face of Imperialism

Author: Sunanda Sen

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2018-01-02

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1351184806

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This volume reiterates the relevance of imperialism in the present, as a continuous arrangement, from the early years of empire-colonies to the prevailing pattern of expropriation across the globe. While imperialism as an arrangement of exploitation has sustained over ages, measures deployed to achieve the goals have gone through variations, depending on the network of the prevailing power structure. Providing a historical as well as a conceptual account of imperialism in its ‘classical’ context, this collection brings to the fore an underlying unity which runs across the diverse pattern of imperialist order over time. Dealing with theory, the past and the contemporary, the study concludes by delving into the current conjuncture in Latin America, the United States and Asia. The Changing Face of Imperialism will provide fresh ideas for future research into the shifting patterns of expropriation – spanning the early years of sea-borne plunder and the empire-colonies of nineteenth-century to contemporary capitalism, which is rooted in neoliberalism, globalization and free market ideology. With contributions from major experts in the field, this book will be a significant intervention. It will be of interest to scholars and researchers of economics, politics, sociology and history, especially those dealing with imperial history and colonialism.

The Costs of Connection
The Costs of Connection

Author: Nick Couldry

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-08-20

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 1503609758

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Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free—it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives—our ways of knowing; our means of production; our political participation. Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but this book shows that the historic appropriation of land, bodies, and natural resources is mirrored today in this new era of pervasive datafication. Apps, platforms, and smart objects capture and translate our lives into data, and then extract information that is fed into capitalist enterprises and sold back to us. The authors argue that this development foreshadows the creation of a new social order emerging globally—and it must be challenged. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, they offer a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.