Onur Ulas Ince delivered a lecture on ‘Saving Capitalism from Empire: Uses of Colonial History in New Institutional Economics’. It was chaired by Prathama Banerjee.
ZOOM ID: 81448883877 PASSCODE: csdsdelhi
The most recent Nobel Economics Prize to Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Simon Johnson was for reappraisal of new institutional economics (NIE) through the lens of comparative colonial history. This talk critiques the “colonial turn” in NIE with broader implications for theorizing colonialism and capitalism within the same analytic frame and admitting colonialism into its history of capitalism while excluding it from its theory of capitalism. 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 speaker concludes on broader questions about inclusion and exclusion under “actually existing capitalism.”
Onur Ulas Ince is Associate Professor of Political Theory at SOAS and 2024 British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow. He is the author of the award-winning book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2018). He is currently writing a second monograph entitled Before the Global Color Line: Empire, Capital, and Race in Asia, 1800-1850 (under contract with Oxford UP).
Prathama Banerjee is Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Wednesday, 26 March 2025, 6 pm, Seminar Room and Zoom https://bit.ly/4hf7sSz
