Category: Book Review

The Changing Face of Imperialism: Colonialism to Contemporary Capitalism

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叠测听Sunanda Sen and

How is imperialism relevant today? How has it mutated over the past century? What are different theoretical and empirical angles through which we can study imperialism? These are the questions we deal with in our edited volume on (2018).

We understand imperialism as a continuing arrangement since the early years of empire-colonies to the prevailing pattern of expropriations, on part of those who wield power vis-脿-vis those who are weak. The pattern of 鈥榦ld imperialism鈥�, in the writings of Hobson, Hilferding and Lenin, were framed in the context of the imperial relations between the ruling nations and their colonies with political subjugation of the latter, captured by force or by commerce, providing the groundwork for their economic domination in the interest of the ruling nations. Forms of such arrogation varied, across regions and over time; including  the early European invasions of South America, use of slaves or indentured labour across oceans, and the draining off of surpluses from colonies by using trade and financial channels. Imperialism, however, has considerably changed its pattern since then, especially with institutional changes in the  prevailing power structure.

The essays in the volume offer a renewed interpretation, which include the alternate interpretations of imperialism and its changing pattern over space and time, incorporating the changing pattern of oppression which reflects the dynamics underlying the specific  patterns of oppression. The pattern can be characterised as 鈥榥ew imperialism鈥� under contemporary capitalism as distinct from its 鈥榦ld鈥� form under colonialism. The varied interpretations of imperialism  as in the literature do not lessen the significance of the common ground underlying the alternate positions, including the diverse pattern of expropriations under imperialism.

The volume offers fourteen chapters by renowned authors. In this blog, we organise them in the following manner: the first five of those deal with the conceptual basis of imperialism from different angles, the next three chapters deal with contemporary imperialism, and then the rest six chapters of book deal with India, colonialism and contemporary issues with imperialism.

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How To Write About Pipelines

sakshiaravindLeave a comment

Writing about Indigenous rights or climate and environmental justice movements as a non-Indigenous person is difficult and complex. The magnitude of difficulty becomes manifold if the authorial voice falls somewhere on the white, western knowledge spectrum. What we have to say matters less than what we have learned in thinking with the Indigenous people and their knowledge forms. For non-Indigenous scholars, there is a constant need to be alert to the possibilities of reproducing colonial power structures and epistemic frameworks while engaged in knowledge production. The only way out of this conundrum is to constantly learn from Indigenous voices and epistemologies and be sensitive to structural inequities and epistemic injustices that have marred the academe. It is not adequate to merely provide nodding acknowledgement to the idea of environmental justice. Interrogating the colonial and settler colonial structures within environmental movements must be a continuous process. Particularly, the idea of Indigenous environmental justice is yet to assume the place it deserves in the literature on environmentalisms, environmental activism, or even Marxist ecology. While Black-Green solidarity and alliance is an indispensable condition for the flourishing of the environmental movements, the work towards achieving it has been disappointingly slow. These concerns resurfaced as I read Andreas Malm鈥檚 new work .

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Economics Through the Lens of Women – A Review of Giandomenica Becchio鈥檚 A History of Feminist and Gender Economics

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There is a long-standing debate on how economics as a subject is gender blind giving rise to various branches within the subject that seek to address 鈥榯he woman question鈥� (as early feminism has been labeled) within the discipline. Giandomenica Becchio鈥檚 book A History of Feminist and Gender Economics is not merely an attempt to understand the history of economics and how the various dimensions of 鈥榯he woman question鈥� have entered the discipline of economics over the years. The book also explores the work of women economists who mostly remained unheard in the discipline, the women who struggled to enter into the academic realm and the debates within these economists about addressing 鈥榯he woman question鈥�.

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Whose Anger? A Review of Angrynomics

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The recent 鈥榠nsurrection鈥� on Capitol Hill should put an end to any liberal illusions that 2021 would usher in, in Biden鈥檚 words, a return to decency. Surreal images of the roaming the US Senate may yet become one of the defining photographs of the Trump presidency. In many ways it is symbolic of the President himself – and unashamedly atavistic yet, emboldened by , obstructive and corrosive.

Many of these themes are touched upon in Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth鈥檚 short book . In many senses it is a timely book, published just weeks after the murder of George Floyd and in the midst of the largest global recession since the Second World War, these are fertile grounds for anger. Certainly there is very little to dispute about Lonergan and Blyth鈥檚 premise:

鈥淲e have an abject failure of policy. Rather than presenting a major programme of economic reform, the global political elite has offered nothing substantive, instead choosing either to jump on the bandwagon of nationalism or insist that nothing fundamental is wrong鈥� The political classes, bereft of ideas, are now desperately peddling old ideologies and instincts, or pursuing bizarre distractions like Brexit.鈥�

As a result of this abject failure, people are angry. They are either publicly anger or privately angry. That public anger either manifests itself in moral outrage (think, for instance, of an Extinction Rebellion protest) or tribal rage (for example, and this is used in the book, fans at a football match). Private anger, meanwhile, gives us an insight into the daily micro-stresses of people鈥檚 lives. This is the Lonergan and Blyth typology of anger.

Whose Anger?

While the authors are clear that 鈥渨e need to draw a clear distinction between legitimate public anger and cynical manipulation of tribal anger for political ends鈥� (22), their analysis often fails to live up to the task. Through the centrality of 鈥渓egitimate moral grievances in the Rust Belt鈥� in explaining the election of Trump (25) and the 鈥渞eal stressors鈥� of immigration driving the Brexit vote (111-112), Angrynomics ends up sidestepping important discussions of race for an overly simplistic explanation of class.

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The Nature of Social Reality: Issues in Social Ontology (Review)

yannicksladecaffarelLeave a comment

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Review of Lawson, T. (2019). . London and New York: Routledge.

Ontology is the study of being. Social ontology is the study of social being or, in other words, the study of the nature and basic structure of social reality. We all do ontology all of the time, economists included, whether we like it or not. For all practices carry ontological presuppositions. Economists only have a choice between doing ontology explicitly or implicitly. Tony Lawson鈥檚 contributions stand out and are of such profound significance precisely because he explicitly grounds his analysis in an account of social ontology. It is only by redressing the ontological neglect that has for some decades characterised the discipline that a productive transformation of economics is at all feasible.聽

Lawson is perhaps best known amongst heterodox economists for his critique of the mainstream emphasis on mathematical modelling. Lawson shows that the implicit ontological presupposition of an insistence of mathematical modelling is a world of isolated atoms and argues that, as the social realm is not characterised by isolated atoms, the mainstream approach will produce largely irrelevant research. However, it would be wrong to consider this critique to be his major contribution. Rather, it is but one of an increasing number of powerful (sometimes startling) results derived from Lawson鈥檚 three-decade project of developing and defending, along with other participants of the Cambridge Social Ontology Group, an account of the nature of social reality.聽

The Nature of Social Reality: Issues in Social Ontology provides the latest developments that Lawson has made in the field of social ontology. Here, he sets out an account of social ontology that has come to be regularly referred to as a theory of social positioning, demonstrating its explanatory power. An exciting feature of the book is that it sets out the theory of social positioning in its most advanced form to date and then puts it to work through analysing the nature of the corporation, money and emancipatory practice. Whilst Lawson is pursuing themes in social ontology at an advanced level, he takes great pains to ensure that the analysis is everywhere accessible. The detailed and provocative accounts of the corporation and of money provide ample illustrations of the enormous potential of the social positioning framework.聽聽Read More »

Book Review of Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East

Farwa Sial6 Comments

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, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9781108453158 (paper); ISBN: 9781108614443 (ebook)

Adam Hanieh鈥檚 book 鈥楳oney, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East鈥� is one of the most important works on contemporary Middle East. The book analyses the specificity of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as part of global capitalism by focusing on the socio-economic structures of the six Gulf States, the interlinkages between them and other socio-economic and financial relationships with the rest of the world. Joining other scholars, Hanieh draws attention to the fact that scholarship on the Middle East including the GCC has inclined towards an exceptionalism which overwhelmingly focuses on the Middle East as a resource-rich country and a site of various conflicts. This reductive emphasis diminishes the various ways in which the region integrates the contemporary patterns of capital accumulation and historical lineages of familial and monarchic capitalism. As he mentions, even the modern concept of the 鈥楤RICS鈥� excludes the large population of the Middle East. Filling this vacuum, the book focuses on how the GCC absorbs and reproduces contemporary modalities of capital accumulation in diverse sectors including finance, agribusiness, real estate, retail, telecommunications, and urban utilities. The six states of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain have special linkages with global powers including the US, Israel, China and other Arab states. As important logistics hubs and sites of intermediate supply chains these states also connect with other countries.Read More »

Is Postcolonial Capitalism a Thing to Itself? Reviewing Sanyal鈥檚 Rethinking Capitalist Development

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Kalyan Sanyal鈥檚 Rethinking Capitalist Development (2007, 2014) is a rare work of political economy for many reasons. It is written by an economist, but it鈥檚 so interdisciplinary that you won鈥檛 be able to tell. It is an attempt to theorize capitalism in the postcolonial context from the inside-out rather than outside-in, i.e. with no reference to an ideal type. It refuses to sit neatly in theoretical boundaries 鈥� it is not entirely Marxist, not entirely Postmarxist, not entirely neo-Gramscian, not entirely Foucauldian, but a strange concoction of all. Perhaps the only thing that is not rare is that like most interesting and influential works that emerge from the Global South, it too has been largely ignored in the academic circles of the Global North, especially in Economics.聽Read More »