Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, and Limits of Liberal Anti-Imperialism

Recent scholarship has claimed Adam Smith’s frontal attack on the mercantile system as a precocious expression of liberal anti-imperialism. This article 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 Native Americans. 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.

Saving Capitalism from Empire: Uses of Colonial History in New Institutional Economics

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’

Bringing the Economy Back In: Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, and the Politics of Capitalism

This article engages with the question of how to construct modern economic relations as an object of political theorizing by placing Hannah Arendt’s 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 on 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 that such putatively “economic” questions as dispossession, exploitation, and accumulation appear as irreducibly political questions

Between Commerce and Empire: David Hume, Colonial Slavery, and Commercial Incivility

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

Phantasmagorias of the nation

This thesis presents an alternative approach to the notion of the "imagined community of the nation" by focusing on the role of aesthetics in the emergence of the modern nation. Within the framework of the late 18th-early 20th Century Europe, the thesis explores the modern transformations that gave rise to the nation from a perspective that establishes the convergence of aesthetics and politics as the central process through which the imagination of the nation is (re)produced. It designates unqualified, bodily, "naked" life as the grounds for this convergence, and traces the emergence of naked life through processes of its "scientization" by the discipline of psychophysiology, its "aestheticization" by phantasmagorical spectacles, and its "politicization" through its inscription in the national juridical order around the persona of the citizen. It contends that naked life that first emerged as an imaginable entity in psychophysiology was captured in aesthetic constellations by phantasmagorias, which were then appropriated by the project of nation-building for the forging of the national imaginary. The political function of the "phantasmagorias of the nation" is to uphold the mythical notion of predestination to the eternal present of the nation, which finds its corollary in the fateful subjection of citizens to the mythical violence of the nation-state. The thesis concludes by asserting that this particular conceptualization of the nation proves useful for qualifying the understanding of contemporary politics in general and the arguments about the decline of the nation in particular.Arts, Faculty ofSociology, Department ofGraduat