Onur Ulas Ince's Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This panel critically interrogates the interventions of Onur Ulas Ince’s Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemma of Liberalism (OUP 2018) in the growing body of work in political theory that has take up the entanglements of liberalism and empire. Set in the context of the early-modern British Empire, Colonial Capitalism paints a striking picture of the tensions between the illiberal origins of capitalism and its liberal imaginations in metropolitan thought. Through a close examination of three liberal economists—John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield—Ince analyzes how liberals tried to navigate the ideological dilemmas arising from colonial land seizures, commercial imperialism, and colonial labor dispossession. Critics on the panel will consider the ways Colonial Capitalism reconceptualizes the relationship between liberalism and empire by turning to the terrain of political economy and centering what Marx called “the primitive accumulation of capital. The panel will also consider the book’s conversations with and contributions to the renewed interest in histories of capitalism.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 1: Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches

Cosponsor

• DIVISION 42: New Political Science

Chair

• Adom Getachew University of Chicago

Presenters

• Samuel Moyn Yale University

• Jeanne Morefield Whitman College

• Keally DeAnne McBride University of San Francisco

• William Clare Roberts McGill University

• Onur Ulas Ince Singapore Management University