I am an Associate Professor of Political Theory at SOAS, University of London.
My research stands at the intersection of political theory, global political economy, history of capitalism, and history of imperial thought. I mainly investigate how the imperial constitution of global capitalism has been theorized in the medium of political economy since the early-modern period.
I am the author of the award-winning book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2018). The book argues that the ideational parameters of liberalism were forged in the crucible of colonial expropriation and exploitation that gave birth to the capitalist world economy. The oft-noted imagination of the British Empire as an “empire of liberty” – the global avatar of private property, free commerce, and free labor – had to grapple with the empire’s record of territorial conquest, bonded labor, and resource extraction across four continents. The book challenges the scholarly penchant to critique the justifications of European colonialism through the lens of universalism, cultural difference, and representations of the colonized. Parting ways with culturalist approaches prevalent in political theory and colonial studies, the framework of colonial capitalism discloses how imperial economic agendas and the pressures of early-modern global capitalism mediated European constructions of colonial difference. The book demonstrates the emergence of proto-racial categories from the ideological matrix of civilization and savagery that was keyed to the subordination of land, labor, and social (re)production to capital.
Colonial Capitalism received the 2020 Spitz Prize by the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought and was a finalist for the 2020 C. B. Macpherson Prize by the Canadian Political Science Association. You can download the book’s introduction and table of contents here.
My articles on political theory of capitalism and intellectual history of empire have appeared in American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, Political Theory, History of Political Thought, and International Relations, among others. The articles proceed along two research avenues. The first builds on social theory and imperial history to sharpen the political contours of capitalism. I have elucidated the distinctly political aspects of capitalist dispossession and exploitation in several articles that engage with Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin. The theoretical insights from these studies inform the second research avenue, which adopts imperial political economy as an interpretive frame in studying intellectual regimes such as liberalism and racism. My articles on John Locke, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and Friedrich List foreground the economics of the imperial context, critically complementing the culturalist bent of the scholarship in postcolonial theory and the political theory of empire.
I am currently working on two book monographs. The first, “Before the Global Color Line: Capital, Empire, and Race in Asia, 1800-1850,” is under contract with Oxford University Press. The book locates the “prehistory” of late-nineteenth century racial categories in the entwined discourses of political economy and Enlightenment ethnography. It does so by challenging the “methodological Atlanticism” of the recent scholarship on race and capital and widening the aperture to British colonial capitalism in Asia.
I outline the project’s main arguments in two articles: “Deprovincializing Racial Capitalism: John Crawfurd and Settler Colonialism in India” (American Political Science Review), and “From ‘Chinese Colonist’ to ‘Yellow Peril’: Capitalist Racialization in the British Empire” (American Political Science Review).
The second project, “Between Commerce and Empire: Capitalism and the Limits of Liberal Anti-Imperialism”, is in progress. This study reappraises the Enlightenment critique of European colonialism and argues that the Enlightenment thinkers’ denunciation of European empires was ultimately constrained by their commitment to commercial and capitalist expansion.
An early elaboration of the book’s arguments are published in two articles: “David Hume, Colonial Slavery, and Commercial Incivility” (History of Political Thought), and “Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, and Limits of Liberal Anti-Imperialism” (Journal of Politics).