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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 am the author of the award-winning book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2018), which 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 ReviewThe Journal of Politics, Political Theory, History of Political Thought, and International Relations, among others.

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).