I am an Associate Professor of Political Theory at SOAS University of London. In 2024, I was awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship and The Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought Mid-Career Prize. My research has further received the 2020 Spitz Prize by the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought and honorable mentions from the Canadian Political Science Association for the 2020 C. B. Macpherson Prize and from the American Political Science Association for the 2025 Outstanding Article Award in International History and Politics.
My research stands at the intersection of political theory, global political economy, history of capitalism, and history of imperial and international thought. I investigate how the imperial constitution of global capitalism has been theorized in the discourse of political economy since the early modern period.
My award-winning first book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2018), 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 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 postcolonial 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 (introduction and table of contents available here).
I have also published a dozen peer-reviewed articles on political theory of capitalism and intellectual history of empire. These have appeared in American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, Political Theory, New Political Economy, History of Political Thought, and International Relations, among others.
I recently finished writing my second book, “Before the Color Line: Capital, Empire, and Race in Asia,” which will be published by Oxford University Press (expected 2027). The book locates the “prehistory” of late-nineteenth century racial categories in the entwined discourses of political economy and Enlightenment ethnography that stamped the heyday of liberal imperialism. It demonstrates the emergence of proto-racial conceptions from the ideological matrix of civilization and savagery that was keyed to the subordination of land, labor, and social (re)production to capital. By centering analysis on British colonial capitalism in Asia, the analysis challenges the “methodological Atlanticism” of the recent scholarship on “racial capitalism.”
I outline the book’s arguments in “Deprovincializing Racial Capitalism: John Crawfurd and Settler Colonialism in India,” and “From ‘Chinese Colonist’ to ‘Yellow Peril’: Capitalist Racialization in the British Empire,” both published in the American Political Science Review.
I am currently working on my next monograph, tentatively entitled, “Between Commerce and Empire: Capitalism and the Limits of Liberal Anti-Imperialism.” This study reappraises the Enlightenment critique of European colonialism. It is argued that the Enlightenment thinkers’ denunciation of European empires was ultimately constrained by their commitment to commercial and capitalist expansion.
Preliminary findings of this project have been 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).
Before joining SOAS, I held permanent faculty positions in Singapore and Istanbul as well as fellowships at Princeton University, Brown University, and the National University of Singapore.