{"id":1141,"date":"2023-04-24T12:15:09","date_gmt":"2023-04-24T12:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/?page_id=1141"},"modified":"2026-02-02T14:31:47","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T14:31:47","slug":"before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"Before the Color Line: Empire, Capitalism, and Race in Asia (under contract with Oxford UP)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Before the Color Line<\/em> is a book in political theory and intellectual history that makes three theoretical interventions in the burgeoning literature on the entwinement of capitalism, race, and colonialism. First, the book illuminates the \u201cprehistory of the global color line\u201d by locating the ideational antecedents of nineteenth-century racial categories in eighteenth-century discourses of political economy and ethnography. Second, it aims at \u201cdeprovincializing racial capitalism\u201d by widening the aperture beyond Atlantic histories of slavery and settler colonialism and situating the capital-race nexus in a trans-imperial analytic frame encompassing Asia. Third, it develops the notion of \u201ccapitalist racialization\u201d to delineate the specific role of capitalist social forms in the elaboration of social difference into civilizational and racial hierarchies, whereby it elucidates the co-constitutive relationship between capitalism and racism while also providing a distinctly materialist angle on the problem of universalism and difference central to the political theory of empire and imperialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book develops its theoretical claims through an imperial intellectual history of the civilizational and racial hierarchies under British colonial capitalism in South and Southeast Asia in the first half of the nineteenth century. It contends that the colonial representations of Asian societies that would inform the racist ideology of global capitalism in the late-nineteenth century were initially forged during the heyday of liberal imperialism half a century earlier, thus retrieving a neglected episode in the history of what W. E. B. Du Bois famously labeled the \u201ccolor line.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The study focalizes the formative impact of political economic priorities on the hierarchization of colonial populations in British Asia, which it explicates by introducing the concept of \u201ccapitalist racialization.\u201d It contextualizes the dynamics of capitalist racialization in the self-avowed imperial project of transforming Britain\u2019s colonies into commercial agrarian satellites under the command of British capital and in the service of British industry and finance. It is argued that the attributes that distinguished colonial populations in the British imaginary were inflected by their presumed fit with this imperial division of labor. The book specifically focuses on the contrasting stereotypes of the servile and agrestic Indian and the commercial and enterprising Chinese, which, it maintains, took shape in and through colonial schemes for matching the empire\u2019s subjects to its political economic ends. Within these schemes, the book reconstructs two important episodes that have been underserved in the extant literatures on empire and race. The first of these is the aborted program of settler colonialism in India, which envisioned the \u201ccolonization\u201d of India by British capitalists as the spearhead of liberal reform and economic uplift in the subcontinent. The second is the British colonial agents\u2019 discovery of \u201cChinese colonists\u201d in Southeast Asia, whose commercial activities in the region presented a potential model for reconciling plantation agriculture with the British Empire\u2019s newfound commitment to free labor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In both cases, the book\u2019s attention centers on the British Straits Settlements and Singapore in particular, which exerted an outsized impact on the ideational currents of liberal imperialism. A socially heterogeneous and economically vibrant free port colony between the Indian Ocean and East Asia, the Straits Settlements embodied for many reformers the crystal of a liberal multicultural British Empire in the east. At the same time, the book argues, it formed a key site of the arbitration of various ethno-religious groups into proto-racial hierarchies according to capitalist priorities. British Southeast Asia opened up a space for political economic arguments that suggested the possibility of an empire of free trade, colonization without dispossession, and plantations without slavery. The same political economic arguments, however, formed the basis of ranking the Malays, the Indians, and the Chinese along a developmental spectrum that would eventually ossify into racial taxonomies. Originally articulated in the idiom of civilization and savagery, the distinguishing attributes of \u201cthe Hindoo\u201d and \u201cthe Chinaman\u201d laid down in this period would gradually harden into racialized features as the century came to a close, culminating, on the hand, in the imperial alibis of insurmountable cultural difference and indirect rule in India, and on the other, in the fear of impending inundation of white settler colonies by a tide of Chinese immigration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book contends that the specific terms of ordering the empire\u2019s subjects derived from the overlapping idioms of political economy and civilization\/savagery that increasingly circulated in early Victorian imperial networks of print and personnel. As the linchpin of colonial knowledge production in the early nineteenth century, the analysis foregrounds the stadial theory of commercial society and the ethnographic\u00a0 paradigms of \u201cthe savage\u201d and \u201cthe Oriental\u201d that bookended it. The civilizational gradations themselves drew much of their semantic content from classical political economy\u2019s capital-centric theses on private property, the division of labor, capital accumulation, market formation, and labor productivity. Political economy and Enlightenment ethnography, as the principal languages that ordered the social heterogeneity of the empire, furnished the ideational precursors of racial categories that would contour the global color line at the turn of the twentieth century. The period of liberal imperialism under study thereby constitutes the pivot of the historical arc that extends from the ambivalent cosmopolitanism of Enlightenment thought to the strident racism of the late Victorian imperial ideology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In substantiating these claims, the analysis draws for its evidence on a range of primary texts, including\u00a0 nineteenth-century colonial correspondence, parliamentary reports, pamphlets, and monographs, which it combines with a critical appraisal of secondary literature on British imperial history, critical political economy, and European intellectual history. Of the primary texts, the practical \u201cmiddle\u201d political theorizing of colonial officials, travelers, merchants, and publicists familiar with colonial Southeast Asia are accorded particular weight. The interpretive approach adopted in the book is a social history of political thought that does not merely situate political ideas in their imperial contexts of articulation but more importantly develops a critical social theory of the imperial context qua <\/em>\u201ccolonial capitalism.\u201d The analytic framework of \u201ccolonial capitalism\u201d expounds the multiple and shifting modes of ordering social difference into civilizational and racial hierarchies with reference to the variegated totality of British imperial political economy.<\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before the Color Line is a book in political theory and intellectual history that makes three theoretical interventions in the burgeoning literature on the entwinement of capitalism, race, and colonialism. First, the book illuminates the \u201cprehistory of the global color line\u201d by locating the ideational antecedents of nineteenth-century racial categories in eighteenth-century discourses of political … Continue reading “Before the Color Line: Empire, Capitalism, and Race in Asia (under contract with Oxford UP)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1141","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nBefore the Color Line: Empire, Capitalism, and Race in Asia (under contract with Oxford UP) - Onur Ulas Ince<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Before the Color Line: Empire, Capitalism, and Race in Asia (under contract with Oxford UP) - Onur Ulas Ince\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Before the Color Line is a book in political theory and intellectual history that makes three theoretical interventions in the burgeoning literature on the entwinement of capitalism, race, and colonialism. First, the book illuminates the \u201cprehistory of the global color line\u201d by locating the ideational antecedents of nineteenth-century racial categories in eighteenth-century discourses of political … Continue reading "Before the Color Line: Empire, Capitalism, and Race in Asia (under contract with Oxford UP)"\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Onur Ulas Ince\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-02-02T14:31:47+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.ulasince.com\\\/home\\\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.ulasince.com\\\/home\\\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\\\/\",\"name\":\"Before the Color Line: Empire, Capitalism, and Race in Asia (under contract with Oxford UP) - Onur Ulas Ince\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.ulasince.com\\\/home\\\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2023-04-24T12:15:09+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2026-02-02T14:31:47+00:00\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.ulasince.com\\\/home\\\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\\\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/www.ulasince.com\\\/home\\\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\\\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.ulasince.com\\\/home\\\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\\\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.ulasince.com\\\/home\\\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Before the Color Line: Empire, Capitalism, and Race in Asia (under contract with Oxford UP)\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.ulasince.com\\\/home\\\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.ulasince.com\\\/home\\\/\",\"name\":\"Onur Ulas Ince\",\"description\":\"Associate Professor of Political Theory, SOAS University of London\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.ulasince.com\\\/home\\\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Before the Color Line: Empire, Capitalism, and Race in Asia (under contract with Oxford UP) - Onur Ulas Ince","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Before the Color Line: Empire, Capitalism, and Race in Asia (under contract with Oxford UP) - Onur Ulas Ince","og_description":"Before the Color Line is a book in political theory and intellectual history that makes three theoretical interventions in the burgeoning literature on the entwinement of capitalism, race, and colonialism. First, the book illuminates the \u201cprehistory of the global color line\u201d by locating the ideational antecedents of nineteenth-century racial categories in eighteenth-century discourses of political … Continue reading \"Before the Color Line: Empire, Capitalism, and Race in Asia (under contract with Oxford UP)\"","og_url":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\/","og_site_name":"Onur Ulas Ince","article_modified_time":"2026-02-02T14:31:47+00:00","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Est. reading time":"5 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\/","url":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\/","name":"Before the Color Line: Empire, Capitalism, and Race in Asia (under contract with Oxford UP) - Onur Ulas Ince","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/#website"},"datePublished":"2023-04-24T12:15:09+00:00","dateModified":"2026-02-02T14:31:47+00:00","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\/"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/before-the-color-line-empire-capitalism-and-race-in-asia-1800-1850-in-progress\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Before the Color Line: Empire, Capitalism, and Race in Asia (under contract with Oxford UP)"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/","name":"Onur Ulas Ince","description":"Associate Professor of Political Theory, SOAS University of London","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"}]}},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9k8Zi-ip","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3,"url":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/","url_meta":{"origin":1141,"position":0},"title":"Home","author":"admin","date":"October 28, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ulasince.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Profile-pic-SOAS-Sepia-edited-5.jpeg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ulasince.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Profile-pic-SOAS-Sepia-edited-5.jpeg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ulasince.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Profile-pic-SOAS-Sepia-edited-5.jpeg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ulasince.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Profile-pic-SOAS-Sepia-edited-5.jpeg?resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ulasince.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Profile-pic-SOAS-Sepia-edited-5.jpeg?resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":29,"url":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/invited-talks-and-conference-presentations\/","url_meta":{"origin":1141,"position":1},"title":"Invited talks","author":"admin","date":"October 28, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"\u201cCapitalism and Race in Imperial Perspective: Beyond Methodological Atlanticism,\u201d King\u2019s College London (January 2024, London) \u201cFrom \u2018Civilization\u2019 to \u2018Race\u2019: The Political Economy of Imperial Subjecthood,\u201d University of Oxford, Political Theory Workshop (October 2023, Oxford);\u00a0 University College Dublin and Australian Catholic University, Subjecthood in the Nineteenth-Century Anglosphere Workshop (August 2023, Rome)\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":18,"url":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/peer-reviewed-articles\/","url_meta":{"origin":1141,"position":2},"title":"Journal articles","author":"admin","date":"October 28, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Click on the title to access the full text in PDF. From 'Chinese Colonist' to 'Yellow Peril': Capitalist Racialization in the British Empire, American Political Science Review, (November 2023). Open Access. Literature on \u201cracial capitalism\u201d exhibits a tension between the term\u2019s evocative power and its conceptual imprecision. This article navigates\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ulasince.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Ince-2023-From-Chinese-Colonist-to-Yellow-Peril.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ulasince.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Ince-2023-From-Chinese-Colonist-to-Yellow-Peril.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ulasince.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Ince-2023-From-Chinese-Colonist-to-Yellow-Peril.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":13,"url":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/book-colonial-capitalism-and-the-dilemmas-of-liberalism\/","url_meta":{"origin":1141,"position":3},"title":"Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2018)","author":"admin","date":"October 28, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2018) Winner of the 2020 David and Elaine Spitz Prize, International Conference for the Study of Political Thought Finalist for the 2020 C. B. Macpherson Prize, Canadian Political Science Association (Introduction and the table of contents available for download here)\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ulasince.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Comp_R2_ColonialCapitalism_Ince-674x1024.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":236,"url":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/between-commerce-and-empire-capitalism-and-the-limits-of-anti-imperial-critique-book-manuscript-in-progress\/","url_meta":{"origin":1141,"position":4},"title":"Between Global Commerce and Empire: Capitalism and the Limits of Liberal Anti-Imperialism (in progress)","author":"admin","date":"October 24, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Between Global Commerce and Empire furthers the arguments of my first book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism.\u00a0At the heart of both books is the contradictory and constitutive relationship between capitalism, liberalism, and empire in British international thought. While Colonial Capitalism examines this contradiction in liberal defenses of empire,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1198,"url":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/research-in-progress-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":1141,"position":5},"title":"Research in progress","author":"admin","date":"May 11, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"Before the Color Line: Empire, Capital, and Race in Asia, 1800-1850 Between Commerce and Empire: Capitalism and the Limits of Liberal Anti-Imperialism","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1141"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1546,"href":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1141\/revisions\/1546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ulasince.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}