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Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism$

Onur Ulas Ince

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780190637293

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190637293.001.0001

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ConclusionBringing the Economy Back In

ConclusionBringing the Economy Back In

(p.158) Conclusion
Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism

Onur Ulas Ince

Oxford University Press

This chapter recapitulates the theoretical conclusions of the book, highlights its contributions, and identifies the further lines of research that it opens up. It is argued that colonial capitalism offers a new perspective on liberalism and empire by shifting the focus from who the colonized are to what the colonizers do as an ideological challenge to the universal claims of liberalism. Secondly, colonial capitalism as an analytic frame can generate systematic explanations of how liberal thinkers parsed and ordered the variety of cultural differences between Europeans and non-Europeans, and why they emphasized certain differences over others as being more relevant for imperial justification or anti-imperial critique. Finally, it is maintained that introducing capitalism into the study of political theory in the imperial context pushes the boundaries of political theory more broadly to encompass questions, such as of dispossession and exploitation, conventionally relegated to critical social theory and political economy.

Keywords:   capitalism, colonialism, primitive accumulation, liberalism, empire, ideology, political theory, social theory, political economy


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