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Full-Text Articles in Political Science

Empire And Its Afterlives, Inder Marwah, Jennifer Pitts, Timothy Vasko, Onur Ulas Ince, Robert Nichols Mar 2020

Empire And Its Afterlives, Inder Marwah, Jennifer Pitts, Timothy Vasko, Onur Ulas Ince, Robert Nichols

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

At the time of its 2005 publication, Jennifer Pitts’ A Turn to Empire was among a handful of works in political theory probing imperialism’s constitutive influence over modern political thought.


Between Commerce And Empire: David Hume, Colonial Slavery, And Commercial Incivility, Onur Ulas Ince Mar 2018

Between Commerce And Empire: David Hume, Colonial Slavery, And Commercial Incivility, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought has recently been reclaimed as arobust, albeit short-lived, cosmopolitan critique of European imperialism. Thisessay complicates this interpretation through a study of David Hume’s reflectionson commerce, empire, and slavery. I argue that while Hume condemned thecolonial system of monopoly, war, and conquest, his strictures against empiredid not extend to colonial slavery in the Atlantic. This was because colonialslavery represented a manifestly uncivilinstitution when judged by enlightened metropolitan sensibilities, yet also adecisively commercial institutionpivotal to the eighteenth-century global economy. Confronted by the paradoxical“commercial incivility” of modern slavery, Hume opted for disavowing the linkbetween slavery and commerce, and confined his …


Between Equal Rights: Primitive Accumulation And Capital's Violence, Onur Ulas Ince Dec 2017

Between Equal Rights: Primitive Accumulation And Capital's Violence, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper attempts to elaborate a political theory of capital’s violence. Recent analyses haveadopted Karl Marx’s notion of the “primitive accumulation of capital” for investigating theforcible methods by which the conditions of capital accumulation are reproduced in the present.I argue that the analytic function accorded to primitive accumulation can be better performedby a pair of new concepts: “capital-positing violence” and “capital-preserving violence.” Irefine the conceptual core primitive accumulation (coercive capitalization of social relations ofproduction) by focusing on the role of colonial violence in the history of capitalism, which Ithen elucidate with reference to Carl Schmitt’s account of European colonial expansion …


Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, And Cosmopolitan Overstretch, Onur Ulas Ince May 2017

Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, And Cosmopolitan Overstretch, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Adam Smith has recently been celebrated as a precocious theorist of commercialcosmopolitanism who decried the injustice of imperial conquest and extraction. This paperfocuses on Smith’s endorsement of settler colonialism in North America and argues thatSmith’s newfound cosmopolitanism is overstretched. Smith welcomed settler colonies as theembodiment of the “natural progress of opulence” and spared them from his invective againstother imperial practices like chattel slavery and trade monopolies. Smith’s embrace of settlercolonies, however, involved him in an ideological conundrum insofar as the prosperity ofoverseas settlements rested on imperial expansion and seizure of land from Native Americans.I contend that Smith muffled this disturbing …


Friedrich List And The Imperial Origins Of The National Economy, Onur Ulas Ince Aug 2016

Friedrich List And The Imperial Origins Of The National Economy, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay offers a critical reexamination of the works of Friedrich List by placing them in the context of nineteenth-century imperial economies. I argue that List's theory of the national economy is characterised by a major ambivalence, as it incorporates both imperial and anti-imperial elements. On the one hand, List pitted his national principle against the British imperialism of free trade and the relations of dependency it heralded for late developers like Germany. On the other hand, his economic nationalism aimed less at dismantling imperial core-periphery relations as a whole than at reproducing these relations domestically and expanding them globally. …


The New Capitalism: Asia And The Future Of Business, Government, And Society, Ann Florini, Bindu Sharma May 2014

The New Capitalism: Asia And The Future Of Business, Government, And Society, Ann Florini, Bindu Sharma

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

To have a conversation, the appropriate language is needed. The language is just starting to emerge in both Asia and the West for one of the most important conversations the world is now having—the discussion about the future of business and capitalism. Thailand’s King Bhumibol refers to the sufficiency economy. Harvard’s Michael Porter speaks of shared value. Ellen MacArthur’s eponymous foundation supports the transition to the circular economy. John Elkington proposes breakthrough capitalism. Bhutan’s call to measure progress by gross national happiness (GNH), rather than the narrow metric of gross domestic product (GDP), is now attracting attention around the globe. …


Not A Partnership In Pepper, Coffee, Callico, Or Tobacco: Edmund Burke And The Vicissitudes Of Colonial Capitalism, Onur Ulas Ince Jul 2012

Not A Partnership In Pepper, Coffee, Callico, Or Tobacco: Edmund Burke And The Vicissitudes Of Colonial Capitalism, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay examines the tensions between liberalism and capitalism through an analysis of Edmund Burke's works on eighteenth-century liberal political economy and, specifically the challenges posed by colonial capitalism. When criticizing the East India Company Burke attempted to fortify "commercial" principles, on which British self-image rested, against the "rapacious" policies of British imperialism in India, which threatened this liberal self-image. His denunciation of the Company thus can be construed as an index to broader contradictions between the liberal self-image of capitalism and the coercive processes of colonial displacement and extraction that were an integral part of capitalism's emergence. The article, …


Enclosing In God’S Name, Accumulating For Mankind: Money, Morality, And Accumulation In John Locke’S Theory Of Property, Onur Ulas Ince Feb 2011

Enclosing In God’S Name, Accumulating For Mankind: Money, Morality, And Accumulation In John Locke’S Theory Of Property, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

John Locke's theory of property has been the subject of sustained contention between two major perspectives: a socioeconomic perspective, which conceives Locke's thought as an expression of the rising bourgeois sensibility and a defense of the nascent capitalist relations, and a theological perspective, which prioritizes his moral worldview grounded in the Christian natural law tradition. This essay argues that a closer analysis of Locke's theory of money in the Second Treatise can provide an alternative to this binary. It maintains that the notion of money comprises a conceptual area of indeterminacy in which the theological universals of the natural law …