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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, And Limits Of Liberal Anti-Imperialism, Onur Ulas Ince
Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, And Limits Of Liberal Anti-Imperialism, Onur Ulas Ince
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Recent scholarship has claimed Adam Smith's frontal attack on the mercantile system as a precocious expression of liberal anti-imperialism. This paper argues that settler colonialism in North America represented an important exception and limit to Smith’s anti-imperial commitments. Smith spared agrarian settler colonies from his invective against other imperial practices like chattel slavery and trade monopolies because of the colonies’ evidentiary significance for his “system of natural liberty.” Smith’s embrace of settler colonies involved him in an ideological conundrum insofar as the prosperity of these settlements rested on imperial expansion and seizure of land from the indigenous peoples. Smith navigated …
Between Commerce And Empire: David Hume, Colonial Slavery, And Commercial Incivility, Onur Ulas Ince
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 …
Friedrich List And The Imperial Origins Of The National Economy, Onur Ulas Ince
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. …
Not A Partnership In Pepper, Coffee, Callico, Or Tobacco: Edmund Burke And The Vicissitudes Of Colonial Capitalism, Onur Ulas Ince
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, …