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Articles 1 - 14 of 14
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 …
Empire And Its Afterlives, Inder Marwah, Jennifer Pitts, Timothy Vasko, Onur Ulas Ince, Robert Nichols
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
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
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
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 …
Political Dynamics In Land Commodification: Commodifying Rural Land Development Rights In Chengdu, China, Qian Forrest Zhang, Jianling Wu
Political Dynamics In Land Commodification: Commodifying Rural Land Development Rights In Chengdu, China, Qian Forrest Zhang, Jianling Wu
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Commodification of land is at the forefront of the re-casting of rural China by the spread of capitalism. This study examines a market-based program of land development rights trading in Chengdu, China. The program was made possible by a change in the central government’s land-use regulation that shifted the policy goal from ‘no net loss’ of farmland to ‘no net gain’ of construction land. We detail how local governments at multiple levels work together to construct land development rights as a commodity and build market institutions to foster its trading, illustrating land commodification as an inherently political process. A unique …
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. …
Class Differentiation In Rural China: Dynamics Of Accumulation, Commodification And State Intervention, Forrest Qian Zhang
Class Differentiation In Rural China: Dynamics Of Accumulation, Commodification And State Intervention, Forrest Qian Zhang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper develops a classification of the emerging agrarian class positions in China today. Using an instrument based on rural households' combination of market positions in four markets – land, labour, means of production and product – I identify five agrarian classes: the capitalist employer class, the petty‐bourgeois class of commercial farmers, two labouring classes of dual‐employment households and wage workers, and subsistence peasants. This classification is then used as a heuristic device to organize the empirical analysis that examines how dynamics of agrarian change drive class differentiation in rural China. For the capitalist employer class, the analysis focuses on …
The New Capitalism: Asia And The Future Of Business, Government, And Society, Ann Florini, Bindu Sharma
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. …
Comparing Local Models Of Agrarian Transition In China, Qian Forrest Zhang
Comparing Local Models Of Agrarian Transition In China, Qian Forrest Zhang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The development of markets and the penetration of capital into agriculture have started the agrarian transition in rural China, which is transforming smallholding, household-based agriculture into various forms of capitalistic production. This again raises in a new historical and social context the long-debated question in the agrarian transition literature: Can family farms survive the onslaught of capitalist agriculture based on wage labor and what shapes the confrontation between family farms and agro-capital? I argue that it is the local political economy—rather than some natural obstacles in agriculture to the penetration of capitalism—that shapes this confrontation and gives rise to a …
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, …
Enclosing In God’S Name, Accumulating For Mankind: Money, Morality, And Accumulation In John Locke’S Theory Of Property, Onur Ulas Ince
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 …
From Peasants To Farmers: Peasant Differentiation, Labor Regimes, And Land-Rights Institutions In China's Agrarian Transition, Q. Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
From Peasants To Farmers: Peasant Differentiation, Labor Regimes, And Land-Rights Institutions In China's Agrarian Transition, Q. Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The development of factor markets has opened Chinese agriculture for the penetration of capitalism. This new round of rural transformation—China’s agrarian transition— raises the agrarian question in the Chinese context. This study investigates how capitalist forms and relations of production transform agricultural production and the peasantry class in rural China. The authors identify six forms of nonpeasant agricultural production, compare the labor regimes and direct producers’ socioeconomic statuses across these forms, and evaluate the role of China’s land-rights institution in shaping these forms. The empirical investigation presents three main findings: (1) Peasant differentiation : capitalist forms of agricultural production differentiate …
On Changes In Rural China: The Rise Of Agrarian Capitalism And Dissolution Of The Peasantry In Contemporary China, Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
On Changes In Rural China: The Rise Of Agrarian Capitalism And Dissolution Of The Peasantry In Contemporary China, Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
For decades, Mr. Hong and his family have toiled the ground of Dounan Village, an area of Yunnan Province that became well-known throughout China for the quality of its fresh vegetables. While Hong and his neighbors have, since the early 1980s, concentrated on the small plot of land that the state allocated to them, in recent years, Dounan village has begun producing vegetables in large enough scale to market to distant, wealthy coastal areas, bringing new-found prosperity to the area. After gaining experience producing vegetables both on the plot that the government allocated to his family, and on his neighbors’ …