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Book Review The Economic History of Colonialism Jamin Andreas Hubner Download 2024 Full Chapter
Book Review The Economic History of Colonialism Jamin Andreas Hubner Download 2024 Full Chapter
and organizations dedicated to informing the public about the devastating economic
and social consequences of settler colonialism – whether from disease, or decimating
Buffalo populations, forced labour, or from war.3 The authors side-step all of this to
focus more on whether colonialism worked for the British empire. (Chapter 5 is, in
fact, entitled, ‘Debates About Costs and Benefits’.) The authors even contend that
‘there was no such thing as colonial capitalism’ (p. 150) at all – though they do, to be
sure, believe in London’s ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ (pp. 152–153). Readers are left won-
dering: if ‘the impact of colonial interventions varied widely across space and time’ so
that it is ‘difficult to sustain simplified narratives of resource extraction’ (p. 1), why is
the book then so unclear – or outright exclusionary – where colonialism is resource
extraction? If the authors bothered to include centuries of colonialism in the Americas,
it would indeed, be much more difficult to relativize the nature, goals and effects of
colonialism as a whole.
Furthermore, the book’s perspective is dramatically at odds with other scholars
who directly connect the origins of capitalism to the colonial projects in the Caribbean
and Americas (Crosson 2021; Beckert and Rockman 2016; Blaut 1992; Dunbar-
Ortiz 2015; Horne 2018, 2020; for additional alternative perspectives, see Banaji
2020; Frank 1997; Gran 1998; Pomeranz 2000; Rodney 2018 [1972]). It also there-
fore ignores the fact that colonialism terminated in mass genocide of Indigenous
peoples and what some call the ‘Great Dying’ (over 50 million deaths from 1492 to
1600). This economic history is hard to square with how the book frames colonial-
ism, which is rather neoclassical (attempting to be ‘value-free’, and focusing on eco-
nomic ‘growth’ instead of human flourishing).4 So, for example, by page 7, the
economic growth of colonialism (in terms of gross domestic product (GDP)) is front
and centre – so much that the authors feel it necessary to say that ‘This does not, of
course, mean that colonialism was not a violent and disruptive process’ (p. 8). They
elsewhere remark that ‘it may be argued that the institutions of colonialism may have
contributed to some types of inequality’ (p. 73).
These types of observations are obviously absurd and offensive in the face of the colo-
nized – especially in the Americas. Canada has continued to locate mass graves of
Indigenous children buried under boarding schools. Scholars do not need to speculate if
‘the institutions of colonialism may have contributed to some types of inequality’. I
would be embarrassed as a professor of economics to even talk about ‘costs and benefits’
of colonialism with my Indigenous colleagues in or outside the classroom, where the
‘costs’ means annihilation and the ‘benefit’ means Black Hills gold, sacred land or sex
slaves for Confederate Generals. Presumably, the authors are familiar with these eco-
nomic histories of colonialism, but that only leaves readers asking why it apparently has
no place in a book dedicated to that subject.5
It is difficult seeing the volume being used as a textbook. Others, though they are not
explicitly economic, do a better job of providing a coherent and more readable summary,
such as Empires and Colonies in the Modern World.6
The Economic History of Colonialism is a reminder of how even critical attempts at
framing and summarizing this notorious subject remain challenging – and in desperate
need of further clarification.
144 Capital & Class 46(1)
Notes
1. I mostly reject this proposed category, where the ‘political route . . . involved conquest, inva-
sion or the imposition of a protectorate status, without a definite economic gain in sight’
(p. 27). The conquering of Algeria is said to be ‘one of these acts’, but while the French offic-
ers had no direct financial interest in the colony at first, economic motives are surely there;
to put an end to Barbary privateering and establish more control over the area (Algeria is
economically strategic in being directly south of France across the Mediterranean Sea). The
same goes for the other examples cited. It is unclear why and how the authors superficially
detach military occupations from economic interest.
2. This is all the more puzzling since the first paragraph of the book actually states the real con-
text of colonialism: ‘Europeans conquered some 84 per cent of the world between 1492 and
1914, before losing the vast majority of these territories by 1860 . . .’ (p. 1). But this intro-
duction is never followed through; instead, the book looks at Britain’s influence on Africa,
India and select parts of Asia since the 1800s.
3. Of course, some projects – like the new Visitor Center in Custer State Park (South Dakota)
– intentionally remove all references to Native Americans from the area’s history. To address
this chronic amnesia, Crazy Horse Memorial (which is larger than Mount Rushmore, just a
few miles away), is being carved out of the granite without any federal funding.
4. This ‘bourgeoisie’ economic approach was specifically targeted in Rodney, How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa, 14. Despite attempting to improve on oversimplifications, his criti-
cism is relevant a half-century later regarding books like The Economic History of Colonialism.
5. There were also a few sentences that were downright baffling, such as ‘The transition from
1650 to 1750, when enterprise existed without even the distant prospect of empires, to full-
fledged colonies of the 19th century raises a puzzling set of questions’ (apparently no empires
existed or are significant for economic history until the creation of the British empire). The
rest of this particular paragraph (and the next whole page) are equally baffling. (e.g. ‘Elements
of managerial capitalism took shape’ (p. 155) in the 1920s – something Banaji and others
locate in the 1300s to 1500s; cf. bottom of p. 2, and Bown 2010).
6. Heather Streets-Salter and Trevor Getz (2016).
References
Banaji J (2020) A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
Beckert S and Rockman S (eds) (2016) Slavery’s Capitalism. Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Blaut J (1992) The Colonizer’s Model of the World. New York: The Guilford Press.
Bown S (2010) Merchant Kings. New York: Martin’s Press.
Crosson J (2021) Humanism and the Enlightenment. In: Anthony P (ed.) The Oxford Handbook
of Humanism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dunbar-Ortiz R (2015) An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press.
Frank AG (1997) Re-Orient. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Gran P (1998) The Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760-1840 (Middle East Studies Beyond
Dominant Paradigms). New York: Syracuse University Press.
Horne G (2018) The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and
Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean. New York: Monthly Review
Press.
Horne G (2020) The Dawn of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler
Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Pomeranz K (2000) The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World
Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Book Reviews 145
Rodney W (2018 [1972]) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. New York: Verso Books.
Streets-Salter H and Getz T (2016) Empires and Colonies in the Modern World: A Global Perspective.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Author biography
Jamin Andreas Hübner is a Research Fellow at LCC International University and a faculty mem-
ber in Economics at the University of the People.
Email: jaminhubner@gmail.com
Gal Kirn
Partisan Ruptures: Self-Management, Market Reform and the Spectre of Socialist
Yugoslavia, London: Pluto Press, 2019; 304 pp.: ISBN 9780745338941, £24.99.
Thirty years after its dissolution, Yugoslavia is still evoked in political and media dis-
courses in its post condition. The post-Yugoslav associates the former country with vio-
lence unleashed in the 1990s, ethnic nationalism and a seemingly endless transitional
stage. Rather than social goals, the consolidation of democracy and administrative
rationality has become fetishes that facilitate the reproduction of a scheme dominated by
comprador bourgeoisie, mafia-like political elites and imperialist interests. In this con-
text, the subordinated classes are subjected to harsh economic, administrative and ideo-
logical pressures. By studying the Yugoslav experience as a set of revolutionary ruptures
with long-term consequences, Gal Kirn’s book is an invitation to look at the current situ-
ation in the region through the prism of its own past, but without falling into the temp-
tation of nostalgia.
The 13 chapters of Partisan Ruptures can be divided into two parts. The first part
(Chapters 1–6) deals with the ruptures that emerged from partisan politics during the
resistance in the Second World War and ultimately shaped Yugoslavia’s unfolding in
critical local and geopolitical contexts. The second part (Chapters 7–13) deals with the
contradictions generated by the market reform of 1965, which changed the logics of
exploitation and representation to the detriment of the working class. The book illus-
trates the path taken by Yugoslavia from its articulation as an extraordinary novelty in the
context of anti-fascist resistance and the Cold War, to the development of its internal
class antagonisms.
Kirn’s argument rests on the critique of the approaches that have dominated explana-
tions of post-socialist transitions, aimed at burying Yugoslavia’s legacy under a concep-
tual framework constructed with the purpose of justifying the nations’ path toward
liberal democracy and free market. In their articulation around such a marked teleology,
these revisionist narratives obscure the innovations brought about by Yugoslavia. The
latter, called ‘partisan ruptures’, are defined in Partisan Ruptures by reflecting on the
subjectivity of social actors through the notions of desubstantialisation and delocalisa-
tion. Drawing on the work of Althusser, Kirn highlights the importance of temporality,
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