Onur Ulas Ince
My research lies at the intersection of international political economy, critical theory, intellectual history of capitalism, and history of imperial and international thought. I mainly investigate how the imperial constitution of global capitalism has been theorized in the medium of political economy since the early-modern period. My first book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2018), situates the origins of this problem in the British Empire and its distinctly liberal vindications in the long-eighteenth century. It is argued that the racialized parameters of liberalism were forged in the crucible of colonial expropriation and exploitation that gave birth to the capitalist world economy.
The study challenges the scholarly penchant to critique Eurocentrism in international thought through the lens of universalism and cultural difference. Parting ways with culturalist approaches prevalent in political theory and colonial studies, the framework of colonial capitalism discloses how imperial economic agendas and the pressures of global capitalism mediated European constructions of cultural and racial difference.
By the same token, the book provides a historically grounded analysis of what has been recently labeled “racial capitalism.” Unlike the heuristic invocations of racial capitalism, the book demonstrates the emergence of racialized categories from the ideological matrix of civilization and savagery that was keyed to the subordination of land, labor, and social (re)production to capital. This approach not only elucidates the variation of racialized constructs across different colonial contexts and over time, but it also discloses their fluidity and circulation across the colonizer/colonized divide. Equally importantly, it highlights the institutional-ideological continuities, especially the persistent logics of devalorization and disposability, in the imperial constitution of the global capitalist order.
Colonial Capitalism was shortlisted for the 2020 C. B. Macpherson Prize for the Best Book in Political Theory by the Canadian Political Science Association. It has also been reviewed in Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, Canadian Journal of Political Science, The Review of Politics, and The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.
I am currently working on a second book project, tentatively entitled “Between Global Commerce and Empire: Capitalism and the Limits of Liberal Anti-Imperialism,” which extends the framework of colonial capitalism to a study of the liberal critics of European colonialism. The analysis centers on the limits that the historical entwinement of global commerce and imperial institutions placed on the much-vaunted Enlightenment anti-imperialism. It is argued that the Enlightenment thinkers’ denunciation of European imperialism and their sympathy for its non-European victims were ultimately constrained by their commitment to commercial and capitalist expansion. The study examines sophisticated detractors of European colonial aggression, and shows that their efforts to imagine liberal commerce as an alternative to illiberal empire foundered on the dependence of commerce and capital on Atlantic slavery, settler colonialism in North America, and free trade imperialism in Asia. Together the two books work towards to a social history of imperial and international thought.
I have also produced a series of articles and book chapters proceeding along two research avenues. The first builds on critical social theory to sharpen the political contours of capitalism. I have elucidated the distinctly political aspects of capitalist dispossession and exploitation in several articles that engage with Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin. The theoretical insights from these studies inform the second research avenue, which reconstructs the ideological problems that colonial capitalism posed for liberal international political thought. My articles on John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Friedrich List foreground the economics of the imperial context and complement the scholarship on the political theory of empire. These have appeared in The Journal of Politics, New Political Economy, Political Theory, History of Political Thought, and The Review of Politics, among others.
The study challenges the scholarly penchant to critique Eurocentrism in international thought through the lens of universalism and cultural difference. Parting ways with culturalist approaches prevalent in political theory and colonial studies, the framework of colonial capitalism discloses how imperial economic agendas and the pressures of global capitalism mediated European constructions of cultural and racial difference.
By the same token, the book provides a historically grounded analysis of what has been recently labeled “racial capitalism.” Unlike the heuristic invocations of racial capitalism, the book demonstrates the emergence of racialized categories from the ideological matrix of civilization and savagery that was keyed to the subordination of land, labor, and social (re)production to capital. This approach not only elucidates the variation of racialized constructs across different colonial contexts and over time, but it also discloses their fluidity and circulation across the colonizer/colonized divide. Equally importantly, it highlights the institutional-ideological continuities, especially the persistent logics of devalorization and disposability, in the imperial constitution of the global capitalist order.
Colonial Capitalism was shortlisted for the 2020 C. B. Macpherson Prize for the Best Book in Political Theory by the Canadian Political Science Association. It has also been reviewed in Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, Canadian Journal of Political Science, The Review of Politics, and The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.
I am currently working on a second book project, tentatively entitled “Between Global Commerce and Empire: Capitalism and the Limits of Liberal Anti-Imperialism,” which extends the framework of colonial capitalism to a study of the liberal critics of European colonialism. The analysis centers on the limits that the historical entwinement of global commerce and imperial institutions placed on the much-vaunted Enlightenment anti-imperialism. It is argued that the Enlightenment thinkers’ denunciation of European imperialism and their sympathy for its non-European victims were ultimately constrained by their commitment to commercial and capitalist expansion. The study examines sophisticated detractors of European colonial aggression, and shows that their efforts to imagine liberal commerce as an alternative to illiberal empire foundered on the dependence of commerce and capital on Atlantic slavery, settler colonialism in North America, and free trade imperialism in Asia. Together the two books work towards to a social history of imperial and international thought.
I have also produced a series of articles and book chapters proceeding along two research avenues. The first builds on critical social theory to sharpen the political contours of capitalism. I have elucidated the distinctly political aspects of capitalist dispossession and exploitation in several articles that engage with Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin. The theoretical insights from these studies inform the second research avenue, which reconstructs the ideological problems that colonial capitalism posed for liberal international political thought. My articles on John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Friedrich List foreground the economics of the imperial context and complement the scholarship on the political theory of empire. These have appeared in The Journal of Politics, New Political Economy, Political Theory, History of Political Thought, and The Review of Politics, among others.
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Book by Onur Ulas Ince
"Onur Ulas Ince constructs an important analysis of liberalism, capitalism, and empire in his new book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2018). This text brings together a number of lenses through which to consider the writings and ideas of British liberal thinkers, especially John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. This book-which is part of a larger project that will contain another book paying attention to Adam Smith, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and others-focuses on the political thought, socioeconomic context, and the cultural understanding of British empire, the growth of capitalism, and the rise of Anglo-liberal thought. This extremely clear and beautifully written book links together a variety of methodological approaches to consider these often-distinct areas within political thought, economic thought, cultural studies, and theories of empire. Ince explores this analysis through the triad of private property, market exchange, and free labor, especially as these components became the structure of the British colonial undertakings across continents, countries, and people, while also being integrated into the foundation of liberal political theory."
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Britons celebrated their empire as a unique “empire of liberty” that propagated the rule of private property, free trade, and free labor across the globe. They also knew that the same empire had been made by conquering overseas territories, trading in slaves, and extorting tribute from other societies. Set in the context of the early-modern British Empire, this book paints a striking picture of the tensions between the illiberal origins of capitalism and its liberal imaginations in metropolitan thought. Ince investigates the construction of a liberal self-image for the British Empire in the face of the systematic expropriation, exploitation, and servitude that built its transoceanic capitalist economy. The resilience of Britain’s liberal image, Ince argues, owed in good measure to the liberal intellectuals of empire and their efforts to disavow the violent transformations that propelled British colonial capitalism. Moving across the colonization of America, the conquest of India, and the settlement of Australasia, Ince examines the metropolitan debates over property, exchange, and labor relations within the empire. At the center of Ince’s analysis are John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield as three liberal political economists who tried to navigate the ideological dilemmas arising from colonial land seizures, commercial imperialism, and colonial labor dispossession. Ince deftly dissects the theoretical maneuvers, rhetorical strategies, myths, and fictions through which these liberal intellectuals disavowed the originary violence of capitalism – what Karl Marx labeled “the primitive accumulation of capital” – so as to craft an essentially commercial, pacific, and free character for the British Empire. Weaving together intellectual history, critical theory, and colonial studies, Colonial Capitalism is more than a study in intellectual history. It is a bold attempt to reconceptualize the relationship between capitalism, liberalism, and empire in a key that continues to resonate with our present moment.
Journal Articles by Onur Ulas Ince
analyses have adopted Karl Marx’s notion of the “primitive accumulation of
capital” for investigating the forcible methods by which the conditions of capital
accumulation are reproduced in the present. I argue that the current scholarship
is limited by a certain functionalism in its theorization of ongoing primitive
accumulation. The analytic function accorded to primitive accumulation, I
contend, can be better performed by the concepts of “capital-positing violence”
and “capital-preserving violence.” In coining these new concepts, I first refine the
conceptual core of primitive accumulation as the coercive capitalization of social
relations of reproduction, which falls into sharpest relief in the violent history
of colonial capitalism. I then elucidate this conceptual core with reference to
Carl Schmitt’s account of European colonial expansion and Walter Benjamin’s
reflections on law-making and law-preserving violence. The resultant concepts
of capital-positing and capital-preserving violence, I conclude, can illuminate both
the historical and the quotidian operations of the politico-juridical force that has
been constitutive of capitalism down to our present moment.
"Onur Ulas Ince constructs an important analysis of liberalism, capitalism, and empire in his new book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2018). This text brings together a number of lenses through which to consider the writings and ideas of British liberal thinkers, especially John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. This book-which is part of a larger project that will contain another book paying attention to Adam Smith, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and others-focuses on the political thought, socioeconomic context, and the cultural understanding of British empire, the growth of capitalism, and the rise of Anglo-liberal thought. This extremely clear and beautifully written book links together a variety of methodological approaches to consider these often-distinct areas within political thought, economic thought, cultural studies, and theories of empire. Ince explores this analysis through the triad of private property, market exchange, and free labor, especially as these components became the structure of the British colonial undertakings across continents, countries, and people, while also being integrated into the foundation of liberal political theory."
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Britons celebrated their empire as a unique “empire of liberty” that propagated the rule of private property, free trade, and free labor across the globe. They also knew that the same empire had been made by conquering overseas territories, trading in slaves, and extorting tribute from other societies. Set in the context of the early-modern British Empire, this book paints a striking picture of the tensions between the illiberal origins of capitalism and its liberal imaginations in metropolitan thought. Ince investigates the construction of a liberal self-image for the British Empire in the face of the systematic expropriation, exploitation, and servitude that built its transoceanic capitalist economy. The resilience of Britain’s liberal image, Ince argues, owed in good measure to the liberal intellectuals of empire and their efforts to disavow the violent transformations that propelled British colonial capitalism. Moving across the colonization of America, the conquest of India, and the settlement of Australasia, Ince examines the metropolitan debates over property, exchange, and labor relations within the empire. At the center of Ince’s analysis are John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield as three liberal political economists who tried to navigate the ideological dilemmas arising from colonial land seizures, commercial imperialism, and colonial labor dispossession. Ince deftly dissects the theoretical maneuvers, rhetorical strategies, myths, and fictions through which these liberal intellectuals disavowed the originary violence of capitalism – what Karl Marx labeled “the primitive accumulation of capital” – so as to craft an essentially commercial, pacific, and free character for the British Empire. Weaving together intellectual history, critical theory, and colonial studies, Colonial Capitalism is more than a study in intellectual history. It is a bold attempt to reconceptualize the relationship between capitalism, liberalism, and empire in a key that continues to resonate with our present moment.
analyses have adopted Karl Marx’s notion of the “primitive accumulation of
capital” for investigating the forcible methods by which the conditions of capital
accumulation are reproduced in the present. I argue that the current scholarship
is limited by a certain functionalism in its theorization of ongoing primitive
accumulation. The analytic function accorded to primitive accumulation, I
contend, can be better performed by the concepts of “capital-positing violence”
and “capital-preserving violence.” In coining these new concepts, I first refine the
conceptual core of primitive accumulation as the coercive capitalization of social
relations of reproduction, which falls into sharpest relief in the violent history
of colonial capitalism. I then elucidate this conceptual core with reference to
Carl Schmitt’s account of European colonial expansion and Walter Benjamin’s
reflections on law-making and law-preserving violence. The resultant concepts
of capital-positing and capital-preserving violence, I conclude, can illuminate both
the historical and the quotidian operations of the politico-juridical force that has
been constitutive of capitalism down to our present moment.
The introduction, entitled 'The Life of International Law and its Concepts', is a standalone piece that grapples with the relation between legal concepts, life and living in international law. First, we briefly explore the contemporary malaise in international law’s disciplinary life, in and for which this book emerges. We urge a sensibility that sees working on international law’s concepts as opening up a range of possibilities in how we may act, live, know, see and understand within and towards the discipline. Second, we offer an overview into how legal thought has, in its diversity, approached legal concepts. We aim to draw out those sensibilities that remain prevalent in today’s legal writings on concepts, whilst also pointing to the limits, nuances and fractures of these sensibilities. In this regard we offer detailed readings, criticisms and extensions of texts by Jhering, Hohfeld, Ross, Cohen, Kennedy, Koskenniemi, and Marks to name but a few. These readings primarily point to the intricate and intractable difficulties of reconciling concepts with social life. They also point to a series of shifting and entwined aesthetic, ethical and political presuppositions that dominate the various ways in which we approach legal concepts today. In showing the diversity of legal sensibilities towards legal concepts, we hope to not only open up the various possibilities and limits of these sensibilities, but to point towards the intellectual cultural resources at the modern scholar’s disposal. Third, and finally, we offer an introduction to the volume itself. Here we outline how we chose its concepts, the types of concepts contained therein, and how we see the complex relations between different concepts.