Colonial Capitalism and Racialization in Asia: A View from the British Empire (Onur Ulas Ince)

PRE-READ NOTICE: This is a pre-read workshop. To receive the pre-circulated draft, please email yiningchang@g.harvard.edu.

This event is co-hosted with the Capitalism and Its Critics Workshop. 

This presentation lays out the main theoretical and historical arguments of an ongoing book project, entitled Before the Global Color Line: Empire, Capital, and Race in Asia, 1800-1850. The study reappraises the emergence of racial categories in nineteenth-century British South and Southeast Asia through the prism of “colonial capitalism.” Ince contends that the perceived differences between the British Empire’s Asian subjects, which would eventually sediment into the categories of nineteenth-century race science, were originally elaborated through the stadial theory of civilization and savagery. The civilizational gradations themselves drew their semantic content from classical political economy’s capital-centric theses. Political economy and Enlightenment ethnography, as cardinal languages that ordered the social heterogeneity of the empire, furnished the ideational precursors of the racist worldview that contoured what W. E. B. DuBois iconically labeled the global “color line.” These arguments are developed through a detailed historical study of the racial stereotypes of the agrestic “Hindoo” and the enterprising “Chinaman” and of their inception in nineteenth-century visions of liberal-capitalist reform in British Asia.

The project addresses several shortcomings in the burgeoning literature on capitalism and race, namely, its provincial focus on the Atlantic world, lack of conceptual rigor, and insufficient attention to the historicity of the language of “race.” First, the project situates capitalism and race in a transimperial framework that encompasses Asia. Second, it elaborates the concept of “capitalist racialization” to illuminate the racial ordering of colonial populations according to capitalist agendas of reorganizing colonial land and labor. Third, it contends that such ordering was originally articulated in the intersecting discourses of civilization and political economy before it was overtly racialized in the last third of the nineteenth century. By recovering the neglected debates over the “British colonization of India” and the “Chinese colonization of Southeast Asia,” the project raises fresh questions for scholars of colonialism, empire, and race.

Onur Ulas Ince is Associate Professor of Political Theory at SOAS University of London. He is the author of the award-winning book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford 2018), as well as a dozen articles on political theory of capitalism, history of political economy, and intellectual history of empire.