Ulas Ince

Onur Ulas Ince is Associate Professor of Political Theory at SOAS University of London. His research weaves together history of political thought, global political economy, imperial history, and history of capitalism. He mainly investigates how the imperial constitution of global capitalism has been theorized in the medium of political economy since the early-modern period. His publications have demonstrated the centrality of political-economic argumentation to British liberalism, Enlightenment ethnography, and racial thought.

Ince is the author of the award-winning book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford 2018), which received the 2020 David and Elaine Spitz Prize by the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought. The book argues that the ideational parameters of liberalism were forged in the crucible of colonial expropriation and exploitation that gave birth to the capitalist world economy. Challenging the prevailing tendency to critique the justifications of European colonialism through the lens of universalism and cultural difference, it discloses how imperial economic agendas and the pressures of global capitalism mediated European representations of the colonized.

Ince is currently working on two book monographs. The first, “Before the Global Color Line: Capital, Empire, and Race in Asia, 1800-1850,” is under contract with Oxford University Press. The book locates the “prehistory” of late-nineteenth century racial categories in the entwined discourses of political economy and Enlightenment ethnography. It does so by critiquing the “methodological Atlanticism” of the recent scholarship on race and capital and widening the aperture to British colonial capitalism in Asia. The second project, “Between Commerce and Empire: Capitalism and the Limits of Liberal Anti-Imperialism,” is in progress. This study reappraises the Enlightenment critique of European colonialism and argues that the Enlightenment thinkers’ denunciation of European empires was ultimately constrained by their commitment to commercial and capitalist expansion. The preliminary results of both projects have been published in articles in the American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, and History of Political Thought.

In addition to these monographs, Ince is the author of a dozen articles on political theory of capitalism, history of political economy, and intellectual history of empire. These have appeared in the American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, Political Theory, New Political Economy, and International Relations, among others.

In 2024, Ince was awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship. Prior to joining SOAS, he held permanent faculty positions in Istanbul and Singapore as well as research fellowships at Princeton University, Brown University, and the National University of Singapore.