The Continuing Mode of Colonial Repression

By Sunanda Sen

This blog post is an excerpt from Professor Sunanda Sen’s talk delivered at the Plenary Session of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Association for Heterodox Economics (AHE). It is an overview of the broad themes from the considerable body of their work on the continuing mode of colonial repression and its workings in the contemporary phase of capitalism. Professor Sen’s work is located in the rich tradition of critical investigation of colonialism by scholars from the Global South.

In the following blog, I elaborate on the colonial mode of subordination, its past pattern as well as the continuing pattern of repression which prevails at present.

Colonialism came into being in the 16th century with the emergence of a few powerful states based on the ruling ideology of racial superiority. Following its implementation, the whole world came to be divided along racial lines, primarily resulting in two types of colonies – the white-settled North and the tropical Southern colonies. Power over the colonial possessions was exercised using three aspects: a) physical-territorial control and command over the State, b) political control by asserting administrative controls; and c) control over the economy and resources. In this blog, I will provide examples of the earlier pattern of expropriation by the ruling country in two such colonies  – one my own, India, and the other, Indonesia, both subjected to colonial rule by major empires of the West.

Colonialisation started in Indonesia by the 16th century with the emergence of the spice trade in the islands of the archipelago. With spice treated as a highly precious commodity in terms of its high value in the market, the growing spice trade with Indonesia came to be directly controlled by the Dutch East India Company (the VOC). The virtual take-over was very much under the patronage of the Dutch Crown, located far from the spot of trading.

It is worth highlighting that the pattern of gaining access to the economy by using trading channels was similar in India, starting with the British East India Company (EIC) having a charter of trade from the British crown. The company eventually was in a position to rule a considerable territory of India, largely by using military power, which effectively began in 1757 with the Battle of Plassey. As with Indonesia, activities of the EIC in India were not just limited to trade but in effect were involved in the direct annexation of large territories. Finally, it was in 1858, during Queen Victoria’s regime in England, that the company (i.e. the EIC) rule gave way to direct British rule of the Crown.

Colonialism came up with the combination of a very powerful state and its power, by people who were in possession of that power. Being dominant they could also draw a distinction between their own race and the other, which could include a specified community identified by the dominant race. Thus began the division of the whole world according to race, which often was marked by the colour of the skin. The process started with the distinction between the white-settled and the tropical colonies by the 16th century. Controls by the dominant race were exercised by using the following two modes of control. First, territorial control by occupying the space and exercising command over the occupied state. Second, political as well as economic controls by taking over the administration of the economy.

These colonial controls started off quite early in the 16th century, both in India and in Indonesia. In Indonesia, colonialism started in the 16th century with trading in the spice islands of the archipelago. Using international voyages that came in search of spices, trading turned out a valuable deal at that point of time. It can be imagined that such voyages, close to plunders rather than exchanges via free markets, were not at all peaceful. While there was violence the traders in meantime formed the Dutch East India Company or the VOC in 1602, which along with the voyages were controlled by the Dutch crown.

Similar turn of events were there in India where the initial trading by the British traders were taken over by a company which was formed in 1600 and given a charter of trade by the British crown. In the meantime, they had already started occupying territories within the country, often with territorial wars. Finally, as mentioned above, the company gave way to British rule of India by 1858, during the regime of Queen Victoria.

Colonialism in action, in effect, was geared to benefit the ruling nation. To achieve this, several steps were initiated. First and foremost, it was agriculture which went through major changes. In Indonesia, the change known as “cultivation system” introduced commercial crops in Java, the cultivation of which was subject to taxes, both on farmers and on export earnings. Between those, such revenue provided 33% of the income earned by the Dutch crown.

Structural changes in Indonesia was met with coercion of the local people, especially as a huge bridge was constructed by the VOC for transporting the materials in sugar processing. Similarly, in India, the East India Company forced the cultivators to cultivate indigo, which was much needed to bleach the cotton.

Widespread commercialisation that followed changes with cultivation patterns switching to export crops did not mean much for the poor whose consumption included maize and other inferior grains. More so as the net value of exports were earned from overseas but the money in most cases never came to the cultivators, or even to the exporting country, as with the much disputed “Drain of Wealth” from India.

To talk a bit more of what was called a “Drain of Wealth” by Indian nationalists at end of 1900, taxes,  raised within India, were earmarked in the domestic budget to meet what was labelled by the ruling government as  “Home Charges”, to meet overseas expenditure of the Secretary of State for India (or the India Office) in London. The “home” was, of course, home for the British. Thus the overseas expenses were accounted for as expenses which India must meet in order to run the administration of British ruled India’s offices in England. As the nationalists claimed, this was completely illegitimate and fabricated. This blog does not provide the details of the transfer of tax revenue of India to meet those rather illegitimate expenses in England. The reader can refer to my book, apart from other writings available on the literature [1].

There also remained other channels of transferring resources from India, especially of gold which was much needed by Britain to manage the international gold standard [2]. It may be mentioned here that Britain by this time was in command of the international gold standard. Accordingly, gold was much needed to support the continuing system. While the entire sum of India’s export earnings in sterling was deposited with the India Office in London, gold was transferred from both the Paper Currency Reserve as well as the Gold Exchange Reserve in India to London. Use was made of gold which was transferred by Britain to invest in securities with handsome returns, all for Britain. Finally, silver trade was used as one more channel of making profits by the British while the dearth of procurements of silver led to a serious shortage of credit as well as currency in India.

Colonialism continued to fetch benefits by using other means, such as the use of labor. In Indonesia slavery started, as in Brazil and in many other countries, with the use of forced labor within the country. The process fetched a lot of profit to those in power to use such labour. The Dutch also imported enslaved Africans. In this the process, places like Surinam came up as appendages to the Dutch empire.

As for use of labour in India, it was an indirect form of slavery which relied on the shipping of indentured labor from India to plantation islands of the British Isles. It proved useful to the rentier plantation-owners of Britain by providing such labour when slavery formally was abolished in the British Isles in 1830s. Such labour, nearly enslaved, were engaged to run the plantations in West Indies and Mauritius. The practice of indenturing was a clever device on part of the British to get labour from India, ship them, often in in-human conditions, and engage them in plantation islands under strict conditions in order that the plantations can continue. As mentioned already, the plantations were owned by the Britishers, which included the big financiers in London – all providing the benefits Britain was enjoying. I provide a figure below which indicates the multiple benefits enjoyed by Britain in the process, which included the advantages of exploiting the cheap (or free) labour from India and the use of products cultivated by them in the sugarcane plantations for processing white sugar in Britain and exporting to rest of world, which also included India. I have worked elsewhere on the details of the triangular pattern of exports, of labour, of raw sugar or sugarcane, and finally, exporting processed sugar with benefits to Britain in multiple ways [3].

Figure: Triangular Trade between Britain, India, and the Plantation Islands

Continuing on mode of suppression. I notice a parallel process which relates to the same period between the late 19th to early 20th century. One recalls the 22 million white men and women who   migrated from Britain to the white settled colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand between 1815 to 1914. This was indeed a huge immigration from Britain to these newly settled white colonies. The settlers displaced the locals in every aspect of their existence by taking over administration and other controls over the settled economy. The people who were displaced were identified as aboriginals. When I visited Australia, I was told that the present generation is very aware of the injustice done by their ancestors in the past. Remedial steps as follow including the re-naming of their streets, in terms of the Aboriginal names etc. Similarly when I visited Brazil, I was told about the amazon belt as a touristic place which includes the aborigines! As it had been, people who displaced live in that region, like in a ghetto. That’s how the system continues while these 22 million who immigrated were supported under the surveillance of the nation from where they came from.

We now move to the notion of the current/continuing colonial mode in today’s time. While one talks about globalisation which apparently has integrated the world economy, the reality is far from that picture. Globalisation in practice has intensified the global divide between the North and the South.

This is how one should look at globalisation. Let us ask as to what has happened to the developing or underdeveloped countries under globalisation? One here needs to point at how globalisation operates in reality. A major force here has been the market, the market being the agency of the advanced countries. The latter believe in the free market which parallels the controls of the colonial masters. The colonial masters ruled directly by controlling, the market, today accepted like a faith in advanced countries, is ruling indirectly. The market in turn follows the dictates and prescriptions of mainstream economics, which is subscribed no-less by policy makers in major advanced countries, and more so because it provides benefits to the advanced countries.

To repeat, the global integration has divided the world between the Global South and Global North, making use of the free market, which is a parallel to the tools of expropriation on part of colonial masters. Markets conform to mainstream economics, very different from heterodox economics which we are dealing with, and it has been to the advantage of the advanced countries. In the process, institutions are changed, and  banks are also changing their form – no longer providing cheaper loans to the poor, while privatisation has been the norm. That brings an end to what newly industrialised countries like India tried after independence to achieve something which can be called a developmental state. What is happening today is a new form of subordination, by the elite state in developing countries and also in advanced countries, of the rather helpless poor in the Global South.  It is reflecting the colonial mode in terms of the repressions, while the form is different.  

Repression happens via finance with liberalised finance – which contrasts the formal colonial period, when controlled finance was the goal. Today it is liberalised finance with subordinate financialisation in the developing countries. In this corporate profits are easy, with financial supremacy and speculative bubbles fetching business and profits [4]. De-regulated finance in the Global South has been responsible for their continuing subordination by finance controlled by advanced nations. The related lack of monetary autonomy, the weak currency status of all their currencies in terms of the lack of convertibility to dollar in the market, makes the case for the subordinate financialisation. We recall here that under British rule India was denied gold currency even with considerable export earnings in gold. 

The other form or tool of repression in the current period happens to be the use of labour. Given that most of the previous protective measures on labor have been suppressed and labour rights have been scrapped the pattern now compares to the colonial mode of repressing labour.

Another form of repression is with the extraction of resources and related displacements of people who used to live in as aborigines in Australia, in Brazil’s Amazon belt, and as the tribals and locals in India’s districts prominent with mines and other extractive resources. As in India where displacements of tribals is common, Brazil is found to be handing over a large part of the Amazon belt to domestic and foreign capital.

Colonial or the modern form of subordination works by using the racial and colonial dynamics which is essentially based on power. Often based on proximity to ruling authorities, exercise of power has been responsible for the continued use of race as a tool of subordination. That is how the Dalits (low caste) in India, or black people in other places have been treated as inferiors. Those who are more powerful are usually proximate to the ruling authorities which enable them to exercise such power based on racial discrimination and oppression. Simultaneously, the process goes with state action, privileged with state sanctions by the White supremacy in advanced countries. Think of George Floyd, who was choked to death by a white policeman, a part of establishment.

The protests which have come up, and are very welcome, have been happening, thus re-stating the fact that the black lives do matter. This may initiate a re-look at history, a very positive thinking by the current generation, which include both blacks as well as whites. You also notice the overthrow of the statues like Edward Golson in Bristol, the protests, sometime back in Oxford and London, which all are continuing. Protests are also coming as new writings and even with a petition that countries which looted the former colonies and repressed their people should pay it back as reparations. This has found scholarly resonance in works such as Boris Bitker’s A Case for Reparations and William Darity Jr.’s Reparations for Black Americans. Similar discrimination and repression is continuing in present times in other countries, including in my country India,  in the targeting of tribals and Dalits on grounds of racial prejudice and class oriented privileges. So I conclude that there  prevails a continuing pattern of subordination under contemporary capitalism as it happened with formal colonialism and the only way to redress it is to continue the on-going forms of protests.


[1] Sunanda Sen, Colonies and Empire: India 1870-1914, Orient Longman, Calcutta 1992.

[2] The reader can wait to see my paper titled “ Could Britain continue with the gold standard in absence of India as a colony?” in Review of Political Economy (forthcoming in 2022).

[3] See for detailed analysis, Sunanda Sen, “Indentured Labour from India in the Age of  Empire” Social Scientist Jan-Feb 2015. See also, The Surplus Approach of Engels and Marx  and its relevance in the context of the conditions of working class in contemporary capitalism” Social Scientist Nov-Dec 2020.

[4] Sunanda Sen, Financialisation, Speculation and Instability “ in Philip Mader et al (ed) International Handbook of Financialisation [Routledge 2020]; Investment Decisions under Uncertainty”,  Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Vol 43, No 2, 2020, pp  267-280; “Financialisation and Corporate Investments: The Indian Case” (with Zico Dasgupta), Review of Keynesian Economics, Vol 6 issue 1, January 2018. 

A Detoxed Heterodox Praxis to Lead Authentic Diversification and Decolonisation of Economics

By Lynne Chester

The mission of D-Econ (Diversifying and Decolonising Economics) is to promote inclusivity within the content and institutions of the economics discipline due to the dominance of Eurocentric thinking. This situation has occurred because of the longstanding exclusion of alternate views — based on identity (gender, race, geography), and theoretical-methodological discrimination — from the teaching of economics in higher education institutions. Thus, D-Econ argues, the knowledge base and debate of issues to be relevant to the world’s majority needs to include non-white and non-male voices as well as heterodox approaches.

D-Econ’s mission is framed at countering mainstream (conventional) economics. I think this ambition needs to be bolder. It needs to extend beyond the mainstream to explicitly encompass the entire social science discipline of economics.

Why?

The mainstream is ‘guilty as charged’. I think many within our heterodox community can be similarly charged.

Many sites that determine ‘legitimate heterodox knowledge’ cannot be characterised as always displaying tolerance and respect for difference. Contributions to heterodox conferences, workshops, journals, teachings, and more, are marred — not just on the odd occasion — by one perspective asserted as the ‘truth’, or reluctance (sometimes even open hostility) for constructive dialogue about the contributions of alternative perspectives. These practices replicate orthodoxy’s ills.

Heterodox economic scholars also have an ethical and moral obligation — thus responsibility — to ‘diversify and decolonise’ their teaching, research, and other practices given our own experiences of marginalisation, exclusion, and disregard by the mainstream. To not do so is tantamount to condoning the discriminatory practices that have buttressed the mainstream’s hegemony.

Diversification and decolonisation will not be — but should be — innate to all members of the heterodox economics community. Deliberative actions are required that require more than — as needed with the mainstream — ‘changing the narrative’.

The praxis of many heterodox economists needs to change. By praxis, I mean the activity of human beings (in this case, heterodox economists) that directly shapes both aspects of social reality (in this case, the teaching of economics and its application to explaining social reality) and themselves as producers of knowledge.

Why?

Decolonialisation is not about rewriting or erasing history. Nor can it be achieved by academics and students completing an anti-slavery awareness training module. Decolonisation is also more than the revision of curriculum content, assessment tasks, and reading lists to include scholarly works by women and persons of colour.

Decolonisation requires collective critical critique of knowledge creation through an historical lens — by whom, where, why, and how — to illuminate the embedded colonial practices that are the foundations of existing gender, racial, ethnicity, disability, class, sexuality, geographic, and other divisions.

Decolonisation also requires the ‘practice’ of an ongoing reflexive process given the institutionalised nature, and reproduction, of inequalities in the higher education sector, the primary site of knowledge production.

Decolonisation should not be conflated with diversification. Diversification is more than moving beyond the dominance of white heterosexual Eurocentric male voices in the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

Diversification is also much more deliberative than job advertisements stating that ‘women and minorities are encouraged to apply’, much more than an institution providing training in ‘conscious bias’, and much more than special journal issues, editorial boards, conference panels and workshops including women, persons of colour, or scholars from the Global South. These actions are mere tokenism, as is the advocacy and not the overt practice of theoretical-methodological pluralism in knowledge production and pluralism in the topics investigated.

To achieve and maintain substantive and authentic diversification and decolonisation of economics, the praxis of all heterodox economists needs to embrace a conjunction of interrelated actions. A single action is inadequate for the task. Moreover, unending vigilance is required to embed the ‘gains’ so that these become conceived as ‘norms’.

There are, I contend, four key interrelated actions for heterodoxy to ‘detoxify’ and lead the way on diversifying and decolonising the social science discipline of economics.

One key action is transparency about one’s ‘positionality’.  I am referring to a scholar’s social ontology — her ‘world view’ of the nature, character, basic features, structures, and constituents of social reality — and her epistemological views (how knowledge is created by, for example, observation and induction or model building and deduction). Analytical constructs reflect a chosen research methodology which, in turn, reflects ontological and epistemological beliefs. These should be rendered explicit.

Why?

The purpose of social inquiry, and the practice of economics as a social science, should be to explain an ever-changing and increasingly complex social reality. The knowledge produced needs to accord with social reality to be relevant to the many and be able to address persistent issues and crises such as the climate emergency, inequality, and global pandemics. The analytical approach of the mainstream denotes reality as a closed system devoid of social, political, and historical contexts. Thus, issues are falsely framed, and the approach is the antithesis of the research task at hand. Positional transparency evokes openness about the ‘methodological position’ the researcher has taken to the problem under investigation and thus, appropriateness to explain social reality.

Positionality reflects a scholar’s gender, race, ethnicity, history, nationality, geographic location, political views and more. Thus, positional transparency is interrelated with a second action — acknowledgement of the social construction of knowledge, and the exclusionary role that language can play.

Knowledge is situated. Any knowledge created is inevitably framed by the lives and experiences of the knowledge producers (and reflected through their positionality). The language of mainstream scholarship presents it as ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’, and thus authoritative, not influenced by the positions and lives of its creators. This is inherently dishonest and should be always called out.

Explicit acknowledgment that knowledge creation is situated in lived experiences — and thus, are arguments/analyses — recognises that a plurality of explanations is possible. As Sheila Dow wrote 25 years ago, ‘no one knowledge system can capture totality because each is partial, reflecting a vision of reality’.  Visibility of the positioned nature of knowledge will mean greater integrity in scholarship.

Further, the rhetoric deployed by knowledge producers plays a significant role in silencing underrepresented voices, and the reproduction of insular communities. Rhetoric can act as a social control mechanism by dismissing the scholarship of others as ‘biased’ or ‘unscientific’. This should not only be revealed but heterodox economists should consciously seek not to replicate. This, in turn, means clear recognition that the English language actively creates, not just conveys, the message.

Acknowledgment of the social construction of knowledge and language use leads to a third action—a transformative approach to knowledge building and learning. With the inclusion of new information and different perspectives, frank, open conversations can expose the realities of marginalisation, discrimination, and power relations, and societal privilege (not necessarily intellectual superiority) resulting in the ubiquity of white, male, Eurocentric voices.  Knowledge creation and learning then become transformative processes of mutual critique and discovery.

Transparency about positionality, meaningful recognition of the social construction of knowledge and language, and transformative processes for knowledge production and learning are the foundations to enable achievement of a fourth critical action — a decolonised economic pedagogy.

As posited by Kvangraven and Kesar, a decolonised economic pedagogy is effectively structured around at least the following: the economy is consistently treated as embedded within the social sphere; explicit acknowledgement of the bias and values inherent to different perspectives, and the repression of some epistemologies by others; not relying on one perspective or approach nor advocating universality of explanation; exposing students to the Eurocentric underpinnings of different theoretical perspectives; the presentation of knowledge within its colonial and post-colonial contexts; exposing the spectrum of power inequalities within communities; and, taking a student-centred approach to pedagogy requiring teacher-student co-responsibility to create a common co-operative learning space and to create knowledge.

Ongoing attention and effort focused on these four interrelated actions as a conjunction — by all heterodox economists, not a few — will drive meaningful change to the practice and teaching of economics through authentic diversification and decolonisation. If not, the praxis of heterodoxy will remain as susceptible to charges of insularity, bias, and discrimination as the mainstream.

These comments extend those I made, earlier this year, as a participant in the URPE@ASSA panel Diversity in Heterodox Economics: Radical Solutions for an Old Problem organised by D-Econ, and the inaugural webinar of the Association of Heterodox Economics series Heterodox Economics Goes Global .


Lynne Chester is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney.

Note: This post was originally published at the Progress in Political Economy (PPE) blog and is reproduced here with the permission of the author.

Image credit: Brooke Anderson

Knowledge, Power, and Economics: D-Econ Blog Launch

By Deepak Kumar, Carolina Alves, Aditi Dixit, and Surbhi Kesar

In a world marked by stark hierarchies, the constitution of knowledge is not immune to social contradictions. Varied axes of power relations among and across genders, classes, races, castes, and nations play a pivotal role in the making, remaking, and regulation of knowledge. Critical scholars from across the disciplinary and geographical spectrum have tried to understand how the social production of knowledge perpetuates inequitable power (see Stoddard, 2007).

This phenomenon is all the more critical in the field of economics where the disciplinary objective is the study of economic relations through which societies create and distribute wealth. The role of economics has not only been to passively identify and analyse these relations but also in actively moulding them. Given the significance of the economic in reproducing the social, it is important that economics as a discipline be conscious of the myriad ways in which these hierarchies influence the scope of its study, its frameworks, and methods of analyses.

Mainstream and the scientific method

While social reality is shaped by historical contingency and social conflict, mainstream economics is premised on eternal natural laws and harmony of social interests. The discipline relies on an approach that is largely limited to viewing social behaviour through the lens of methodological individualism and economic macrodynamics within the framework of equilibrium solutions of mathematical models (Hausman, 1992; Dow, 1997; Alves and Kvangraven, 2020). In this view, the ‘scientific’ progress of the discipline has been an incremental march, each ‘development’ leaving behind some inadequacy in theories past, towards a more proximate understanding of historically invariant laws.

Ideologues and adherents have rationalised this view of a ‘pure economics’ on grounds of a near exclusive claim among social sciences on the scientific method. They argue that it proffers on their disciplinary framework, and by extension its practice, a ‘value-neutrality’  – impartiality and overcoming of biases – that other approaches and social science disciplines purportedly lack (Robbins, 1932; Friedman, 1966). This is expressed in the branding of ‘economic sciences’ that gained common currency through the 20th century.

The belief and attachment to a unique ‘way’ to do economics has imbibed in it an inflexible hierarchy, with scholars located in positions of relative privilege having disproportionate influence in defining and regulating necessary bounds of knowledge and participation. This gatekeeping is evidenced in the tyranny of the top five journals (Heckman and Moktan, 2020), the prejudice against  ideas from outside the economics mainstream (Javdani and Chang, 2019), the exclusion of heterodox contributions from mainstream journals (Reardon, 2008), dominance of the US and Europe in the discipline (Das et al, 2013), and the largely white male social constitution of the profession (Bayer and Rouse, 2016; CSMGEP, 2020).

There are inherent limitations in searching for invariant laws of the social world in the image of the natural sciences. People’s behaviour is shaped by a confluence of social, economic, cultural, and legal factors; coevolving with their relation to the natural-physical world. The laws of motion of society are then far more contingent, diverse, and volatile than can be accommodated in the reductive estimation of science subscribed to by mainstream economists. The issue here is not one of whether some degree of abstraction is necessary (to which the answer is yes), but rather if such unrealistic assumptions and claims of universality, objectivity, and neutrality are necessary. 

Heterodoxy, diversification, and decolonisation

The discipline’s monolithic approach has limited the development of a pluralist intellectual edifice suited to study the reproductive mechanism of the economic system and the society in which it is embedded. It does this by delegitimising and relegating to the side-lines people and perspectives whose contribution to knowledge systems is at odds with and therefore poses a challenge to this ideological hegemony. 

This hegemony has from the outset birthed opposition from scholars and allies located on the punitive end of exploitative social relations. Contributions from feminists, people of colour, scholars from the underdeveloped world, and scholars writing from non-mainstream perspectives have not only advocated greater representation and diversity of perspectives in the discipline but also enriched its practice by overcoming scholarly limitations of its more orthodox persuasions. They have operated – at times only implicitly – within the mould of heterodoxy given its more organic treatment of power.

Take, for instance, issues surrounding gender. Feminist contributions alleviate the otherwise blindness of economics to gender (Ferber and Nelson, 1993). Their contributions supplant much of the traditional mainstream analysis based on rational-choice and utility-maximizing frameworks by gendered processes and embeddedness of individual action in social and economic structures (England, 1989; Ferber, 2003; Woolley, 1989).

In the same vein, economists working on the political economy of race emphasise mechanisms and practices that give rise to unequal opportunities and the explicit discrimination that racial minorities confront in the labour market. They centre the role of power, emphasise the social construction of race, and focus on social relations that condition these economic outcomes. This explicitly contests the mainstream frameworks that explain racial inequalities as mere outcomes of differences in productivity owing to differences in human capital, preference, market incompleteness, or informational asymmetries (Feiner and Roberts 1990; Darity et al, 2006; Cook & Kongcharoen, 2010). 

There have, likewise, been remarkable contributions from the peripheral economies of the world, examining how unequal global relations have affected economic outcomes for underdeveloped countries (Shie & Meer, 2010; Patnaik & Patnaik, 2016). A distinctive illustration is the sharp criticism of structural-adjustment policies (Ghosh, 1997, Chandrasekhar and Ghosh, 2002) expressly rationalised with the self-assured ‘value-free’ and ‘scientific’ claims of mainstream economists. Furthermore, several scholars from the South have critiqued the conception of economic development in the image of capitalist institutions of the Global North (Frank, 1967; Amin, 2009) and have articulated alternative ways of understanding the post-colonial development process (Sanyal, 2007).

These instances are illustrative of how a pluralist approach to economics has strengthened not only the representative element in the discipline but also its intellectual prowess in explaining the nature and dynamics of economic relations. 

Resolving the contradictions

An intellectual project that seeks to decolonise and diversify economics then necessarily progresses through a re-examination of the philosophical and methodological basis of mainstream economics and by questioning its disconcerting lack of representation in terms of both identity and alternate schools of thought. It is by design a radical project. It is not, however, without formidable opposition from entrenched interests in the discipline. 

Mainstream economic thought plays a fundamental role in reproducing and valorising structures of power both in its disciplinary practice and in the social world it seeks to investigate. In doing so, it in effect hinders the progress of the discipline and its potentially progressive, democratising welfare implications for the real world. The nature of contradictions arising in the contemporary world – intensifying social hierarchies, their reactionary political manifestations, and pressing ecological constraints – demand from the discipline breaking of these restrictive moulds that hinder their comprehension and their resolution. 

The D-Econ blog series is a collective initiative to bring together contributions from academics and activists who share the vision of decolonisation and diversification of economics. It is a positive project of enhancing scholarship that challenges the Global North-centric mainstream understanding and its universal and objective claim. It promotes a diverse community of scholars and pluralism of perspectives in order to emancipate the economic study of society from the restrictive clutches of privilege and power. It seeks to engage with a community of scholars employing a Global South-centric lens of analyses, located in marginalised social spaces, and discuss issues and concerns systematically overlooked in the discipline. In doing so it hopes to democratise participation and practice of the discipline, to better understand and overcome the intense social contradictions of the contemporary world.

The blog facilitates conversations that explore and emphasise how varied axes of power relations, such as gender, class, race, caste, colonialism, religion, and sexuality among others, affect participation in the academy, limit knowledge production, and contribute to its colonisation. Through this engagement, it seeks to enrich the economic study of society with a plurality of perspectives and methods rooted in objective realities of marginalised and oppressed communities.

D-Econ @ Bristol Festival of Ideas (videos)

This month D-Econ Steering Group member Carolina Alves curated two very exciting panels on decolonising Economics at the Bristol Festival of Ideas. First up, there was the panel Why Diversifying and Decolonising Economics Matters to Everyone, which was a lively discussion featuring Keston Perry, Imran Rasul and Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe. The following panel, Decolonising Economics: What does it mean and how is it done? featured Fadekemi Abiru, Surbhi Kesar, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven and Farwa Sia. Both of the sessions were chaired by Romesh Vaitilingam. You can view the recordings below.

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Decolonising and Diversifying Economics and Economic History (D-Econ @ LSE)

Ariane Hillig (Institute of Management Studies, Goldsmiths) and Professor Tirthankar Roy (Department of Economic History, LSE) will be discussing decolonising and diversifying economics and economic history at LSE on Thursday 20 February 2020. The discussion will be chaired by Dr. Akile Ahmet (Inclusive Education, LSE’s Eden Centre).

The Speakers will discuss key questions, challenges and relevant initiatives in decolonising and diversifying their respective disciplines.

This event is organised by the Eden Centre for Education Enhancement, Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (LSE) and the Decolonising LSE Collective.

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