Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism

Abstract

Abstract This chapter constructs an analytic framework for reconstructing the relationship between liberalism and empire through the optic of political economy. Extant studies of liberalism and empire tend to restrict the analysis to the explication of liberal texts in imperial contexts without explicitly theorizing the imperial contexts in question. To address this lacuna, the chapter elaborates the notion of “colonial capitalism” as a contextual theory and a hermeneutic key for interpreting the works of John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward G. Wakefield. Drawing on critical political economy, imperial social and economic history, and postcolonial theory, “colonial capitalism” captures the heterogeneous and globally networked property structures, exchange systems, and labor regimes that constituted Britain’s imperial economy. Against this background, it highlights the “dilemmas of liberalism” that materialized in the efforts to reconcile the peaceful, commercial, British self-imaginations and the coercive economic practices the Britons undertook in their imperial possessions.