Rethinking capitalism’s conceptual categories, theoretical frameworks, spaces and intellectual trajectories

Capitalism is one of the most well-researched academic subjects, cutting across disciplines and encompassing different intellectual traditions. This Hub is engaged in multidisciplinary research on capitalism, its aim being to problemtaise conceptual categories including property, debt, land and labour; institutions like banks and companies; and temporal-epistemic paradigms including progress and modernity. It asks: how do conceptual and intellectual paradigms associated with capitalism become thinkable?

Much of the work produced and discussed in the Hub centres on approaching the Middle East, South Asia and Africa as sites of theoretical rethinking and production. Recent work in History, Anthropology and Critical Political Economy has rigorously shown that categories often taken to be central to the development of capital in Europe may not be as useful for understanding its evolution in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. However, the critical concepts that emerge in archives and in ethnographic work are still not seriously explored for their theoretical input. Instead, such repertoires are predominantly taken to correspond to European imperatives of capitalism.

Whether this means that the Middle East, South Asia and Africa (especially around the Indian Ocean) had their own capitalist formations or were themselves important sites in which capitalism emerged, the question that remains is whether rich conceptual repertoires emerging in the Indian Ocean region (to give but one example) and Islamic notions of wealth (to give another) imposed themselves on the reordering of land, property, debt, time and agency often associated with the epistemological interruptions and legal reconfigurations of colonial modernity. Indeed, the epistemic foundations of colonial modernity in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa receive less scholarly attention than processes assumed to be capitalist.

The Hub brings together scholars whose work engages critically with the conceptual and epistemic foundations of capitalism and colonial modernity.

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Header Image by Paolo Chieselli from Pixabay