Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism

Onur Ulas Ince is an Associate Professor of Political Theory at SOAS University of London. In 2024, I was awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship and The Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought Mid-Career Prize. My research has further received the 2020 Spitz Prize by the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought and honorable mentions from the Canadian Political Science Association for the 2020 C. B. Macpherson Prize and from the American Political Science Association for the 2025 Outstanding Article Award in International History and Politics.

My research stands at the intersection of political theory, global political economy, history of capitalism, and history of imperial and international thought. I investigate how the imperial constitution of global capitalism has been theorized in the discourse of political economy since the early modern period.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain celebrated its possession of a unique “empire of liberty” that propagated the rule of private property, free trade, and free labor across the globe. The British also knew that their empire had been built by conquering overseas territories, trading slaves, and extorting tribute from other societies. Set in the context of the early-modern British Empire, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism paints a striking picture of these tensions between the illiberal origins of capitalism and its liberal imaginations in metropolitan thought.

Onur Ulas Ince combines an analysis of political economy and political theory to examine the impact of colonial economic relations on the development of liberal thought in Britain. He shows how a liberal self-image for the British Empire was constructed in the face of the systematic expropriation, exploitation, and servitude that built its transoceanic capitalist economy. The resilience of Britain’s self-image was due in large part to the liberal intellectuals of empire, such as John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and their efforts to disavow the violent transformations that propelled British colonial capitalism. Ince forcefully demonstrates that liberalism as a language of politics was elaborated in and through the political economic debates around the contested meanings of private property, market exchange, and free labor.

Weaving together intellectual history, critical theory, and colonial studies, this book is a bold attempt to reconceptualize the historical relationship between capitalism, liberalism, and empire in a way that continues to resonate with our present moment.