Review of Onur Ulas Ince, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism explores early modern theories that underpinned eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British imperialism, liberalism, and capitalism. In a novel contribution to the neo-left literature that followed C.B. Macpherson’s Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), Onur Ulas Ince disentangles these overlapping “isms” through a Marxist approach, aiming to restore the “materiality back to the circuit of imperial ideology and practice” (29). The ambition is to resolve “an overly culturalist and discursive orientation [which] undermines the analytical power and critical commitments of scholarship on liberalism and empire [by examining] political economy as a species of political theory [… through the] socioeconomic analysis of imperial relations [… as well as] the fine-grained analysis of liberal ideas in imperial contexts” (12–13). In doing so, Ince considers classical political economy anew through his comparative case study of John Locke, Edmund Burke, and E.G. Wakefield on reconciling liberal ideals with illiberal extractive means of colonial production.