Book Review: Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism, by Onur Ulas Ince

• Published date: 01 April 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211027967
• Date: 01 April 2022
• Author: William Clare Roberts
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(2) 362 –376

© The Author(s) 2021

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism, by Onur Ulas Ince. New York:

Oxford University Press, 2018, 216 pp.

Reviewed by: William Clare Roberts, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211027967

Onur Ulas Ince’s excellent book works a subtle but momentous transforma-

tion on the burgeoning political theory scholarship on colonialism and

empire. It argues that the works of liberal and liberal-adjacent British intel-

lectuals should be read as efforts to negotiate a “simultaneous commitment”

to a commercial economy, to the economic and political project of imperial

expansion, and to “the primal norms” of liberalism (6). Containing three sub-

stantial interpretive chapters—one each on John Locke, Edmund Burke, and

E. G. Wakefield—and bookended by methodological and programmatic con-

siderations, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism renovates

the study of liberalism’s imbrications with colonialism and empire by shift-

ing the focus decisively away from political principles and imaginaries and

toward political economy. In a bracing and welcome Marxist challenge to the

existing literature, Ince argues that “an overly culturalist and discursive

orientation undermines the analytical power and critical commitments of

scholarship on liberalism and empire,” and he proposes to remedy this by

attending as much to the “socioeconomic analysis of imperial relations” as to

“the fine-grained analysis of liberal ideas in imperial contexts” (13).

Despite this statement, however, one of the signal contributions of Ince’s

book is to move textual analysis forward dramatically, precisely by paying

attention to the economic arguments and references in those texts and by

treating “political economy as a species of political theory” (12). This can be

as deceptively simple in its operation as it is profound in its effects. For

instance, everyone knows Locke’s line “in the beginning all the World was

America.” Everyone cites it. Everyone takes it to be significant. And yet how

many remember that the line ends with “and more so than that is now; for no

such thing as money was anywhere known”? As Ince convincingly argues,

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