In the need book Talking About Global Inequality: Personal Experiences and Historical Perspectives, Christian Olaf Christiansen, Mélanie Lindbjerg Machado-Guichon, Sofía Mercader, Oliver Bugge Hunt, and Priyanka Jha interview a series of scholars from History, Sociology, Economics, Anthropology and Postcolonial Studies about global inequality. Here is the interview they did with me: The Need to Centre Imperialism.
I’m very happy to finally have this open access article “Beyond financialisation: the longue durée of finance and production in the Global South” out in the Cambridge Journal of Economics (coauthored with Kai Koddebrock and Ndongo Samba Sylla). I summarize the article in this twitter thread.
Here is the article abstract:
One of the central premises of the literature on financialisation is that we have been living in a new era of capitalism, characterised by a historical shift in the finance-production nexus. Finance has expanded to a disproportionate economic size and, more importantly, has divorced from productive economic pursuits. In this paper, we explore these claims of ‘expansion’ and ‘divorce’ based on a longue durée analysis of the link between finance and production in Senegal and Ghana. As such, we de-centre the dominant approach to financialisation. Seen from the South, we argue that although there has been expansion of financial motives and practices the ‘divorce’ between the financial and the productive economy cannot be considered a new empirical phenomenon having occurred during the last decades and even less an epochal shift of the capitalist system. The tendency for finance to neglect the needs of the domestic productive sector has been the structural operation of finance in many parts of the Global South over the last 150 years. Therefore, one cannot put forward a theory of the evolution of finance under capitalism without taking these crucial historical insights into account.
The article is a part of a two-part Special Issue on ‘Financialisation in Developing and Emerging Economies: Manifestations, Drivers and Implications’ in CJE, edited by Carolina Alves, Bruno Bonizzi and Annina Kaltenbrunner. Read their introduction to the first part here.
I have a new article in the Review of International Political Economy with the fabulous co-author team of Ilias Alami, Carolina Alves, Bruno Bonizzi, Annina Kaltenbrunner, Kai Koddenbrock and Jeff Powell. The article (open access) outlines a research agenda for understanding international financial subordination by drawing on the heterodox traditions of dependency theory, Marxism, and Post-Keynesianism.
I recently wrote an essay about Samir Amin for the popular magainze, Aeon. In it, I go through what I think are major lessons from Samir Amin that can help us understand imperialism, Eurocentrism, uneven development, and ideology better. I contrast his structural and materialist analysis of capitalism and imperialism with the culturalist views of Edward Said, as Said has received much more attention in both academia and in the public sphere. Read the essay here.
Read a Spanish translation of the article here (Letras Libres).
I had the privelege of publishing a review essay of two books in the most recent issue of Race and Class (2022). I review the important contributions and radical potential of Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire (2019) and Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (2020), and outline some ways in which their analyses and frameworks could be expanded along anti-colonial Marxist lines.
Read the full review here.
I recently spoke to Lev Moscow on the A Correction podcast about the life and work of Samir Amin. Listen here.
In April, I had the pleasure of speaking at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) seminar series. I drew on both my research on dependency theory as a research programme and my work on finance in imperialism in Senegal and Ghana (with Kai Koddenbrock and Ndongo Samba Sylla). The talk was chaired by Antonio Andreoni (IIPP), and Sophie Van Huellen (SOAS) was the discussant.
I wrote an essay on global debt inequalities with Jayati Ghosh for Progressive International. Read the full essay here. The essay is part of the series “A Vision of Debt Justice” of Progressive International’s Debt Justice Blueprint.
Along with Maria Dyveke Styve and Ushehwedu Kufakurinani, I edited a special issue in Review of African Political Economy on Samir Amin’s work and its relevance for contemporary problems.
You can read our introductory editorial here: Samir Amin and beyond: the enduring relevance of Amin’s approach to political economy. We also wrote a blog post about the issue that you can find here.
Key Questions on Global Inequality is an interview series that forces academics to consider how our own upbringings and positionalities affect how we see the world. Here is the interview they did with me, where I dig into how my own childhood led me to see and challenge global inequality in particular ways, and how this in turn eventually led me to heterodox economics and debt justice work.
ingridhk.com 