Following an initial 2017 workshop exploring Colonial Debts, Extractive Nostalgias, Imperial Insolvencies, this two-day event will bring together scholars, artists and activists to discuss the connections between the histories and legacies of colonialism and the role of the financial sector, past and present.

The recognition that Empire has been consequential for the geo-political configuration of international financial markets is almost a commonplace in certain approaches to economic history (Cain & Hopkins 2016) and global political economy (Palan 2015). Likewise, scholars assembled (rightly or wrongly) under the banner of “post-colonial” approaches readily accept that finance, debt and speculation have been key aspects of the colonial and neocolonial project (Baucom 2005; Wang 2018). But invoking empire as part of capitalism’s history itself does not necessarily break free of the Eurocentric perspectives and methodologies that characterise much of political economy (Kayatekin 2009; Dale 2009). Meanwhile, much work remains to be done to fortify our growing understanding of the cultural and sociological relationships between money, risk, race and global exploitation with the tools of political economy.

This gathering responds  to recent works that have examined the role of Wall Street banks in the colonization of the Caribbean (Hudson 2017), insurance ‘innovations’ in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and settler colonialism (Rupprecht 2016; Park 2018), the persistence of imperial “technologies” of race and racialization in the contemporary debt economy (Chakravvarty and da Silva 2013; Kish and Leroy 2015; Roy 2012) and colonial conquest as a crucible for the forging of contemporary understandings of property and corporate personhood (Birla 2013; Bhandar 2016; Yates 2018).

• How are today’s contemporary financial practices, innovations and architectures shaped by, and how have they helped to shape, colonialism, empire and the global production of race, racism and racialization?
• What does attending to colonial legacies and lineages of the sphere we now call ‘finance’ contribute to critical political economic analysis?
• Likewise, how can the rigorous tools of political economy reveal the nuances and patterns of empire, historically and today?
• How is the world economy, past and present haunted, culturally and materially, by the trace of racialization, enslavement, indenture and odious debt?
• Can postcolonial studies and the political economy of finance be drawn into a productive dialogue?
• How can such a dialogue be in a productive exchange with the forms of art and activism that challenge existing power relations?
• Is a ‘decolonial’ political economy of finance possible, and what would it look like?
• And how can we reframe today’s political-economic and cultural challenges, from the persistence of global financial power to the revanchism of neonationlisms in light of such investigations?

Organizers

Dr Clea Bourne (Senior Lecturer in Promotional Media, Goldsmiths, University of London)
Dr Paul Gilbert (Lecturer in International Development, University of Sussex).
Dr Max Haiven (Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice, Lakehead University)
Dr Johnna Montgomerie (Reader in International Political Economy, King’s College, London)

Schedule: Friday, April 5

Quiet room,  Meeting House, University of Sussex

10:00-10:30 Welcome

10:30-12:00 Race, colonialism and debt, past and present (panel)
K-Sue Park (University of California, Los Angeles)
Jerome Roos (ROAR Magazine, London School of Economics)

12:00-12:45 Breakout focus group conversations

12:45-13:30 Lunch (provided for all registered attendees)

13:30-15:00 Tracing imperial legacies: Interventions (panel)
Traces of Nitrate project (Brighton – Xavier Ribas and Louise Purbrick)
Museum of British Colonialism (London)

15:00-15:15 Break

15:15-17:00 Emerging scholars’ panel one

Franziska Müller (Kassel) “Greening the anti-politics machine: De- and repoliticizing Africa’s renewable energy transition”
Rebecca Bramall (University of the Arts London) “The colonial meddling never stopped’: stories about Empire and responsibility in contemporary tax justice discourse”
Nick Bernards (Warwick) “Colonial legacies and the limits of financialization in sub-Saharan Africa”
Sarah-Jane Phelan and Jenny Hewitt (Sussex) “Playing with Experiences of Displacement: Complexity,  Accountability, Global Reach Ambitions and the Toy Industry”

17:00-17:30 Plenary conversation

Schedule: Saturday, April 6

Meeting room 1, Falmer House (Student Union building), University of Sussex

10:00-11:45 Emerging scholars’ panel two

Nadine King Chambers (Central Lancashire) “From the Shadow of a Mine to the Shadow of a Smelter – Entanglements of Extraction from Jamaica to British Columbia.”

Catherine Cumming (Auckland) “How finance colonised Aotearoa: A concise counter-history”

John Handel (Berkeley) “The financialization of American slavery and the mundane political economy of sovereign debt”

11:45-12:30 Breakout focus group conversations

12:30-13:30 Lunch (provided for all registered attendees)

13:30-15:00 Making visible finance & the afterlives of empire (panel)

Femke Herregraven (Artist, Amsterdam)
Research for Action (London)

15:00-15:15 Break

15:15-16:45 Future directions: Write-offs, write-downs & reparations
Cathy Bergin (University of Brighton)
Gargi Bhattacharyya (University of East London)
Johnna Montgomerie (King’s College London)

16:45-17:30 Plenary conversation