Economics of Empire

Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem is Associate Professor of English at The City University of New York/Kingsborough, USA. She also teaches at Drew University, USA, and at The Graduate Center, CUNY, USA.Michael O’Sullivan is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has taught on literature and language in universities in Ireland, the UK, the USA, Japan, and Hong Kong.

"I am fascinated by the various chapters as well as by the overall picture this volume paints. The editors and authors have caught a necessary wave. The overlap between global economic theory and literature will become increasingly important and this strikes me as new material which addresses old issues in a provocative and original manner; the conceptual issues are important, specifically, the relationship between material and ideal structures. That is, the book asks: how do the material structures of global capitalism influence the production of global humanities, literature, and social theory? The book definitely fills a gap – the gap between works on political economy and those working in the tradition of the humanities." — Naeem Inayatullah, Professor in the Department of Politics at Ithaca College, USA"The Economics of Empire is a rare publication that explicitly focuses on bringing empire and capitalism into conversation through a broadly post-colonial lens. In this respect, the book concretises a debate that has been perennial but has also attracted new scholarly interest in recent years. It offers an important contribution as the timing is ripe for such an explicit intervention in postcolonial critique with a view to renewing the field and linking it to other fields." — Robbie Shilliam, Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, USA

• Foreword: Postcolonial Studies and the History of Capital Preface: The Economics of Empire: Bridging Postcolonial Studies Forward 1. Introduction—Empire’s License: Structural Thievery and the Political Life of Appropriated Capital 2. Decolonizing Capital: Indian Political Economy in the Shadow of Empire 3. Criminal Cities: Economics and Empire in Belfast and Johannesburg 4. Interrogating Legal World-Making Through Genre: Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and Colonial Reparations 5. Trading in Women’s "Troubles": Fertility Control and Postcolonial Exchanges in Irish History 6. Contemporary Plantation Narratives and the Postcolonial Memory of Capitalism 7. Waste Lands and Preserves: Olive Schreiner’s Ecological Allegories and Colonial Zimbabwe 8. Unearthing Land and Labor Disputes in Tunisia: An Uneven and Combined Development Approach to Tribal/Management Councils 9. Derailing the Rail: Indian-Kenyan Solidarity in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction 10. Coloniality, Knowledge Production, and Racialized Socio-economic Inequality in South Africa 11. Devalued Knowledge: Colonized Post-Socialism 12. Hong Kong and the Sinocentric Afterlife of an Anglophone Postcolonial Discourse