Imperial Debt

Imperial Debt: Colonial Theft, Postcolonial Reparations is an inspired collection of scholarship in postcolonial studies and related research fields. Jacques Derrida once wrote that “being-with spectres would also be . . . a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.” That idea is the starting point for this volume, which looks for and considers spectres of empire long ignored in the scholarship. It asks, what does a “politics of memory” look like in the international, long-historical framework of modern era imperialism? What are the relevant reparation mechanisms and the generational “inheritances” of wealth and poverty that carry through to shape the present and encompass slavery, the trade in enslavement and its social life? Building on new work in the emergent fields of critical imperial studies, debt studies and critical justice studies, Imperial Debt offers fourteen content chapters that augment the conversation by ascertaining what was taken from nations historically “burdened” by imperialism and what is owed to them?It is the first scholarly collection that explicitly develops the reparations case for and “after” empire. Recognising today’s global distribution of wealth as centuries in the making, these scholarly assessments work from a political justice foundation to suggest that though justice paradigms are rarely applied in research taking up empire as the subject, they are nevertheless expressly relevant and indeed necessary to scholarship on imperialist colonialism. The research collected goes some way toward repairing the absence of the justice question in the study of empire. This volume works from multiple disciplinary, theoretical, historical and geographical perspectives, serving as a clarion call for the justice considerations that should have informed decisions at the time of independence.