Colonial legacies and racial hierarchies in the global economy: a review article

Abstract

This article reviews two recent books on persistent inequalities in the global economy and the role of colonial legacies and racial hierarchies in explaining them. Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire (2019) and Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (2020) draw on the Black Radical Tradition and stratification economics respectively to challenge mainstream understandings of racial hierarchies. After first outlining the strengths and key insights of each book, the author discusses how they could be expanded in a more radical manner, along the lines of anti-colonial, decolonial and black Marxism. She argues that in order to understand how racial hierarchies are connected to the development of capitalism, further engagement with radical scholarship that sees race and class as co-constituted would be required.

Keywords

African development Black Radical Tradition decolonising political economy global inequality imperialism racial hierarchies stratification economics

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References

This is especially the case for Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire, which received the Frantz Fanon Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association, the ASA Best Book Prize from the African Studies Association, the First Book Award from the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association, the W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, the J. David Greenstone Book Prize from the Politics & History Section of the American Political Science Association, and the ISA Theory Best Book from the Theory Section of the International Studies Association. Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa received the Joan Robinson Prize from the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy and has been reviewed extensively, including by Toyomu Masaki (Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review) and Stephanie Seguino (Forum for Social Economics). Obeng-Odoom is also editing a special issue on stratification economics for the Review of Evolutionary Political Economy, which continues to push the research agenda of the book forward.

See for example C. Bartolovich and N. Lazarus, Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); W. Mignolo and C. Walsh, On Decoloniality: concepts, analytics, praxis (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018); S. Rakei and P. Madzivhandila, ‘Black Marxism and liberatory praxis: the contributions of Black Marxists to decolonization thought’, in S. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and M. Ndlovu, eds, Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century: living theories and true ideas (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 151–71; C. Robinson, Black Marxism: the making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

L. T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: research and indigenous peoples (London and New York: Zed Books, 1999).

W. A. Darity Jr, D. Hamilton, P. L. Mason, G. N. Price, A. Davila, M. T. Mora and S. K. Stockly, ‘Stratification economics – a general theory of intergroup inequality’, in A. Flynn, S. R. Holmberg, D. Warren and F. J. Wong, eds, The Hidden Rules of Race: barriers to an inclusive economy, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 35–51.

Copley also notes this in his review of Getachew, see J. Copley, ‘Book Review: Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew’, Capital and Class 44, no. 4 (2020), pp. 635–37.