Ghosts of Eurocentrism past: A review of Decolonizing Economics
Anirban Karak
Platypus Review 184 | March 2026
Devika Dutt, Carolina Alves, Surbhi Kesar, and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2025).
DECOLONIZATION HAS become “chic” and a “buzzword.” The book under review is part of a series titled “Decolonizing the Curriculum,” which includes critiques of politics, geography, anthropology, sociology, and literature. The authors of our volume consciously distance themselves from “fake” decolonization and “co-optation” into the status quo. Yet, their arguments exemplify tendencies that have contributed to the Left’s current helplessness. The book offers little beyond a synthesis of writings fashionable within the “academic” Left, and there are significant omissions in a text that seeks to open debate rather than foreclosing it. I shall argue that these follow from a one-sided view of modern history and its contradictions.
There are reasons to take the book seriously. It treats mainstream economics as ideology, and it proceeds from the conviction that ideology shapes how we interpret and act in the world. Thus, a critique of ideology is a precondition for transformative politics. Any such critique, though, requires self-reflexivity about its own historical conditions of possibility — an element entirely absent here. Rather, decolonization in this text is a light from nowhere that is bestowed upon the less fortunate by the authors.1
The key argument of the book is that everything — quite literally — that is wrong with economics follows from its “Eurocentrism,” which is defined as “a view of the world that positions a partial and mythical experience of the development of capitalism in Western European [sic] as central, interpreting all other phenomena only in relation to it” (16). The considerable, perhaps insurmountable, difficulties involved in positing a unified history of “Europe” (or even “Western Europe”) — and the erasure of politics and contingency within Europe that this entails — are summarily ignored.2
No matter. The authors argue that economists think this way, and that is what turns economics into ideology. This too, is debatable. For instance, is Eurocentrism really what makes some heterodox economists neglect processes of social differentiation beyond class, as the authors claim (119)? Alternative defenses of arguments that the authors disagree with are glossed over, for everything must somehow be tied back to Eurocentrism. Beliefs are implicitly imputed to interlocutors, giving an ad hominem flavor to the critiques articulated in the book, despite protestations to the contrary (161).3 Ideology critique, rather, must explain how historical contexts and their contradictions give force to certain arguments, and thereby account for its own conditions of possibility.
The definition of Eurocentrism must be probed further. What does it mean to interpret “all phenomena” “in relation” to the development of capitalism in Western Europe? The book does discuss one mode of thought for which this makes sense, i.e., modernization theory, or the view that capitalism will evolve “everywhere” in the same manner (16–17). The implicit assumption in such a claim, of course, is that the world is made up of distinct nation-states, for the spatial coordinates of “everywhere” must be further specified for the theory to make sense. Modernization theory — and, one may add, Stalinism — posits that each nation must pass through a pre-determined schema drawn from the historical experience of parts of Western Europe: primitive accumulation, industrialization, and so on.
This is true, but these ideas themselves emerged historically during the 19th century (via proponents of national political economy such as Friedrich List), and were consolidated in the 20th, in large part because of the failures of socialist (and preceding that, liberal) internationalism (read universalism). The authors, instead, superimpose such ideas onto the whole of modernity and political-economic thinking, including Adam Smith. The book thus occludes from view the alternative visions of global society whose defeats were contingent, and it further cements the historical amnesia that plagues the Left today.
This is clearest in the discussions of Smith and Marx. That Smith thought of the world as “comprising numerous equal and independent nations” (41) is surprising, since the context that he wrote about was constituted primarily by “empires.” Moreover, the character of the British empire in particular was up for grabs until the 1780s at least.4 Smith did think of the “relation” between Europe and the wider world, but he was adamant that the rise of bourgeois society in Western Europe was a result of “poor” Europe trading with “richer” parts of the world (especially Asia).5 The “unnatural” progress of opulence in Europe was a function of historical context, not of any innate economic, let alone cultural, superiority.6 Indeed, Smith could not have made such an argument, because there was nothing in his experience that could have suggested such a conclusion. To accuse him of Eurocentrism — and, implicitly, of racism — is profoundly misleading.
Nevertheless, Smith also expressed a sense of historical necessity. The rise of bourgeois society in Western Europe and global commerce from the 16th century onwards had made it possible, for the first time in human history, to universalize “natural liberty.” The brutality of European empires in the Americas, and the monopolization of Asian trade was, for Smith, a betrayal of such promises.7 His criticisms of the extractive rule of the British East India Company in India are nearly forgotten today, and the book under review is no exception. In fact, Smith supported the radical bourgeois faction of the company that sought to re-establish the Mughal empire along commercial lines.8 There is also evidence to suggest that actors within Indian society found reason to support such endeavors.9 A bourgeois revolution, in other words, was once a genuine possibility in India, and its contingent failure must be explained historically, as a function of politics in both colony and metropole.
By Smith’s standards, then, the modern, interconnected, global world that emerged was a failure. Recognizing the simple fact that historical actors themselves viewed extractive imperialism as violent and illiberal obviates the need to find Eurocentrism everywhere, a concept that acquires near-theological status in the book akin to “original sin.” The superficial reading of Smith also has implications for how the question of “structural power” is addressed. The authors insist that economics today does not deal with questions of power, which is true. Yet, there is no systematic discussion of the nature of power in different social forms, or of how historical actors had sought to realize liberty. Smith, of course, was concerned with the liberty that is natural to the human species, and he had no Eurocentric assumptions about “who” is capable (or desirous) of achieving it. Commercial society, for Smith, offered a way to limit state power, because order could now emerge through rather than at the cost of individual liberty. Hence his emphasis on self-interest, which had been submerged under the need for collective order in previous social forms. By not engaging with this central tenet of liberalism, the book downplays the stakes involved in the continued existence of an associational sphere — civil, commercial, or bourgeois society — that is not reducible to the state. The failures of liberalism need to be explained historically. “Eurocentrism” will not cut it.
This brings us to Marx, who is curiously exempted from the charges of Eurocentrism levelled against Smith. The authors surely know that within academic social science, Marx is often treated as one more iteration of a now-finally-defeated Enlightenment universalism. Edward Said, who is repeatedly invoked, was a pioneer of this tendency, and he detected not just Eurocentrism but implicit racism in Marx’s diatribe against pre-colonial Indian society.10 Like Smith, though, Marx had no truck with pre-modern societies anywhere, and his denunciations of India are no more strident than his criticisms of Europe’s own feudal past, of Bonapartism, or of non-revolutionary German burghers.11 And, like Smith again, Marx had only good things to say about the bourgeois revolutions in England and France, in which the victory of the bourgeoisie was “the victory of a new social order . . . of nationality over provincialism, of competition over the guild . . . of enlightenment over superstition, of the family over the family name, of industry over heroic laziness, of civil law over privileges of medieval origin.”12
Of course, Marx was hasty to conclude that the British colonial state, despite being motivated by the “vilest interests,” had brought about a social revolution in India.13 Colonialism yielded a retrograde resolution to the crisis of Indian society, but Marx’s support for national liberation was conditional. It would mean nothing without a social revolution that abolished caste and a proletarian revolution in the metropole. Marx’s basis for arriving at such conclusions, as well as the basis for judging the adequacy of a political program, was decidedly modernist: the possibility of universal human emancipation — the destiny of mankind as he called it — which was impossible without a social revolution in Asia. Bourgeois society, Marx thought, had come to contradict its own stated aims in the form of capital. The crisis of liberalism was a function of its own past failures, which Smith had begun to witness. Future possibilities, though, were also generated by capital, and not by remnants of the pre-capitalist past. Socialism, then, would involve the fulfillment of bourgeois promises and not their negation.
One may disagree with Marx, but the authors constantly invoke him without clarifying where they stand regarding Marx’s indisputable modernism and sense of historical necessity. Often, Marx is portrayed as a theorist of class “processes” as such, with no further historical specification (179–80, passim). The historical Marx appears only in connection with discussions of primitive accumulation, which plays a critical role in the narrative of the book. Indeed, the authors suggest that a focus on original accumulation is key to transcending the Eurocentrism of Smithian economics. Yet again, though, closer examination reveals only contradictions and unresolved aporias.
The book argues that primitive accumulation, slavery, and imperialism reveal that the rise of capitalism was underpinned by violence and expropriation (16–17, 45–49, passim). Foregrounding this is the way out of Eurocentrism because it sheds light on the global character of capitalism from the beginning, which had primarily negative consequences for much of the world beyond the North Atlantic (and, presumably, for many within that region). This is again a one-sided formulation, for it completely ignores the fact that bourgeois and liberal critiques of these phenomena were constantly articulated by historical actors of the time, including Smith. Moreover, through his emphasis on the “double freedom” of wage labor, Marx sought to convey the difficult idea that an irretrievable loss may simultaneously herald the promise of a better future. Despite his florid descriptions of coercive primitive accumulation in Britain, nothing suggests that Marx’s aim was to invoke moral sympathy for the sufferer. If anything, he recognized that the sufferer in this story was “at once decent and flawed.”14 The real question, then, is why doubly-free wage labor did not become the norm everywhere, which the authors neither broach nor address.
The emphasis on the coercive force of imperialism as the basis for global capitalist expansion also reproduces a diffusionist story where “Europe” must be treated as always fully constituted and as ontologically incapable of developing true knowledge about or different relationships with the rest of the world. In short, what happened was always destined to happen. If this is not a form of determinist teleology, I do not know what is.
The big unresolved question in the book, therefore, is what meaning categories such as “capitalism” and “bourgeois society” can have for writing histories of “non-Europe.” The diffusionist, violence-centered story suggests that capitalism is merely a negative development in the history of the species-being, and that it is civilizationally external to “non-Europe.” Hence the claim that although sophisticated economic thinking in pre-modern Asia may have influenced modern political economy, non-Europe offers us “alternatives” to the Smithian emphasis on “self-interest” (50–51). The work of self-consciously “post-colonial” economists is also marshalled to argue that “unlike the European experience,” primitive accumulation remains “ever-incomplete in post-colonial economies” (173).
Why does this not count as Eurocentrism? Claiming that post-colonial transformation is “incomplete” presumes a modular form of transition that repeats itself at the scale of each nation-state. Why, then, is this not an instance of the “methodological nationalism” of modernization theory that the authors criticize (24, 71, passim)? Here, as elsewhere, the book offers no answers.
That the trajectory of capitalism is different everywhere is a truism. Capitalism in India was able to capitalize on and reproduce caste hierarchies because a bourgeois revolution never materialized. Hence, India can be simultaneously pre-bourgeois and post-bourgeois with a deadly mix of the worst of both worlds, a point that Marx had already made about Germany in the 1840s.15 This does not mean, however, that the reproduction of everyday life in India is not dependent on and mediated by the totality of global social capital. Indeed, the increasing impossibility of universalizing wage labor in the so-called “developing” world can only be explained with reference to the contemporary dynamics of capital and the nature of surplus populations on a planetary scale.16
These unresolved tensions culminate in a lack of clarity about the standpoint of critique and the potential bases or sources of transformation. If it is true that capitalism is civilizationally external to non-Europe, then does that imply an uncritical affirmation of pre-modern societies there? What could be the basis for passing a judgment either way if the modernity of bourgeois promises and the notion of historical necessity are rejected?
The authors are aware of these dilemmas, but they take no firm stand. They distance themselves from nationalism and the Right-wing obscurantism that the “decolonizing” agenda is clearly in sync with (24, 26–27).17 They also insist that they are not against economic growth, industrialization, or modernity per se (103). But these are empty gestures given that they also reject the notion of historical necessity, suggesting instead that “cultures” that deviate from a “Eurocentric” norm may be compatible with general human emancipation, and that they must be judged “on their own terms” (148–49). Their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding (132–35), this sounds worryingly relativist and ad hoc. To a critical modernist such as Marx, the basis for judgment was always modern. This does not imply that pre-modern cultures offer nothing worth preserving that is potentially compatible with universal freedom. But it does mean that at the level of society on a global scale, there is no going back. “Culture” and “society” cannot be conflated, and the only way to preserve aspects of pre-modern cultures that are meaningful to us is to develop an anti-capitalist political program, which is grounded in more comprehensive historical memories than what the authors offer.
A lack of self-reflexivity is palpable throughout the book. Complaints against “co-optation” of the decolonization agenda abound (x, 26–27), and everything that the authors dislike is labelled “fake” decolonization (213). Not a moment is spared to consider the possibility that co-optation is a result of the constitutive limits of decolonization itself. The book remains unflinchingly and fundamentally nationalist and statist throughout, not least because of its reliance on dependency theory for the analysis of international political-economic relations. The inherent nationalism — both analytical and political — of dependencia, the historical failures of import substitution industrialization in the Third World, and the fact that these frameworks are indebted to forms of 19th-century thought (such as List’s system of national political economy) that Marx had nothing but disdain for, are not acknowledged.
There are, of course, geopolitical imbalances in the world order. Yet, to posit that some states — usually the United States or the “West” — are somehow the only ones free from the constraints and contradictions of global capitalist dynamics, is to confuse form and content. Capitalist social relations are global in content, and nation-states are the differentiated forms through which the social unity of capital is established on a world scale. Political contestation affects the character of these forms at any given moment, but conflict is still internal to the reproduction of capitalist relations and constrained by the imperatives of valorization. There is a substantial literature that criticizes dependencia along such lines, some of it produced by scholars from and working in the “periphery.”18 Why the book ignores them is unclear.
The obsession with finding Eurocentrism everywhere also makes the authors bad readers. For instance, Guy Standing’s book The Precariat is dismissed off hand as “reek[ing]” of “Eurocentrism” because it fails to account for the specificity of capitalism outside the “center” (177).19 Even the recognition that the nature of work is changing everywhere and that permanent wage labor is now unattainable for many in the capitalist center as well, does not temper the authors’ judgment. Whatever its limits, Standing’s work is an attempt to grasp the present as historically constituted. More importantly, whatever his intentions, Standing’s empirical descriptions of the “new dangerous class” can be the basis for thinking through how revolutionary subjectivity might emerge from within the dynamics of capital that engenders the precariat on a global scale.20 Decolonizing Economics elides the problem of revolutionary subjectivity, addressing it only in passing with the familiar add-on approach of “intersectionality” (131, 154–55, 161). This does not solve the problem, however, for the authors agree that even a marginalized person (by their standards) may be “Eurocentric” (26–27). Such avant-gardism is ill-suited to the demands of self-reflexive critique, and how it plans to be engaged with “real struggles” (213) is anyone’s guess.
Mired in particularism, nationalism, and statism as they are, the authors’ brief sojourn into the world of universalism feels like an afterthought (132–35). Capitalism is now described as a “global” system and not just a “Western” one (133). In what sense, though? If the expansion of capitalism is merely a function of imperialism and violence, then surely its “global” character can only be judged in negative terms. The Haitian Revolution is brought up, the point being that Haitians used the French Revolution’s language of universal freedom to expose the hypocrisy of the French Empire (134). Point taken — but why did this occur? Critiques of slavery within the Enlightenment tradition are overlooked as usual, but, more importantly, why did the Haitians find the language that was first articulated in Europe useful for their purposes? Does this suggest that Enlightenment ideals carry a genuinely universal resonance? Or that Smith was right to suggest that there is a form of liberty natural to the human species, which can be practically instantiated in a civil or commercial society? Since norms can only be realized through practice, could it not be that some people in non-Europe also found in the practices of bourgeois society a way to overcome the crises of their own societies?
These are huge questions, but they must be posed to make sense of the contradictions that riddle Decolonizing Economics. The cursory nod to universalism can only offer a genuine alternative if the entire history of modernity is not collapsed onto modes of thought and practice — such as the Eurocentrism of modernization theory — that emerged gradually, and as a function of past political failures. Had the authors taken the Enlightenment and Smith’s contribution to it seriously, they may have recognized that the emphasis on reason was not meant as a valorization of “capitalist rationality,” narrowly construed as profit-seeking (42). Rather, “reason” and “self-consciousness” were considered inseparable, and the aim was to become genuine subjects —that is, self-conscious agents — of historical change, instead of merely being subjected to it. If it is the authors’ aim to make their readers more self-conscious about how economics as ideology shapes their lives, then they are also part of an Enlightenment tradition. Indeed, without the institutionalized existence of the “public use of reason,” however sickly and embattled today, it is hard to imagine that their ad hominem critiques of “white men” would find an audience.21
Decolonizing Economics is motivated by dissatisfactions with life as it is presently lived.
Addressing them requires conceptual frameworks and narratives that help us understand the present as historically constituted. But the book, however laudable its intentions, offers only vague generalities and a summary of ideas popular among the contemporary Left. It reproduces status-quoist affirmations of multiculturalism and identitarianism, never stopping to ask how “identities” emerge historically, and whether one-sided affirmations of ahistorically construed identities hinder the project of species-wide emancipation.22 Given these shortcomings, we should summarily reject the authors’ call to discard “canonical frameworks” (215). We risk discarding our best hope for interpreting and changing the world. |P
1 Cf. Luis Cortés, “Book Review: Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction by Devika Dutt, Carolina Alves, Surbhi Kesar, and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven,” Capital and Class 49, no. 4 (December 2025): 754–56.
2 For a recent, effective articulation of this point, see Richard Bourke, “Provincializing Europe Revisited,” Global Intellectual History (May 5, 2025), <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23801883.2025.2497092>.
3 I am not making any claims about whether most economists think in “Eurocentric” terms or not. The burden of proof is on the authors. But the claim that all limits of contemporary economic thought flow from Eurocentrism is not analytically convincing.
4 See note below on Smith’s language.
5 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, book 3, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976): 401–45.
6 Smith did use language that we would avoid today, such as “naked savages” when referring to societies in Africa. Nevertheless, Smith’s explanations of the lack of “improvement” were always historical and geographical rather than cultural and static. See Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, book 1: 16, 21–25.
7 Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 2, book 4: 103–58.
8 James, M. Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III: The East India Company and the Crisis and Transformation of Britain’s Imperial State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); Spencer A. Leonard, “‘The Capital Object of the Public’: The 1766–7 Parliamentary Inquiry into the East India Company,” The English Historical Review 132, no. 558 (2017): 1110–48; Spencer A. Leonard, “‘A Theatre of Disputes’: The East India Company Election of 1764 as the Founding of British India,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42, no. 4 (2014): 593–624; Sunit Singh, “Against a Mercatorial Sovereignty: The British Imperial State and the East India Company, 1783–1884,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (2025): 1–47.
9 Anirban Karak, “The politics of commerce in eighteenth-century Bengal: A reappraisal,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 61, no. 1 (January–March 2024): 33–66.
10 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 153–57.
11 Lest we forget, this point about Marx’s equal contempt for European and non-European pre-bourgeois societies was first made in response to Said by the Syrian intellectual Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin: Journal of Revolutionary Socialists of the Middle East 8 (1981): 5–26. Al-‘Azm had initially submitted his review to the Arab Studies Quarterly, edited at the time by Said and Fouad Moughrabi. Al-‘Azm and Said exchanged heated letters about the piece, following which their relationship deteriorated irretrievably. The correspondence can be found at Past and Future Present(s), <https://pastandfuturepresents.blogspot.com/2016/12/edward-saidsadik-al-azm-1980.html>.
12 Karl Marx, “The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution I–IV,” in The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings Volume 1, ed. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 1973), 192–93.
13 Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India” (1853), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Colonialism: Articles from the New York Tribune and Other Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 41.
14 Aijaz Ahmad, “Marx on India: A Clarification,” in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 221–42, 228.
15 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’: Introduction,” in Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, ed. and trans. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 138–39.
16 See the essays in Marxism and the Critique of Value, eds. Neil Larsen, et al. (Chicago: M-C-M’, 2004); and Anirban Karak, “Economic Theory without Historicity: The Relevance of Marxian Social Theory for a Critique of Capitalism,” Critical Historical Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 115–36.
17 For an account of the near-perfect fit between decolonial theory and obscurantist nationalism in India, see Meera Nanda, Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason (New York: Routledge, 2025).
18 Gary Nigel Howe, “Dependency Theory, Imperialism, and the Production of Surplus Value on a World Scale,” Latin American Perspectives 8, no. 3/4 (Late Summer – Autumn 1981): 82–102; Simon Clarke, “Class Struggle and Global Overaccumulation,” in Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crises and Globalization, eds. Makoto Itoh, et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 76–92; The New International Division of Labor, eds. Greig Charnock and Guido Starosta (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2016); and Guido Starosta, Gastón Caligaris, and Alejandro Fitzsimons, Value, Money and Capital: The Critique of Political Economy and Contemporary Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2024).
19 Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). See also Ursula Huws, Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014).
20 For a recent attempt, see Guido Starosta, Marx’s Capital, Method and Revolutionary Subjectivity (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
21 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?,’” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet, second ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60.
22 An early but still relevant critique of the overuse of “identity” in the social sciences is Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity,’” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (February 2000): 1–47.
