Rethinking Capitalism and Economic Order II

The History of Economic Thought Working Group and East Asia Working Group of the Young Scholars Initiative is launching a webinar series that brings critical attention to the idea, practice, and evolution of capitalism. This project aims to reconnect the history of economic ideas with the world they sought to describe, reform, or transform. Capitalism is not just an economic system; it is a lived experience, a political project, and an ideological battleground.

We seek to open a conversation about capitalism as it has been theorised, imagined, and contested across historical periods and geographies. From early critiques of enclosures and slavery, to colonial accumulation and contemporary platform economies, capitalism’s forms have shifted, but its underlying logics—commodification, accumulation, exclusion—continue to shape our worlds.

This series will invite senior scholars who work across traditions—Marxist, classical, feminist, ecological, decolonial—to speak to these shifting realities. Our goal is not to arrive at a unified definition of capitalism, but to stay with its plurality. What is the nature of capitalism in our time? What kind of capitalism is being debated in different contexts? What kind of resistance does it provoke? How do economic theories shape their justification or critique?

Our approach to history foregrounds tension, silence, and the politics of knowledge. The HET WG places special emphasis on themes like decolonisation, pluralism, epistemic difference, and the often under-acknowledged intellectual contributions from the Global South. We invite our participants to think about histories of caste, race, gender, and land, alongside more familiar categories such as markets, property, and the state.

Key areas of focus include:

• Histories of capitalism across continents: not just as diffusion from Europe, but as co-productions and frictions and histories of capitalism have their centres spreading across the globe, not only in the WEST but in the EAST too, from Malacca, Hugli, Calicut, Macao, Nagasaki, Pegu to Batavia, to name a few.
• Capitalism’s relationship with colonialism, racialisation, and dispossession
• Property regimes, financial architectures, and state-market entanglements
• Trade, Tariffs and Wars
• Debates on crisis: inflation, debt, austerity, climate collapse
• Intellectual genealogies: from Marx and Gandhi to Du Bois, Luxemburg, Fanon, and Polanyi
• The metabolism of capital and planetary boundaries
• The role of economics as a discipline in naturalising or resisting capitalist logics

This series is not an attempt to replace critique with nostalgia or celebration. Instead, we want to create a space where histories of capitalism can inform strategies for its transformation or transcendence. Theories of capitalism are not just descriptions; they are interventions. We hope to create a space where critique and imagination work in tandem.

Prof. Barbara Harriss-White

A Different Approach to Informality, Friday, 28 November 2026, 9.00 am EST

India’s informal economy is established as the largest in the world – comprising almost all employment and probably just under half of GDP, though this is thought to be declining. The theoretical genealogy of informal activity – as with the categories of the state which academics have to use – is marked by binaries and duality (unorganised, unprotected, unincorporated etc).  In this lecture I’ll explore a different conjecture: that, irrespective of their state categorisation, informal economic activity negotiates the politics of selective enforcement of state-regulative laws and the politics incentivising selective adherence (voluntary)  and selective compliance (for fear of penalties) to them.  I use an experiment with AI, corroborated with material from seven cases using my own fieldwork, to make an initial, incomplete exploration. It indicates that the informal economy is pervasive.

Barbara Harriss-White, FAcSS, is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies and Emeritus Fellow Wolfson College Oxford University – also  Research Fellow at the Max Weber Foundation for South Asian Studies, New Delhi and chair of the Young Scholars’ Seminar of the Foundation for Agrarian Studies, Bangalore.  Committed to long-term field research in (agrarian) political economy, in the study of informal capitalism and in dimensions of deprivation and waste. Forty two doctoral students, as many post docs and as many (co)authored and edited books; 143 papers and 153 chapters. Former Director of Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford and founder-director of Oxford’s M Phil in Development Studies and its Contemporary South Asian Studies programme in Area Studies.

Related Sessions

S01: The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It with Prof. Barbara Harriss-White

S03: Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History with Prof. David McNally