On Accumulation and Empire

Saha, Jonathan

doi:10.1080/03086534.2022.2057745

On Accumulation and Empire

Saha, Jonathan

Authors

Professor Jonathan Saha jonathan.saha@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

In recent decades, accumulation has become a curiously neglected concept in imperial history. Despite this, it remains a powerful heuristic for understanding the drives, dynamics, and effects of modern imperialism. Juxtaposing early Marxist conceptualizations of accumulation with some formative historiographic debates about colonial knowledge in Africa and Asia, I argue that accumulation can provide a better account of the ‘lumpy’ spatiality of empire than the currently predominant model of the network. Its advantages stem from it being a concept inherently concerned with the relationship between appropriation and accrual. Using accumulation to frame the study of empire foregrounds the relationships between spaces of extraction and dispossession, and sites of aggregation and accretion. The lens of imperial networks struggles to attend to places of disconnection and asymmetries of power. In contrast, the concept of accumulation was developed precisely to better understand uneven distributions and the production of inequalities.

Citation

Saha, J. (2022). On Accumulation and Empire. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 50(3), 417-442. https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2022.2057745

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Mar 22, 2022
Online Publication Date	Apr 8, 2022
Publication Date	2022
Deposit Date	Apr 6, 2022
Publicly Available Date	Jun 30, 2022
Journal	The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
Print ISSN	0308-6534
Electronic ISSN	1743-9329
Publisher	Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	50
Issue	3
Pages	417-442
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2022.2057745

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© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.