Beyond Financialisation: The Need for a Longue Durée Understanding of Finance in Imperialism

Kai Koddenbrock, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven and Ndongo Samba Sylla

No pjt7x, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: One of the central premises of the literature on financialisation is that we have been living in a new era of capitalism, characterised by a historical shift in the finance-production nexus. Finance has begun to behave ‘abnormally’ towards production. It has expanded to a disproportionate economic size and, more importantly, has divorced from ‘legitimate’ economic pursuits. In this paper we explore these claims of ‘expansion’ and ‘divorce’. We argue that although there has been expansion of financial motives and practices the ‘divorce’ between the financial and the productive economy cannot be considered a new empirical phenomenon having occurred during the last decades and even less an epochal shift of the capitalist system. The neglect of the needs of a self-centered economy has been the ‘normal’ and structural operation of finance in most of the former European colonies in the Global South during the last 150 years. We provide evidence to that effect with a longue durée study of the finance-production nexus in Senegal and Ghana. A main result of our empirical exploration is that an understanding of the historical developments of finance under colonialism is key for understanding how capitalist finance works globally. Such a de-centered perspective requires however a serious engagement with the concept and logics of imperialism.

Date: 2020-09-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/5f6da9f9460809024a1b44a0/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:pjt7x

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/pjt7x

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().