Panel discussion

In my presentation, I consider how “political economy” operates in histories of European empires and their aftermath, in the 20 years since Manu Goswami’s 2005 call in boundary 2 to (re-)center this question in the anti-colonial/postcolonial transition. I show how “political economy” marks both analytic and object, thereby offering historians a uniquely precise instrument with which to study massive social transformations at both the theoretical and empirical level. On the one hand, historians have treated straightforwardly “economic” topics with the methods pioneered in modern European intellectual history, and since the 1980s, fields such as literary theory, Subaltern studies, and feminist and queer theory. On the other, historians have re-examined all kinds of historical material through the lens of “political economy” to draw out those aspects and argue for their permeation through politics and culture more broadly. Finally, through an assessment of recent work in the field, I show how labour, reproduction, and ecology have emerged as field-defining questions.