Capital and imperialism: theory, history, and the present

In its near 300-year excursion through the history of the global economy, Capital and imperialism makes two clear arguments: the classical theoretical basis underlying the justification of capitalism as a stable economic system is flawed, and international financial capitalism, as the current and final stage of capitalism, stands at an impasse. Economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik present a thorough and expansive critical account of the history of the development of capitalism to understand its ‘real nature’. This account follows from their 2016 book The theory of imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), and Utsa's 2017 papers quantifying the British colonial extraction from the Indian state to the tune of 45 trillion in today's money, and the role of British Second World War military financing in the Bengal famine. An expanded analysis of the latter two papers is included in this new book. The mainstay of the authors' argument is their critique of classical economic theory that depicts capitalism as a self-contained system, established between capitalists and workers alone, and ultimately leading to sustained high growth and high employment. Instead, Patnaik and Patnaik unpick the realities of capitalism: first, as thriving off exogenous rather than endogenous stimuli––namely colonialism followed by state intervention after the Second World War––thus negating its capacity to be self-contained and perpetual; and second, leading to high unemployment through deindustrialization and land grabs for export crops and property accumulation which push petty producers and peasants into joblessness.