Surfacing colonial relations and fossil capitalism in histories of social rights: Afterword to the Foreword by Nehal Bhuta

Abstract Nehal Bhuta’s Foreword “Social Rights and the Origins of the Social Constitution: From Collective Natural Rights to the Social State” is not just an important intellectual-historical account of the rise of social rights but also a timely political intervention in contemporary debates on social rights and economic inequality. This response draws attention to some blind spots in the analysis and suggests further avenues for exploration. First, it raises questions about whose histories of social rights are told, the scale of the analysis adopted, and the importance of situating European histories of social rights within a broader colonial political economy. Second, it calls for further attention to the materialist underpinnings of discourses of social rights, specifically the role that transformations in energy and technology, and the emergence of a fossil fuel economy, played in the period examined. It suggests that these questions concerning colonial relations and the fossil fuel substratum of social rights matter not only for their historical interest, but also because they are crucial to addressing contemporary challenges of social provisioning in a deeply unequal and violently stratified global order.