A recent book by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik A Theory of Imperialism (2017) identifies ‘increasing supply price', ‘the value of money' and ‘income deflation' as the three central features of imperialism. This book contains a commentary from David Harvey which is extremely critical of...

This paper argues that empires in the age of nations are beset by cultural contradictions that undermine attempts to create a cohesive social bloc able to achieve hegemonic rule. The proposition is tested through an examination of the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth...

Recent scholarship claims that extractive colonial institutions explain the lackluster performance of Latin American economies today. We examine forced labor in colonial Peru. We find that while coercive labor institutions led to a drop in the indigenous population until the seventeenth century,...

What is the long-term impact of pre-colonial ethnic institutions? I examine the consequences of the fragmentation of local indigenous communities produced by Spanish rule in Mexico. To do this I make use of unique data from 18th century pueblos — the basis of modern-day counties — to study...