Debt- The Colony

Manjapara 2020

Financial terror- financial tools deceptively transformed sites of extraction and disposession into sites of debt repayment as the colonised were made to compensate their colonisers. Militerised debt collection- Debt relations made it easier for colonists to degrade the sovereignty of the people they trapped, threatening military force. Dollar diplomacy- US foreign policy in Asia/latin/central america - loan and debt relations as a method of imperial governance with the threat of military violence. Debt colonises the future

Fictitious commodities. land, labour, money

Word for things that are treated as commodities by market but arent actually produced + the 3 examples (Polanyi 1944)

Disembedded finance

Word for the process by which money is made a fictitious commodity

Bottomry loans, bulk trading, buying ahead, joint stock companies, home charges

5 financial tools/mechanisms of financial terror

Polanyi 1944

Money fetish- (18th century) money transformed from a store of value to an abstract autonomus entity seen to have a life of its own beyond social relations. ‘fictitous commodities’- they are not real commodities produced for sale but the market treats them as such. ‘disembedded finance’ - the process by which money is severed from its social relations and is rendered automouts.

Graeber 2011

Argues for acknowledgement of the violence of debt morality- it is itself a product of specific power structures rather than a universal ethical norm. Connects to Sankara OAU speach - collective refusal is legitimate because debt is odious

Sankara 1987 OAU

Argues for collective debt refusal- not our debt - citation + conference

Marx 1867

'so called primitive accumulation’ - basis of colonial accumulation- enclosure, seperation of the producer and means of production. establishment of the capital relation- structural polarisation between owner of capital and workers who only own their labour time

Harvey 2003

Spatialises Marx + accumulation by dispossesion is an ongoing process. capital finds spatial fixes- new rounds of accumlation when capital faces crisis of accumulation

Robinson 1983

GIves racial backbone to the spatialisation of primitive accumulation. The dispossession of Black and Brown people is essential to the existence of capitalism.

Roy 1995

De-development. used to describe the condition of the Palestinian economy after 1967 Nakba- not just underdevelopment but the deliberate act of deskilling, de-instituionalising and expropriation of economic resources. dismantling of the capacity for autonomous development.

Oslo Accords + Paris Protocol 1994

Treaties that gave Israel full control over Palestinian customs, bordes + monetart policy. Leading to the establishment of the Palestinian monetary authority (PMA) which played a crucial role in the financialisation of Palestine: credit information systems, banking legislation, financial housing market.

Mies 2014

Housewifisation- process by which women’s labour is relegated to the domestic spher. colonisation + housewifisation are interlinked processes. The exploitation of the external colonies and ‘internal colonies’ (the nuclear family) operate under the same premise: placing certain peoples outside the category of ‘real economic actors’. The extremely cheap labour of the periphery allowed for the ‘nuclear family’ to exist through higher wages and cheaper commodities.

Haiti 1825, Mexico 1861

2 examples of milliterised debt- gunboats to coerce + collect debt repayment

1947

122 years on- year when Haiti finally payed off its debt.

Pasternak 2023

First Nations/ Canada example. The DPMP - a federal policy ostensibly designed to address debt and default in First Nation communities. When First Nations are placed under the policy, a new form of deficit is created rather than improved: housing stock and water infrastructure becomes much worse off than for First Nations who have never been under the policy. Pasternak's key move is using infrastructure as both subject and method: she shows how "infrastructure denial" (the systematic withholding of housing, clean water, roads) is the contemporary form of what the Colony lecture calls de-development. The colonial state does not merely impose debt; it manufactures the conditions of scarcity that make debt necessary, then uses debt management as a pretext for deeper fiscal intervention into Indigenous governance and sovereignty.

Mullings 2022

The increased policing of diaspora remittences. three mechanisms through which this control is exercised: growing market competition to capture remittance flows; a proposed tax on Caribbean remittances; and the enforcement of Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) policies. She draws attention to the coloniality of these emerging structures of financial control and their role in maintaining the racial orders that have historically limited the autonomy of Caribbean states and Caribbean people in both the region and the diaspora. Relates to Robinson and Manjapara

Gahman 2021

Disaster capitalism in Caribbean. colonial-capitalist debt structures do not merely survive disasters but are actively reproduced through them.