Alex Pollard

Postcolonial approaches to understanding economies are of increasing academic and political significance as questions about the nature of globalization, transnational flows of capital and workers and the making and re-making of territorial borders assume center stage in debates about contemporary economies and policy. Despite the growing academic and political urgency in understanding how "other" cultures encounter "the west," economics-oriented approaches within social sciences (e.g., Development Economics, Economic Geography, and the discipline of Economics itself) have been slow to engage with the ideas and challenges posed by postcolonial critiques. In turn, postcolonial approaches have been criticized for their simplistic treatment of "the economic" and for not engaging with existing economic analyses of poverty and wealth creation. Utilizing examples drawn from everywhere from India to Latin America, Postcolonial Economies breaks new ground in providing a space for nascent debates about postcolonialism and its treatment of "the economic," bringing together scholars in a range of disciplines, including Geography, Economics, Development Studies, History and Women's Studies.