Middle England’s empire: Social reproduction in the colonial global economy
| Published date | 01 May 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481231186117 |
| Author | Ben Richardson |
| Date | 01 May 2024 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481231186117
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2024, Vol. 26(2) 381 –407
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481231186117
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Middle England’s empire:
Social reproduction in the
colonial global economy
Ben Richardson
Abstract
This article brings feminist critiques of capitalism into conversation with race-conscious
International Political Economy to highlight the place of social reproduction in the colonial global
economy. It does so by taking a provincial perspective, using Royal Leamington Spa as a case
study to reveal how the provision of care for the elderly and the ill sustained colonial elites
across the life course, while religious and educational practices helped transmit cultural values
across generations and reproduce imperialism as an institutionalised social order. Whereas the
finance houses of London, the factories of Manchester, and the ports of Liverpool and Bristol
constitute nodal points for imperial circuits of capital, the spa town condenses the everyday
practices through which bourgeois metropolitan empire was lived and made liveable. These
findings point to a functional differentiation of economic space within the metropole and offer a
critical reinterpretation of Middle England as a Whitened site of middle-class respectability.
Keywords
British Empire, colonialism, International Political Economy, metropole, Middle England,
provincialisation, social reproduction
Introduction
In recent years, the field of International Political Economy (IPE) has been subject to a
series of critical interventions stressing the racial logics and legacies of European coloni-
alism (Anievas and Nișancioğlu, 2015; Bhambra, 2021; Halperin and Palan, 2015;
Hobson, 2020; Tilley and Shilliam, 2018). One of the core arguments of this literature is
that extant scholarship has paid insufficient attention to the role of colonialism in the
historical development of capitalism and globalisation. This has led to a misplaced
emphasis on exploitation in the capital-labour relation over expropriation in the metro-
pole-colony relation, and a tendency to either ignore Western empire or launder it as a
benign civilising mission. The upshot is that too much IPE remains race-blind: able
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Corresponding author:
Ben Richardson, International Political Economy, Department of Politics and International Studies, University
of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: b.j.richardson@warwick.ac.uk
1186117BPI0010.1177/13691481231186117The British Journal of Politics and International Relations X(X)Richardson
research-article2023
Original Article
382 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 26(2)
neither to historicise the racial inequalities that exist between and within countries today
nor to articulate a politics to redress these through new forms of recognition, reparation,
and redistribution (see Best et al., 2021).
To help rebuild IPE as a race-conscious field, alternative histories of the modern world
system have thus been advanced. One of the most compelling has been Gurminder
Bhambra’s (2021) account of the colonial global economy. Challenging the presumption
that capitalism developed as an internally driven process within the nation-states of the
West, this foregrounds the colonial relations and racial hierarchies of imperial states in the
establishment and evolution of capitalism (see also Bhambra, 2014, 2022). So instead of
a conventional history that tells us how liberal capitalism was transformed by class com-
promise into social democratic capitalism, Bhambra gives us a regime of state-managed
colonialism in the 19th century followed by the racialised amelioration of labour exploi-
tation for (White) workers within imperial metropoles in the 20th century. In short, she
shows how the foreign warfare and domestic welfare which produced the core of the capi-
talist world system were predicated upon extractive systems of taxation, monopolisation,
and resource appropriation forced upon its colonies. This brings into question contempo-
rary claims about the welfare states and living standards of ‘developed countries’ being
imperilled by (non-White) immigration and a breakdown in working-class solidarity
caused by an identity politics attentive to race and other social differences. On Bhambra’s
reading, these conclusions are only tenable if the colonial provenance of inherited wealth
and the racial basis of its nationalist redistribution are conveniently forgotten.
Another important contribution to this literature is Robbie Shilliam’s (2018) study on
class formation in (post)colonial Britain. In this, he shows how the racialised distinction
between the deserving and undeserving poor has long been articulated by a political elite
cognisant of colonial-metropole relations. In the 19th century, for instance, the ‘residuum’
in the urban slums of London were analogised or Blackened as savages and slaves, prompt-
ing eugenic concerns about the degeneration of working-class stock and their waning mili-
tary fitness in imperial conflict. This in turn provided the impetus for national insurance
legislation intended to reproduce the patriarchal family and industrious labour perceived in
the countryside within the supposedly immoral urban milieu of Britain’s towns and cities.
Pulling this forward into the 21st century, Shilliam reveals the same techniques of govern-
ance at work in the way Brexit Leave campaigners constructed the ‘white working-class’
as a deserving constituency being ‘left behind’ in multicultural Britain. For him, this
occluded the facts that White privilege had diminished rather than zero-sum declined, and
that ethnic minority groups were themselves disproportionately working-class. As he con-
cludes, these two features were tragically exposed by the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017
which revealed, in one of London’s richest boroughs, a deep-seated history of dangerous
and discriminatory housing provision to a racialised underclass.
Taken together, what Bhambra and Shilliam clarify are the racial lines along which
capital accumulation in the colonial global economy was socialised and how that colours
contemporary policy debates. This article extends these insights in two ways. The first is
to bring the feminist concept of social reproduction to bear on race-conscious IPE. Despite
an interest in policy areas like welfare and housing, research on the colonial global econ-
omy has yet to provide historicised accounts of how life under capitalism was reproduced
within imperial states that draws directly on this rich body of scholarship. The second is
to locate social reproduction in the colonial global economy outside London. In recent
IPE and International Relations (IR) literature on the British metropole, examples featur-
ing the capital city abound. They include studies on the link between plantation slavery
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