Devika Dutt et al., "Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction" (Polity Press, 2025)

About this episode

The episode discusses the need for decolonizing economics and critiques the Eurocentric foundations of the discipline.

Decolonization has long been debated across the social sciences, but the economics discipline has so far avoided such critical engagement. Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction (Polity, 2024) provides a much-needed intervention.Dutt, Alves, Kesar, and Kvangraven uncover the deeply Eurocentric foundations that shape how economists study the world today. These have rendered the discipline ill-equipped to tackle critical questions, such as structural racism, uneven development, the climate crisis, labour relations, and how structural power shapes economic outcomes. Decolonizing economics entails challenging the norms of neutrality and objectivity that economists claim to speak from, while fostering alternative ways of understanding the economy that take seriously structural power relations and contemporary processes of economic development. Readers will come to understand the political stakes of decolonization and the wide range of scholarship that already exists that can help us grasp economics from non-Eurocentric perspectives. Through such scholarship, we can gain an enriched understanding of capitalism and its relationship to exploitation, colonialism, and racialization. Learn…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Devika Dutt

Topics covered

• decolonization
• economics
• structural power
• Eurocentrism
• capitalism
• racialization
• climate crisis

Keywords

• decolonization
• economics
• structural racism
• uneven development
• labour relations
• economic outcomes
• capitalism
• colonialism
• racialization

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Polity Press

Books & works: Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction

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