The Social Contract Research Podcast · Social Contract Research Network

Modern Capitalism as Colonialism: Rethinking CB Macpherson's Theory of Possessive Individualism, with John Holmwood

·1 hr 32 min·5 clips

Holmwood says colonial subjects were denied rights in their own persons and excluded from the commonwealth.

The seminar opens as part of an ongoing series on the social contract and the state of nature. Holmwood’s paper is framed less as a recap than as a re-reading of a familiar line of theory. He starts from the idea that many accounts of capitalism lay out historical stages without fully explaining the social relations that hold them together. From there, he returns to McPherson’s possessive individualism and asks what it misses when colonial power is treated as secondary. A key part of the argument is treating mercantile capitalism as more than commercial growth. The chartered companies of early modern Europe are shown as institutions that carried claims to sovereignty as well as profit. Their work was tied to royal authority, jurisdiction, and European modernity. Holmwood uses that to show how the political and economic sides of empire were bound up with each other. He then turns to enclosure and the making of free labour in Europe. That contrast matters. Enclosure can be read as one path toward a nascent class of free labour, but colonial incorporation elsewhere does not follow the same route. It produces unfree labour, and that difference is not a side effect. The colonial relation is not just a border around capitalism. It helps define capitalism’s structure and its category of labour. The talk also sets this argument beside the standard four-stage story associated with mercantile, liberal competitive, social democratic, and financialized capitalism. Holmwood does not dismiss periodization. He uses it to ask what gets hidden when capitalism is treated as if it develops mainly through its own inner logic. The discussion keeps returning to class, labour status, sovereignty, and the colonial organization of production. The paper’s basic point stays clear throughout: modern capitalism is built socially and politically as much as it is economically driven. Colonialism is not an add-on here. It is part of what makes the story work at all.

As heard by us

A grounded reading of capitalism that puts colonial power, sovereignty, and unfree labour at the center.

John Holmwood argues that capitalism cannot be separated from colonial power, sovereignty, and unfree labour. He traces the story through mercantile, liberal competitive, state-managed or social democratic, and finally financialized capitalism.

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You want a lecture-style rethink of capitalism's history, centered on colonial corporations and unfree labor.

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