Alibi of Capital

Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist and historian who has written about colonialism, Middle East politics, economics, expert knowledge in the government of collective life, and the history and politics of energy. His previous books include Carbon Democracy, Rule of Experts, Questions of Modernity, and Colonising Egypt. His writings have been translated into many languages. He is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University in New York.

• Introduction. Uber Eats: How Capital Consumes the FutureChapter 1. Ground BreakingChapter 2. On RivercideChapter 3. Capitalism as a DetourChapter 4. Reading the Book of the FutureChapter 5. Economentality: How the Future Entered GovernmentChapter 6. The Properties of MarketsChapter 7. Infrastructures Work on TimeChapter 8. A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow? Climate Crisis and the Alibi of Growth

In this path-breaking critique of the science of economics, Mitchell traces the roots of modern capitalism to the hundreds of new joint stock companies that sprang up in the late 19th century to capitalise the future so that stockholders could enjoy their unearned incomes in the present from new enterprises at home and in the empire. In the course of this magisterial demonstration, he traces the transformation of political economy into economics, shows how the economy and the market are in fact the effects of certain technical and computational tools that homogenise an immense variety of actual transactions and create the supposed distinction between a real economy and the fictive world of stocks and bonds. This book is an outstanding achievement of conceptual rethinking combined with deep historical scholarship.