Was Capitalism Just a Detour? – A Talk by Professor Timothy Mitchell

During this seminar, Professor Timothy Mitchell (Columbia University) will present and discuss a section from his forthcoming book The Alibi of Capital: How we Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow, to be published by Verso in early 2026. In the book, Prof Mitchell advances the case that value in capitalism is created by consuming the future.

Organised and hosted by the Histories of Capitalism in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa in the Department of History, this talk is co-sponsored by the Department of European & International Studies, the Department of International Development, and the Department of Political Economy.

The Histories of Capitalism in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa research group takes these regions as sites from which to problematise capitalism as a self-evident historical phenomenon. The main aim of the group is to rethink capitalism's central conceptual categories including property, debt, land and labour; institutions like banks and companies; and temporal-epistemic paradigms such as progress and modernity. It asks: How do the conceptual categories, theoretical paradigms, and intellectual trajectories associated with capitalism become thinkable?

Talk Title

Was Capitalism Just a Detour?

Timothy Mitchell, Columbia University

Capital is best understood not as a fund saved up from the past but as a claim on the future. The growth of capitalism, it follows, has depended on developing stronger means of commanding the future. It has also depended on expanding the future, by pushing it further away--through deferrals, delays, and detours. This approach to the history of capitalism provides a new way to understand Europe's relation to the non-European world. Was the rise of Europe, and of modern capitalism, the outcome of a detour?

SPEAKER

Professor Timothy Mitchell is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. He is a political theorist and historian whose groundbreaking work investigates the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. Mitchell is the author of Colonising Egypt (1991), Rule of Experts (2002), and Carbon Democracy (2012). The Alibi of Capital: How we Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow is his latest and most ambitious work.

A section from Prof Mitchell's new book will be pre-circulated to registered participants. Participants are asked not to share the unpublished material outside the seminar.

CHAIR

Dr Rana Baker is a Lecturer in the History of the Middle East. Her research brings together history, critical political economy, Islam and STS to study transformations in debt, land and money in modern Egypt. She uses Ottoman-Egyptian sources as conceptual repertoires and sites of theoretical production to rethink standard categories in the study of the Middle East. Her current book project explores the history of prosperity in nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt. It examines how Ottoman-Egyptian forms of organising material and spiritual abundance were transformed through colonial practices which produced new forms of life based on financialised relations to land and credit.