Onur Ulas Ince is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Singapore Management University and a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, political economy, history of capitalism, and imperial studies. He mainly investigates how socioeconomic transformations constitutive of global capitalism have shaped and in turn have been shaped by various discourses of political economy since the early-modern period. His research has been published in The Journal of Politics, History of Political Thought, New Political Economy, The Review of Politics, Polity, and Rural Sociology. He has received his PhD in Government from Cornell University.

Winner of the 2020 CSPT David and Elaine Spitz Prize
Shortlisted for the 2020 C. B. Macpherson Prize for the best book in political theory awarded by the Canadian Political Science Association

"Onur Ulas Ince's excellent book works a subtle but momentous transformation on the burgeoning political theory scholarship on colonialism and empire." -- William Clare Roberts, Political Theory

"By bringing the history of capitalism back to the fore of political theory, Ince has presented us with a powerful and urgent contribution to the field that bears as much on the study of liberalism and empire as on ongoing interpretive debates over historical context." -- Lucas Pinheiro, Contemporary Political Theory

"Ince's innovative readings of these three thinkers reframe liberal theory as intimately and constitutively bound up with the predations of colonial capitalism." -- Kevin Bruyneel, The Review of Politics

"In a lively, original analysis of British imperialism, one that ranges across continents as well as centuries, Ince provocatively makes the case for taking the history of capitalism seriously. It deserves to be read by anyone invested in the liberalism and empire debate." -- Matthew Birchall, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

"Ince's clever historical study of liberal ideology analyzes the attempt by John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield to figure liberal democratic values as compatible with capitalism in the British colonies. ... Against but also augmenting competing arguments that explain colonialism via British culturalist arrogance or one-dimensional universal cosmopolitanism, Ince (Singapore Management Univ., Singapore) shows how key aspects of political economy (in Locke, money; in Burke, commercial society; in Wakefield, nominally free" labor and artificially produced scarcity in land) provided moral insulation for imperial expansion: a distinctively British empire of liberty." --G. D. Miller

"This is an original and important survey of the co-creation of the intertwined languages of both English political economy and liberal political theory in relation to colonization and capitalism from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries." JAMES TULLY, Professor Emeritus, University of Victoria

"This innovative, superbly written book challenges political theory's 'turn to empire' by pressing inquiry into the historical relationship between imperialism and liberalism beyond philosophical questions and symbolic politics. Rather, Ince insists we reintegrate the exploitative violence of colonial capitalism into analyses of the conceptual universe in which ideological liberalism was first articulated. In so doing, he illuminates the historical complexity of liberalism in our 'colonial present." JEANNE MOREFIELD, author of Empires Without Imperialism

"Over the past fifty years, the dialogue between political economy, social history, and intellectual history has been minimal even while all three disciplines have turned their focus upon the relationship between liberalism and empire. In a challenge to us all, this book reconnects these disciplines in order to achieve a deeper understanding of a relationship which is foundational to the increasingly globalized present. ANDREW FITZMAURICE, University of Sydney

"Onur Ulas Ince's Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism succeeds in demonstrating the importance of political economy for political theory's imperial turn, preoccupied as it has been with a discursive approach to cultural difference." -- Corey Snelgrove, University of British Columbia

"That in the course of his intrepid and penetrating study Ince both decisively renovates and effectively supersedes the Macphersonite scheme is thrilling." -- Samuel Moyn, Perspectives on Politics