For a long time, Europe’s colonizing powers justified their urge for expansion with the conviction that they were ‘bringing civilization to territories where civilization was lacking.’ This doctrine of white superiority and indigenous inferiority was accompanied by a boundless exploitation of local labor. Under colonial rule, the ideology that later became known as neoliberalism was free to subject labor to a capitalism tainted by racialized policies. This political economy has now become dominant in the Western world, too, and has reversed the trend towards equality. In Colonialism, Capitalism and Racism, Jan Breman shows how racial favoritism is no longer contained to ‘faraway, indigenous peoples,’ but has become a source of polarization within Western societies as well.

Jan Breman is professor emeritus of comparative sociology at the University of Amsterdam and an honorary fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.

Prologue
I Imperialism, Its Ideology and Practice of Racial Inequality
1. Colonialism and racism
2. Alexis de Tocqueville on class and race
II The Coolie Scandal at Sumatra’s East Coast
3. Dutch colonialism and its racial imprint
4. Coolie labour and colonial capitalism
5. A crafty lawyer of shady deals
III Civilisation and Racism
6. A state of terror. Leopold II’s Congo
7. Colonial development
8. Whistleblowers of Belgian colonialism
IV The Denial of National Freedom
9. The color line as the crux of colonial rule
10. Christianization and capitalism. The religious fervour of ethical politics
11. Indonesia’s decolonization impaired
12. The last colonial war and its impact on Indonesia’s independence
Development Aid as the Postcolonial Globalization of Capitalism
13. Spreading Dutch welfarism in the Global South
14. Development aid abandoned, mission achieved
15. W.F. Wertheim, a sociological chronicler of revolutionary change
Epilogue