MATTHEW WATSON: Any claim to knowledge must necessarily have a particular perspective built into it, an intuitive lens through which individual experiences of the world can be grouped together as some meaningful whole. Decolonising the curriculum involves exposing the sources of imperial power that are in danger of remaining unseen when textbooks present the subject field’s underlying traditions of thought in fundamentally ahistorical terms. Many textbooks imply that their traditions of thought are equally useable by everyone everywhere. Yet looking more closely at who is speaking within the theory and on whose behalf tells us that this cannot be the case.
However, these supposedly neutral concepts emerge from historical and cultural origins that are far more contested and hierarchical. For instance, John Hobson has recently argued that Marxist theories of world politics tend to celebrate and ultimately defend Western civilisation, while David Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah have shown how liberal scholarship has deliberately downplayed the violence of colonial capitalism in its defence of economic progress. Despite such colonial lineages, liberal concepts like ‘the market’ and ‘trade’ are unlikely to have their neutrality questioned. They tend to be seen in benign terms, as conversational facilitators, much in the manner of other forms of basic vocabulary.
However, scholars in a tradition of thought known as post-colonialism have long argued that the constitution of such concepts in historical circumstances of Empire is very definitely consequential. To take just one example, between the concept of ‘work’ and the concept of ‘property’ scholars like Robbie Shilliam have sought to highlight how practices of slavery raise all kinds of difficult ethical and political questions about how we come to know markets. From this viewpoint, seemingly benign concepts can mask violent political histories within the global economy.