A

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to this episode of New Books and Intellectual History, part of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Thomas Edward Kingston. And today I'm delighted to be joined by Timothy Mitchell, professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University. Professor Mitchell will be discussing his newest book, the Alibi of How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow, which is out now from Verso Press. It's a real pleasure to have you here, Professor Mitchell.

B

Thanks very much, Thomas, for inviting me and doing this together.

A

So let's dive in at the deep end or in another way right at the beginning. One of the things that immediately strikes me about this book is where it begins. The book is discussing industrialization, empire and other industries, but it starts with Uber, and it's really a striking place to begin, a history that spans several centuries. So why start there? And also, what first prompted you to write the book?

B

Let me start with what prompted me. I wanted to understand first and most simply corporate power, but not only in the present, but its colonial genealogy, the way in which the power of corporations is something that in different forms goes back centuries and that over the last 150 years or so since the late 19th century, has allowed corporations to become one of the most powerful master institutions of our collective life and in ways that I don't think are very well explained in a lot of conventional political theory. And I also wanted to connect that specific kind of power that I associate with the large business firm with, associated with climate collapse, with the climate crisis and climate collapse, and to understand what was the link between the rise and the increasing scale of corporate power and the problem of climate catastrophe. Why start with Uber? As you say, the book ranges back over a much longer period of history than that of the most recent tech firms. I think for a couple of reasons. First, because the extraordinary power of contemporary tech firms has created a new kind of interest in the extraordinary power corporations have. But I wanted to write about one of the new kinds of firms in a way that connected it to that past and didn't treat it as just a phenomenon of tech of the present, of the age we're in right now, but to show rather that you could look at a particular case, such as Uber, and learn something much wider about the history of capital. And as I was starting to write the book, Uber went public, sold shares on the stock market. Those shares valued the company at an astronomical price. And in the usual ways the financial press tried to make sense of this, either saying, well, this Value is unreal. It comes from thin air or from the other side, saying, well, this just shows you the power of tech itself, of new forms of technology. Uber has mastered a distinctive technology, and I think that it made a good case to show what's wrong with those usual ways in which we talk about tech on the one hand and corporate power on the other. And instead it enabled me to develop, through the example of Uber in the opening chapter of the book, one of the central claims, which is that Uber acquired its enormous value not from any technological breakthroughs, but rather, and nor was it a value somehow mysteriously acquired from thin air. It was acquired from the future. What the selling of a shares in a company does is it makes available in the present the future profits of the company, and it makes them available to those who can find the ways of putting together some money to purchase them. It makes available that future at a discount because the value of those future profits are calculated in terms of the current value of a future income. The methods that are used in finance discount that future value to take account the fact that it's not available yet, and it's not going to be available into the future. So I wanted to talk about the way in which firms operate, the way they sell shares, the way those shares seem to give a claim on the future, and ask who pays that claim? It's not coming from thin air. It's actually coming from the people who, as customers or as workers of that company, will pay back the enormous gains being made. So it was a very simple case of explaining capitalism as a relationship to the future, as a relationship to the future, based on this particular method of discounting the future in the present and then requiring that that discounted gain be repaid at full price by those who work for or who use the services of the company. So that was why Uber, and it provides a sort of simple story to then open up a much larger, much wider history of capitalism, as I say, and to show that this phenomenon of tech is not as. As recent as it may seem.

A

Yeah, and I think the great example of Uber as well is that it of course gets us looking backwards, but also gets us looking at the present. I mean, we've seen numerous similar IPOs recently and then lots of discussion about them. And I'm sure we could talk about that for a very long time. But let's get back to the book, and the title itself is a fascinating one. I think when most of us think about an alibi, we think about something that excuses responsibility after the fact, that yet in your book, it's something much larger than that. So for our listeners, what is the alibi of capital? And why did it become the organizing concept for this excellent book?

B

I really use the term in two ways. As you say, an alibi can refer to an excuse. I mean, literally the word means not there, elsewhere, somewhere else. And I use it on one level to think of all the ways that we not so much make excuses, but distract attention by pointing elsewhere, pointing to some other party, some other responsibility for the world we live in, and to think about all the ways in which those kinds of excuses, if you like, or more broadly, those kinds of distractions, those misdirections operate. And I'm interested in that at all kinds of levels. How the ordinary way the press talk about finance in the example we just gave of Uber, the way economists explain our relationship to the future in terms of technology growth, terms of that sort, all of these are key terms that I unpack, I look at critically. So that's one level in which I talk about something called the alibi of capital, resting on a very sort of what passes in most ordinary accounts for a very, very simple notion of capital, where capital either just means technology in some simple sense, which I think the Uber case helps us get away from, or it talks about capital. It thinks of capital as some fund of wealth that is saved up from the past and then rolled over and invested to produce more in the future. There's some ways in which funds are saved up in the past, but one of the arguments of the book, and I'm not the first one to argue that, is that the vast majority of those funds that we think of as capital are actually these forms of claims upon the future. And they come into being as that claim on the future. And it's not just a claim in some speculative sense. Often there's an element of speculation, but again, Uber illustrates this and many other cases in the book. What secures the power of that claim on the future is not something speculative, is not something merely sort of imaginative. It's a whole set of quite deliberate political, material, technical arrangements that give a firm or others the actual direct control over the future. So again, I'll stick with the case of Uber, even though it's only a brief story at the start of the book to acquire that value. It wasn't enough that they just produced a lot of hype about their app and their on their technological breakthroughs and that sort of thing, but they actually organized forms of monopolistic control over ride sharing and more broadly, forms of publicly available transportation, and the value was a way of reflecting that monopolistic power that the firm attempted to gain. So none of that is particularly well represented in mainstream accounts of either the value of the firm or even of capitalism itself, which typically is not thought of in terms of specific technologies over the last 100, 150, several hundred years for the control of the future. And that's where I particularly see that we sort of live under a misdirection, a mistaken understanding of the way in which capital works. There's a second level in which I use the word alibi, and that's that, of course, an alibi is a misdirection in the sense also, not only at the level of sort of distracting people's attention from a different way of thinking about how forms of wealth and impoverishment work, but to the extent that an alibi refers to some kind of, as I say, some kind of misdirection or detour. I'm also interested in the ways in which these claims upon the future become more valuable by introducing detours and delays. Because the further you can push the promised income into the future, the greater the claim on that future can be. So as I write about the history of capitalism, variety of places and ways, I'm interested not only in sort of debunking various points, sort of myths about technological breakthroughs as being the secret to capitalism. I'm actually looking for the opposite. What are all the ways in which dysfunction, delay, distraction of a very sort of practical kind, operate at the heart of capitalism? So alibi works on those two levels, both in the way we explain capitalism, but also in the way capitalism itself actually operates. I didn't actually write the book thinking I need to write a book called the Alibi of Capital. It came right at the end, the title. And it's. When a book ranges over such a broad area of both history and of the ways we understand that history and, sorry, it's not always possible to find a single term that will capture what you're doing. And I don't think Alibi of Capital really fully does justice to all the things I'm trying to do, but it does, uh, it, it does capture some of that.

A

Yeah. I mean, personally, I thought it was a, a very thought provoking title. And especially the, the, the second level you were talking about, it brought to mind sometimes what we maybe see. We saw the millenarian movements, right? Like the great disappointment that if, if you said the end of the world's gonna happen tomorrow, you get a lot of fans, but it doesn't happen. And then, and, and then the Dr. If you keep dragging it on and you say, well, we don't know when it's going to happen, so you better behave yourself.

B

Right, well, and there's all those ways in which capitalism has operated through these promises of a better tomorrow and that, you know, the subtitle refers to this kind of invoking of a better tomorrow. And the notion of forms of continuous human improvement are fairly central to the way we think about its history. There have been periods, there have been other ways of thinking about human improvement, including ways that make a better balancing of what improves and what gets worse and are better able to account to for periods of improvement alongside periods of setback and. Increasing distress or suffering or hardship. And part of the problem with the sort of hold that capitalism has is that on the way we think is that very sort of unilinear notion of historical change. So again and again, in working simultaneously on the sort of history of things that have come to be called capitalism and the history of the language we've used to account for it, I'm interested in, as I say, the way in which this alibi misdirects us and gets in the way of a better understanding of the processes we live with.

A

So one of the book's central arguments is that environmental destruction is repeatedly being justified or deployed as a necessary sacrifice or, yeah, that's probably the best way to put it on the path towards a better tomorrow. Yet your account makes clear that this way of imagining the future was never inevitable. And in fact, you just mentioned there were different ways of thinking. So perhaps you could explain to the listeners how that logic emerged and why is it proved so persuasive and possibly so pervasive over such a long period of time.

B

Right. So the book has several lines of argument here. I mean, on the one hand, there's nothing new about associating the history of capitalism with ecological destruction. And the worse the climate crisis becomes, the more we realize the connection between a particular mode of organizing collective life and the process of making the planet more and more unlivable, not only for humans, but for other forms of life as well. So that relationship between capitalism and ecological destruction is not in itself anything new. But the book does try and explain that relationship in slightly different terms. And there's a couple of aspects to that. One is that one of the criticisms often made of capitalism is that we actually, the problem with capitalism is that we are entirely focused on the present, that we ignore the future, that we undervalue the future, and that the ills that capitalism brings, particularly in the realm

A

of

B

the destruction of nature, destruction of forms of life, is due to a kind of ignorance of the future or failure to take the future into account or to calculate it or value it properly. And I take a slightly different view there because, as I've already suggested, I see capitalism actually based very directly on a set of attitudes towards the future and indeed on a set of very specific technologies for valuing the future, of which the example I began with the calculating of the value of a share in a company and how that value will change over time over the following years or decades, has been central to what we call capitalism. So I don't think it's sufficient to say that we don't calculate the future, we don't value the future. And I think what the book tries to show is that actually we do, but we do it in a very peculiar way, according to a very specific set of methods for calculating those values, and specifically methods that rest upon this practice, which the book talks about at length. And it's difficult to summarize, of discounting, of saying you can actually have the future at a cheap rate because you are prepared to pay something for your claim on the future. And again, the share in the company is one example. But anything that involves what is usually thought of is in terms of interest, of money gaining value over time, but can also be thought of, as it were, through the other end of the telescope, as that future value being made available more cheaply in the present. All those are very specific technologies for controlling the future and for undervaluing it. So then what happens is that as you go forward in time, that future that was acquired through those who had the ability to organize claims on it, that was acquired at a discount, has to be paid back at full price. And I associate some of the forms of ecological destruction with that relation to the future, which is not a relation of sort of driven simply by technological improvement. Again, an idea that I think we vastly overrate, and not simply by some sort of fundamental rapaciousness of capital or capitalists or anything of that sort, but by this very specific and strange way of extracting from the future and living at its expense that we've come to live with. So that I think one can enhance the understanding of the ecological destructiveness of capitalism by thinking more carefully about not as sort of, as I say, a general sort of disdain for the future or a lack of ways of valuing it, but specific and very damaging ways of organizing its value. So I think that's one answer. To your question about whether our ways of imagining the future were inevitable. They came about in a specific way, through a specific set of financial and legal and technical arrangements. You also asked whether how that emerged over such a long period of time. So mostly I've talked about contemporary examples of this through the contemporary tech firm or giant. Shareholder owned firms. Those firms go back a century and a half or so. The modern joint stock company came into being in the late 19th century. It was associated very much with the railway age. And I have particular arguments about why it was associated with the building not of the first railways in the early 19th century, but of the large long distance railways of the later 19th century and of other large scale, what I call sort of terraforming projects, infrastructure projects that transformed the world on a whole new scale. And there's an argument to do with the relationship to the future there, which I can come back to. Namely that the scale and durability of those technical forms gave a kind of technical control over the future, which earlier technical processes didn't necessarily offer. But equally, one can see how the scale of those kinds of projects through which this modern corporate forms of capitalism came into being were destroying. There was a new scale transformation of the earth that came with the building not only of railways, but of large dams, of large canals, of infrastructure projects, Earth shaping projects on all kinds of scales. So again, rather than sort of general associating of capitalism with environmental damage and destruction, I'm interested in the very specific ways this way of thinking about capitalism through as modes of control of the future had particular consequences for our relationship to the earth and to other forms of life on earth. I mean, I could say a little bit more about that question of durability. And actually, when I first thought of this book and was not so focused on the present, but was focused more on the historical examples of the rise of the large business firm. I actually thought of it as really an account of the sort of history of these forms of durability. So, for example, one could turn back not just to the 1860s, 1870s, when one gets the modern joint stock company, but to the earlier origins of the first joint stock companies, which tended not to be infrastructure projects, but long distance trading firms. The East India Company and the many other long distance trading firms of the 17th, 18th centuries. What was interesting about those was again, their durability. Merchants had often used sort of forms of credit and ways of making money out of trade before. But with the rise of new forms of colonial power, the new Forms of military power that went with colonialism,

A

you

B

could build apparatuses that could control future revenues on a new scale. And the first example of that durability, as I call it, was the sailing ship itself. You could now send out a well armed sailing ship on a voyage that might take two years or three years before it returned with the goods that was source of profit. And that durability became what you could then capitalize, became what you could sell shares in as a form of future profit. And the first forms of the joint stock company in England, in the Netherlands, and later elsewhere, was this selling of shares in long distance trading and colonizing ventures. And that was this history of these forms of durability, of the technical durability, of the sailing ship, of the military durability, of the kinds of armed forts and other establishments they formed, of the colonial settlements they established, and so on. All of which went into establishing claims on future revenue, the revenue from colonial trade, and of course, increasingly of slavery as well, that were unlike the kinds of claims you could make before, different in scale. And I associate that trail to that scale, among other things, with these forms of technical durability. All of which comes back to the kinds of ecological destruction that go with those expanded forms of the exercise power of violence across the globe from the 16th century onwards. So it's a big story. I don't spend a lot of time in the 16th, 17th, 18th century, but I do show that we can actually think about the longer history of capitalism and of capital's relationship to the environment in these kinds of ways.

A

Yeah, when I was thinking about those earlier sort of precedents as well, I was thinking of similarities. Right. If their value was in their monopolistic status. And yeah, it wasn't that. Just as you said, the value wasn't plucked out of thin air. It was plucked out of a supposedly almost guaranteed realization of the future. And I think that's something that I really did like about the book. And I particularly appreciated that, the way that the book historicizes concepts like the economy, markets, or technology. So rather than treating them as timeless categories, you show that they too have histories, and they also play a role in shaping the futures people imagine. So why do you think. It's a very broad question, a very ambitious one. Why do you think recovering these histories is so important for understanding our present?

B

I've always been interested in the history of political categories, and I'm particularly interested in the way they kind of govern our thinking and govern our collective life. Ideas about the state and government, the economy, power and many others. But I'm also struck that although a lot of writers try and think about the history of those terms, there's a group of them that get, I think, far less extensive analysis. And that sort of continue to govern us unquestioned. And those are indeed the terms we use to think about forms of economic life. And I first began this work on language, on vocabulary, 25 years ago or more. When, almost by accident, I discovered I was doing research on Egypt and trying to think about how in the mid 20th century, new ideas about the economy sort of moved from Europe and America to places like Egypt and the Middle east in the early decades of the 20th century. And the first thing I discovered was that nobody in Egypt was talking about something called the economy in the 1920s and 1930s. And I wanted to know why that was. And then I started reading much more closely the British and American and French economists of that period. And discovered that none of them were talking about the economy in the 20s or 30s. And that the idea, as it came to be used, really only dates from the mid 20th century. You see it starting to be used, at least in English, in the period just before the Second World War. But it's really during the Second World War that. And as part of the business of fighting a total war, that the new forms of calculation are put together that make it possible to measure and thus conceive of this thing called the economy. As the sum total of all the economic transactions within a particular place. And there are reasons why people hadn't been able to think in those kinds of terms before, which is part of the history I look at. One of those reasons is that anyone who tried to think about forms of national wealth or national income was always confounded by the problem of how do you take account of all those destructive forms of national income, the most obvious one of which was the cost of wars and military expenditure, but also the cost of crime, the cost of ill health, all kinds of negative things. And because new methods came into being during the Second World War. Where precisely they needed to count very precisely what those costs were going to be. They were all put together, and it was suddenly decided, for the purposes of war fighting. That you didn't have to distinguish between beneficial expenditures that sort of improved the human condition or the individual condition and those that were detrimental because they were about killing people or forms of violence or forms of wastefulness. And therefore, for the first time, you could count everything. And you could come up with this new term, the economy. And then at the same time, you could now measure it in such a way that you could measure it from one year to the next in a series of snapshots and talk about the growth of this thing called the economy. Again, completely new sets of terms from the mid 20th century. And very surprisingly after the war, this came to occupy a position at the center of political life. That political life was about this thing called economic growth. That economic growth could be measured in terms of all forms of monetary expenditure, whether they were on something beneficial or not. And that having figured out how to measure all those, you could then think of your well being in terms of the growth of this new object. So that way of thinking about the economy is one particular example that I look at. And then I can, that I associate with the sort of rather strange ways we think about capitalism and growth. Growth is one of the alibis I talk about. That sort of hides from us the actual nature of capitalism. But at the same time as an idea plays a central role in how these processes of capitalization, of acquiring from the future work. Because the alibi is, doesn't matter that we're indebting the future, because the future will always be bigger. Big hearts. We live according to this process. It's called growth. So these ideas all turn around together, but in order to properly understand them, one wants to understand where those ideas come from, what they represent and what they don't represent. And of course, the economy was a dominant idea in political life, came into being the 50s, 60s, 70s. But then it gets to be displaced a little bit, doesn't go away. But there's another idea which is the idea of the market. And those key ideas associated with the rise of neoliberalism, with Thatcherite and Blairite politics in the UK and with Reagan and post Reagan politics in the US in which the market is seen as a much more decisive measure and metric, an instrument of rule, than even just the governing of the economy. So I also wanted to know about the history of that term stretching back in the earlier decades of the 20th century. But I wanted to do something more because I really thought there was more work to do in thinking about the problems in ways sort of taken for granted. Economic language governs the way we think about our predicaments. And that was to understand not just these specific terms of the 20th century, but the longer term over the last century and a half rise of the modern discipline of economics. And one of the things which others have written about, what I sort of bring into this larger story, is how economics itself is, as I say, kind of born in the stock market in the late 19th century and the pioneers of what comes to be known as neoclassical economics, the kind of economics which is pretty much the only sort of that is taught, at least in American economics departments. It comes into being because of this new phenomenon of the joint stock company, this new way of selling shares in the future, because the share is this very unusual kind of form of property that hasn't existed before. So I want unpack the whole history of that story and it's just the focus of one part of one chapter. But again, it's tying together this history of certain key ideas with, with the history of the actual technical and earth changing processes that brought us the modern form of political life that we have.

A

I mean, I feel that that's one of the outstanding strengths in the book is that it does tie together sort of almost this investigation in almost sort of Wittgenstinian language games and how they occlude, but also the real impact of that. I mean, a lot of books focus on one or the other. I mean, you might get a history of what does capitalism mean or process, but to zoom in to something that is. Well, zooming in is possibly a grand term because it's still very big. But readers of your earlier work and fans, as there are a lot of them, particularly rule of Experts Colonizing Egypt, will recognize Egypt as a familiar point of reference. One of the examples that stands out in this book is the Suez Canal. At one level it's infrastructure, but in your account it's this nexus of finance, empire, environment. And it's a very good case study, an illumination of the central themes. So could you tell us a little about why the canal occupies such an important. My notes say place in the book, but place in history and what it reveals about the relationship between capitalism and the future. Even though it's in the past, it is present.

B

But yes, yeah, I mean, I think of myself as a political theorist as much as a historian and in order to think about ideas, I need to think about very concrete material and technical processes. Not only because my mind works that way, but because I think that's where the political is being organized and built. And the Suez Canal is a good example of that. It was one of the largest, if not the largest infrastructural projects of the second half of the 19th century. And it illustrates many of the key features of the book. First of all, its scale was also about its durability, the length of time, the length of future that it was offering. So that when the company was Brought into being in agreements between the Egyptian government and mostly French entrepreneurs and investors, and then the British. The company was set up with a 99 year lease. So when you were investing in this company, you were getting 99 years of promised revenue. Now there were leases on land and things that lasted 99 years. But this was on a different scale because of its ability to start charging for the movement through this new waterway. So again, you see these issues of durability of revenue being captured from the future. And then you see the ways in which the Suez Canal illuminates, how that gives rise to the new forms of debt and the new forms of finance that came to characterize that period of the 1860s, 1870s, the history of capitalism. This is often thought of as the kind of export of capital abroad because there's some surplus been built up at home in Britain and other parts of Europe that have sort of begun to stagnate. No money was exported. Egyptians paid for the canal and future users paid for the canal. It wasn't an export of capital. It was a way of, as I say, colonizing a particular part of the world in such a way that those payments to the shareholders in the canal would go on for the next 99 years. I didn't quite go for 99 years because about 10 years before the lease was up, the Egyptians nationalized it. But, you know, the scale of that kind of claim on the future was enormous. But at the same time, it was enormous in its ecological impacts and all kinds of other themes that the book explores. So it, you know, on a much larger scale than Uber, it brings together many of the themes of the book about forms of technical transformation, forms of earth changing, terraforming as I called it, projects, or with the scale of control of the future and then with the forms of debt that can be piled up on the promise of those future revenues. Because the moment the Egyptian government is seen as being one of the partial beneficiaries of those revenues, though the Egyptian government's revenues more came from elsewhere. It's possible then to start lending as they creating bank money, creating credit to that government on an unprecedented scale and driving it into debt as soon as the prices on which the future repayments, largely the price of cotton, shift and the repayments can no longer be afforded. So you see all kinds of processes that are absolutely part of our experience today of finance, of debt, of impoverishment developing there on a huge scale. But I'd say one thing about the Suez Canal, which I do spend a little bit of time on But I spend far more time on a parallel project. And I'm kind of interested in those parallels, which is at the same time as the Suez Canal was being built and these processes of finance and debt were being organized. And particularly after the British occupy the country, when the Egyptian government is unable to pay the interest on those ever increasing debts, they said about what can be seen as actually an even larger scale project, which is a completely transforming. Not a waterway through the desert as the canal was, but the entire Nile Valley. And I write a new history of the River Nile, which is actually one of the more original parts of the book in terms of telling a story. There have been countless histories of the Nile, including of the modern transformations of the Nile in the 19th century, the building of dams, the introduction of private property and so on and so forth, including some very good scholarship. But I actually came up with a completely different way of telling that history. Partly based on going back actually to earlier medieval Arabic sources about how the Nile was cultivated before all this happened, to sort of uncover a different set of relations to the land, to the water, to ways of storing water, all of which were destroyed by the irrigation schemes that the British pursued. And I explain the ignoring of the past ways of cultivating the Nile Valley and the introduction of these highly destructive methods in the late 19th century. Again in terms of capitalization, in terms of particular crops, particular modes of irrigation that made it possible to promise the future in ways that older forms of agriculture, which were more productive, more healthful, more in every other way better, but they didn't do what the industrial crops of the 19th century could do in terms of the colonization of the future.

A

Yeah, I mean, some of my own work, for example, I have a paper on Sarawak where there's a rubber plantation. It's not rubber plantation, actually. Wild rubber processing. And the Vanderbilts are involved. And it shifts from wild collection to monopolized connection to licensing. And then the problem is that they don't realize that because it is indigenous labor. And they're not coerced. I mean, they're coerced in the sense of earning money, but as soon as the prices drop, they just go and do something else. So the company fails and they seem to have done okay. So there are parallels. And I think it's this. It is that thing. I think there is this certain point, right, where the idea of sort of shares and the. And called them with the book, the selling of the future becomes sort of a. Almost like a universally tradable. Doesn't matter where you are, you know, you could be. You can. You can be in Sarawak where nobody really knows about. I mean, I was surprised Cornelius Vanderbilt knew where Sarawak was. But I think that brings. I'm talking about sort of parallels in time as well. But one of the most original aspects of the book is the way it treats time itself as part of history. So financial infrastructure and technological promise bring and offer imagined futures into the present and allow them to shape decisions. So what point did the temporality aspect become so central to the story you wanted to tell?

B

In some ways it was always there, but in a sort of cruder form in that when I first started thinking about the book, as I mentioned, I was thinking about durability only. I was thinking about what were the new technical means, whether going back four or 500 years or just going back the last 100, 150 years, that allowed the building of new modes of extracting from the future, of indebting the future, and imposing on those who come later the costs of the repayment of what have been extracted.

A

So

B

as I began to understand that not just as durability, but in relation to these methods of valuing, discounting and so on that I was mentioning earlier, I began to realize that there was more to this relationship, this temporal relationship, than just one, a simple durability. So time is very central to the arguments and temporality, but I think it's also different from many of the standard ways in which we've tended to think about the history of modernity in general, capitalist modernity, because so many of those ways of thinking are about either the speeding up of time, acceleration that comes. And many very well known, very important studies of the sort of experience of capitalist modernity as an experience of acceleration, of being disconnected from the past through the increasing pace of change or movement or any other technical processes. So either it's a sort of speeding up and acceleration, or. Or capitalism thought of as a kind of the regulation of time, the time discipline of the factory system, the new ability to control people's lives and extract from them through the much more regulated control of the working day, of the hours of work and so on, all of which absolutely are important aspects. But once one introduces this aspect of capital itself as a relationship to the future, then a completely different set of relations to the future come into view alongside those not to replace them, because it becomes a question of how far can you push the future away? So not of speeding up, but, as it were, sort of delaying. And the example I just gave of the Suez Canal sort of illustrates that you could push the future 100 or 99 years away, you could now capitalize a process that was being more and more extended into the future. And to the extent that that's not just sort of extending the future, but delaying its arrival in various ways, the opportunities to profit from that future might increase.

A

So

B

the history of this sort of treating time as part of capitalism's history is very important. But I think the book does it in a slightly different way. But it did become, as you say, quite central to some of the questions I was raising in the book.

A

Yeah, I mean, I thought it was a very, very original and refreshing take. I'm not sure it sort of jostled any other ones out of the way, but I think it was very complementary with a lot of other scholarship.

B

Exactly. Yeah.

A

And I think that was something that struck me that the book moves very easily between intellectual history, environmental history, political economy, history of science and technology, infrastructure studies. Yet you don't ever come away feeling like they're just different perspectives once again jostling and placed once together. So this is a. I mean, I imagine the readers will find it very interesting, but there's a slight personality pay off for this. So I wondered whether you began this project. Did you know that it required that kind of interdisciplinary approach, or did they push you in that direction?

B

I think a bit of both. I've just about always worked outside the confines of any one particular discipline. I never found a discipline that I felt completely at home in, though. I've learned a lot from a wide variety of different disciplines, from law to political theory to history to political science to anthropology and others, and including some newer, more interdisciplinary fields like science and technology studies and environmental studies. But I have a particular approach which rests upon not allowing a given discipline to define what the question is or what the problem is, but rather to think in the kinds of ways I've been trying to illustrate about very specific cases and processes, whether a tech firm or a river or a trading company, or any of the other many an agricultural process, a stock exchange, many of the other sort of sites and places and examples that I take, and I take those sites and those places. And then partly through reading the work of the scholars who specialize on them more, seeing what one can understand from that very close up focus on a particular site, a particular set of processes, a particular. And by not being confined to a particular discipline, one can then follow those processes across the boundaries of different disciplines. So in the chapters that deal with Egypt and the colonial period, I'm not confined to writing sort of Colonial history, what the British regime did, or how the Egyptians organized against it. Nor am I confined to writing a kind of agrarian or archaeological history, or nor am I confined to writing a history of finance. People have done those separate ones, but rather to think about what it is that sort of cuts across those boundaries. And not, as I say, to be confined by the way a particular discipline might ask questions about those processes and those connections, because I want the connections themselves, the actual connections that I discover to drive the research. And those connections might be building together, as they do, aspects of the development of money and finance, with aspects of the hydraulic history of the River Nile, with aspects of the development of machine guns and other automatic weapons that allow a more direct control of a river valley, and so on and so forth. So moving between intellectual history, histories of technology, and all these different fields allows you not just to sort of jump from one thing to another, but on the contrary, to find connections that perhaps you wouldn't notice if you were trying to frame what you were doing within the language or the questions raised by one specific discipline. So it really is, to me, a method, a method for thinking about our collective world. And I've learned a lot from others who do that kind of interdisciplinary work. It's not original to me, but it is the kind of work that I find particularly useful for gaining new insights into the way our world is organized.

A

I mean, I think that also speaks to a long term and ongoing debate within academia, right, about sort of the siloing of disciplines, right. That the world itself is not. The world itself isn't neatly boxable as much as deans of departments might want it to be. And instead, yeah, to understand the big questions, you have to take a holistic approach. I mean, yeah, it sounds very common sense, but at the same time it's quite remarkable. And it is a pleasure to have someone like you talking about it with a book like this, because it does it so well. But we are coming towards the end of our conversation. So one thing that stayed with me is your critique is not just directed at capitalism. I should say not simply at capitalism, but at our way of imagining the future. I thought kind of humorously to myself, maybe we could rephrase that. The problem with socialism is you run out of other people's money is the problem with capitalism is you run out of the future. But the alibi only works within this because people come to believe that what we're going through today and the environmental destruction that is at the core of so much of this will produce a better Tomorrow. So after spending so many years researching, writing this, has it changed the way you think about the future and more broadly, what this is, and this is a. I'll make apologies in advance. This is a very big question. Do we need new policies or do we need new ways of imagining the future?

B

Well, I think both, but I also think maybe those aren't such separate things as they might appear, because what are thought of as sort of policies and quite sort of concrete and immediate and planning for the near future are themselves, of course, incorporating or presupposing much broader ways of imagining the future. Whether they're incorporating certain ways of imagining the future in terms of growth as it's conventionally measured, or even in attempts to remeasure growth in slightly different ways. And so I actually think we need both of those things, both at the level of policy and at the level of, of our imaginations. You know, one of the things about the present is that while we're attempting to come up with new ways of thinking about the future and new policies for better relating to the future, we're also living in the present carrying the costs of repaying all the earlier futures that were stolen, accumulated from in the past. So that's as simple as something like the levels of debt imposed on national health services and many other forms of public services. Because it was thought back in the 80s and 90s and well beyond that, you could, you could do things more efficiently by allowing people to capitalize the future payments of a health service or a public utility and turning that into a source of private property. And now, whether in terms of the supply of basic public services for water or electricity or anything else, or the provision of health or the provision of well being in retirement, they all burden with these forms of debt, which are the ways in which this mode of living at the expense of the future has actually already a burden for us now. So it's not just that we will be putting burdens on people in the future, but we are the people who were burdened by those who impose these methods in the past now. And I think finding new policies is much easier and much more obvious if one breaks with the sort of economic common sense about the way in which finance works, the way in which debt works, the shift over the last generation to entirely privatized forms of organizing, the capture of the future, of organizing relation to the future in terms of. It must always have this element that is captured by private interests, namely by forms of credit and capital. So I don't see these as opposites or as two different ways of thinking because I think we're trapped by a certain imagination of the future and the limited one as much as we are trapped by particular policies that rest on a rather unexamined set of assumptions about how the different ways in which one can relate to and impoverish or not impoverish the future.

A

Yeah, I mean, just as you were saying that and we are wrapping things up. But I was brought to mind scholars such as Frederick Gause and his sort of non reformist reform and Roberto Unger with his notion of this false necessities that we do take for granted. And yeah, I mean, I think that's quite, I've come away quite optimistic from this.

B

Well, that's pleasing because, you know, by nature I'm an optimist and if I if reading my book can be a source of optimism, even though there's, you know, a pretty terrible history in many ways being recounted, I'm really happy with that.

A

What better? Note to end upon so once again, I'd like to thank you for joining me, Professor Mitchell, and just to remind our listeners, this has been New Books Intellectual History, and I've been discussing the Alibi of Capital by Timothy Mitchell, who's a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University. And it's out now with Verso. Thank you.

B

Thank you very much, Thomas. It's been great. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website, newbooks network.com connect with us on Instagram and Bluesky with the handle EW Books Network and subscribe to our weekly substack newsletter@newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.