Introduction

Abstract

Race, finance and inequality: enduring legaciesWe live in a colonial global economy. It is of course true that many territories which were conquered, annexed and settled during the expansion of European empires formally gained their independence during the twentieth century. 1 Settler colonialism, however, clearly persists in Britain's former 'white dominions' of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as in Israel/Palestine. 2 As you might imagine, the colonial world did not disappear overnight for the citizens of newly independent former colonies. On the level of crude imperial 3 relations of exploitation and extraction, much appeared to stay the same. Ghanaian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah (1965) wrote in his book Neo-colonialism that African industrialization had been frustrated because of the extraction of Africa's mineral resources for Western benefit. More than half a century later, the Tricontinental Institute and Third World Network-Africa observed similar patterns of economic exploitation. Only 1.7% of global returns from Ghana's gold remain in Ghana's domestic economy, the majority flows out to shareholders of British, American, Canadian and Australian mining companies. Many see this as effective neo-or re-colonization of many African territories, resulting in de-industrialization (Tanoh 2019). Sovereign debts incurred by African governments to pursue development are the basis for a continued source of pressure by the World Bank to use meagre taxes and royalties from mining companies to service their sovereign debt, rather than using that mineral wealth for the kinds of national development envisioned