World Anthropological Perspectives on Economic Nationalisms*

Abstract

As rising numbers of national governments promote economic nationalist policies and the withdrawal from (or renegotiation of) global political and economic relationships, the impossibility of disconnecting from global circulations is illustrated by the traveling discourse of economic nationalism itself, although conceptualized and implemented quite differently as refracted through specific historical and political contexts. Drawing on the possibilities of world anthropologies, the authors build connected analyses of the lived effects and contradictions of economic nationalist policies through their ethnographic examples from Brazil, India, Uganda, and the US. In comparatively analyzing these contexts, the authors emphasize the plural, transhistorical, transnational, gendered, and contested nature of economic nationalist policies and discourses worldwide, pointing to the need for further empirical investigations into diverse understandings and political deployments of economic nationalist projects.

Sleights of Hand: Free Ports, Bordering, and the Racial Capitalist Roots of Economic Nationalist Strategies in the US and the UK

“…Whether for the Frankfurt School in the 1930s or in recent years, trying to sort out the geographical and historical distinctions of nationalisms and populisms and their chimaeric projections as they mushroom is challenging. And while economic nationalist rhetoric can sound similar, the associated policies can differ quite a bit (see Kingsolver et al 2022). Economic nationalism is not a stable concept or set of policies, but a political discourse that might best be understood as 'the nationalism-economy nexus' (Berger and Fetzer 2019: 2) or as 'a complex set of relationships between nation and economy' (Pickel 2005: 13) in order to encompass the many forms and contexts of economic nationalisms.…”