What are some good resources covering the economics of European colonialism?

by CantInventAUsername
boringhistoryfan

There's a few resources I can give here that seem like a good starting point. I do want to emphasize that my training is largely in the British Empire and I suspect my resources favor that. The reality is, European colonialism is a very complex creature. We're talking about multiple countries, across several centuries, in projects that effectively spanned the entire globe. This affects entire areas of study, ranging from national histories, to imperial histories, to regional and oceanic histories. All of them speak to the economics of Colonialism.

What I've got here is my attempt at a diverse range, but there will always be more.

  1. Sidney Mintz Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.
  2. Eric Hobsbawm*, Industry and Empire*
  3. Robin Blackburn*, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (1997)*
  4. James Belich*, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World*
  5. A.J Hopkins and P.J Cain British Imperialism: 1688-2015
  6. K.N Chaudhuri*, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: an Economic History from Rise of Islam to 1750*
  7. Kenneth MacPherson*. The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea*
  8. Gwyn Campbell. Africa and the Indian Ocean World from Early Times to Circa 1900. 2019
  9. Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa
  10. Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: East African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization.
  11. Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850
  12. Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific
  13. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton

This is a good place to start I think. I've tried to provide a good mix of the different regions, and hopefully a reasonable array of time as well. I'm not sure if I've done justice to the early colonial era, but you could probably start with these and move forward. I do think you should get a reasonable understanding of most of the major regions of the world. East Asia might be a tad lacking, but I'm hoping between MacPherson and Parthasarathi you'd have a good place to get started atleast if that's where your inclinations went. These texts should also give you some survey of the major scholarly interventions in the field, such as the growing role of commodities histories among economic historians, the great divergence debate, gentleman capitalism, etc.

Hope this helps.