2024 BIAPT Mid-Career Prize Winner: Dr Onur Ulas Ince
The BIAPT Executive Committee is pleased to award its 2024 Mid-Career Prize to Dr Onur Ulas Ince of SOAS, University of London, in recognition of his ground-breaking contributions to the field. Dr Ince’s research has taken political theory’s imperial turn in new and refreshing directions by incorporating insights from the history of capitalism, imperial intellectual history, and global political economy. His award-winning monograph Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2018) grapples with the conflicted origins of liberalism, emphasising how its commitments to the freedoms of property, labour, and trade were inextricably bound up with colonial processes of territorial conquest, resource extraction, racialised domination, and systematic enslavement. By bringing the political economy of colonialism to the fore, Ince has successfully challenged the emphasis on universalism and cultural difference that has hitherto framed treatments of liberalism’s imperial origins. The book also offers novel interpretations of key figures in the history of political thought, including John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon.
More recently, Ince has embarked on two new ambitious projects that further reveal the rich potential of his approach to the history of imperial thought. The first, Beyond the Colour Line: Empire, Capitalism, and Race in Asia, 1800-1850, builds on his earlier research by looking at how racial categories and hierarchies were forged in the process of British imperialism in Asia, and in the encounter of British imperialists with their Chinese counterparts. Beyond the Colour Line not only obliges us to rethink how racialised capitalism emerged; it also exposes the ‘Atlanticist’ methodological biases of the scholarship on empire by foregrounding Asia as an undertheorized arena of British imperial expansion and contestation. The project has already produced two articles in the American Political Science Review, with a monograph with Oxford University Press to follow. In the second new project, Ince explores of what he calls the “limits of liberal anti-imperialism” in the work of Scottish Enlightenment figures such as Adam Smith and David Hume.
Dr Ince’s career trajectory has mirrored the global reach of his scholarship. Since graduating with a PhD from Cornell University in 2013, he has taught in Turkey (at Koç University), Singapore (at Singapore Management University), and now in the imperial metropole itself, London (at SOAS). In each of these locales Ince has made his mark beyond research through inspiring teaching (in Singapore he was nominated for the Most Promising Teacher Award) and through service to the profession. Examples of the latter include his co-chairing of the Association for Political Theory’s 2018 conference in America, and copious reviewing for a host of journals. Dr Ince is therefore a thoroughly deserving winner of this year’s Mid-career prize.
In response to his award, Dr Ince said “Academics have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. And some of them have also been lucky enough to get a prize for it, a position I am now delighted to find myself in. The judges have my thanks for their consideration.”