The Union for Radical Political Economics is pleased to announce the
2026 David Gordon Memorial Lecture
https://urpe.org/announcement/2020-david-gordon-memorial-lecture/
The 28th Annual David Gordon Memorial Lecture will be delivered via webinar, on Thursday 15 January 2026, at 8:30 p.m. India Standard time (10:00 a.m. Eastern US time/3:00 p.m. GMT)
Colonies of Conquest and Metropoles: Conceptual Issues Relating to the “Drain of Wealth”
Speaker: Dr. Utsa Patnaik, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Session Chair: Dr. Elif Karaçimen, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan University
Abstract: The literature on the “drain of wealth,” namely one-way transfers from colonies of conquest to their metropolitan rulers, goes back more than two centuries. In the Indian case, it was the colonizing power itself that first used the terms “tribute payment” and “drain of wealth” from the 1780s to describe the unique trade relations between India and Britain. From the mid-19th century however, we see obfuscation and denial of the process of tribute transfer. The first requirement of any present-day attempt to measure empirically the size of colonial transfers to the metropolis is conceptual clarity about what exactly we mean by such transfers. Using a minimalist concept of tribute transfer for India, we find that it was very large and contributed substantially to metropolitan industrialization and to the global diffusion of capitalism outside the colonies of conquest.
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Meeting ID: 954 0043 9509
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The David Gordon Memorial Lecture is an invited lecture presented annually at the Allied Social Science Association meetings by an economist whose work follows in the tradition of David Gordon’s contributions (in 2025 and 2026, due to political circumstances, the DGML has been held instead as a webinar). Not all David Gordon Memorial Lectures have been published in the RRPE, but those that have been are listed here.