The Known Economy

Reviews / Votes

"Incisive, illuminating, and strikingly original, The Known Economy is a lucid and erudite account of how modernist knowledge practices (especially those of economists) came together with the post-war international system to create what the author terms "the modern world scale". Danby's engaging and eye-opening tale should dispel once and for all the idea that national accounting is dull!" - James Ferguson, Susan S. and William H. Hindle Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University

"An incisive genealogical critique of Modernist economics, The Known Economy adds a fresh dimension to postcolonial studies. Colin Danby's analysis of the origination in economics of the category known as "world scale" demonstrates the complicity of the international in the national and challenges postcolonial theory to rethink its perspective on nationalism and the nation state. For far too long, economics has been no more than a concept metaphor in postcolonial studies, and Danby's work remedies this situation and demonstrates the infrastructural imperatives of economics and economic accounting at work in the worlding of the postcolonial imaginary" - R. Radhakrishnan, Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine

The Known Economy offers an innovative account of the conceptions and forms of calculation with which mainstream economics came to represent and measure the economy. Equally, the book argues that some of the major cultural critics of modern economic thought share the same conceptual genealogy, reproducing in their criticisms some of the unexplored assumptions on which the contemporary global economy depends. Economic calculation and its critics, Danby tells us, jointly shape our world. - Timothy Mitchell, Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University

The Known Economy provides a fascinating and insightful account of the contested representations that have shaped 20th century economic practice. Through a set of imaginative and carefully researched case studies, Colin Danby disrupts the binaries of household/market, national/global, modernity/tradition and love/money that animate economic thinking, while exposing the gendered, heteronormative and colonial power dynamics at work in even the most "technical" accounts of national and global economic activity. This book is crucial reading for anyone interested in critically rewriting economics outside of its current disempowering logics. - Suzanne Bergeron, Professor of Social Sciences, University of Michigan-Dearborn