Dr Maha

@maharafiatal

New Yorker abroad. Adam Smith Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Political Economy at University of Glasgow studying governance by/of corporations. Sometimes journalist. Always feminist.

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Dr Maha@maharafiatal· 5d

1847 is bad, but as I recount in WHEN COMPANIES RULE (out November), the Cecil Rhodes companies in southern Africa were enslavers as late as 1897, and likely into the 20th century. cup.columbia.edu/book/when-co...

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· 11d

Ultimately the settlers were forced to accept what they wanted made no economic sense. Africans in Kenya were given limited land rights in the 50s both to blunt Mau Mau but also bc colony was starving by letting settlers play pretend farmer. From cup.columbia.edu/book/when-co..., out in November:

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Jul 11

Did you have "Becks knows every word to Wonderwall and is super into fan sing-along" on your bingo card? Because I did not and I love it.

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Jul 10

Not bad views for a mammoth proofreading session: Out in November, buy your copy now cup.columbia.edu/book/when-co...

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Jul 6

"What no competent government can deliver is Scandinavian levels of welfare provision sustained on American levels of taxation, with immigration reduced. Yet since [Brexit], this has been the quixotic demand of the UK electorate." Me, on Starmer, Burnham and Brexit: www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/...

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Jun 30

Am I here for @sasemeeting.bsky.social or am I here for drinking cold beverages and watching the World Cup in charming Bordeaux squares? Who can say? (Holler if you're around Sky-pals, I'll be manning the Network L stations most of the week.)

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Jun 1

Happy Monday for history nerds: The World in 1776, a travel adventure game based on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Been the highlight of my year writing this with colleagues @uofgsocsci.bsky.social @uofggameslab.bsky.social. Huge thanks to @lesteph.com for bringing it to life: worldin1776.org.uk

The journey begins
It is March 1776. Adam Smith has just published a book The Wealth of Nations that will change how the world thinks about wealth and power. North American colonists are on the verge of revolution. In the Caribbean, enslaved people outnumber their enslavers ten to one. Private companies rule from the Cape of Good Hope to the Bay of Bengal. The world is more connected and more volatile than ever before.

Clyde - Merchant shipThis game puts you in that world. You play as a young sailor leaving Glasgow on a merchant voyage. You grew up speaking Gaelic in the Highlands. Your family scattered to the factory towns when the land was cleared, and the sea was the only wide-open thing left. The story follows real 18th century shipping routes, and the people, places, and arguments you encounter are drawn from history. This game does not flinch from that history. Your character participates in the transatlantic slave trade as an ordinary person doing ordinary work in an economy built on extraordinary violence. The game does not ask you to judge him, but to see what he saw. Some of what you will encounter is disturbing. At each location you can read further, explore the themes of free trade, slavery and empire, and revolution, and find out what Adam Smith had to say about them.

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· May 18

ICYMI: my first book, WHEN COMPANIES RULE, will be out in November. It's a gripping 400-year history of super-powerful corporations, and a guide to challenging corporate power today. cup.columbia.edu/book/when-co...

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· May 15

Corporate power today is scary, but not new. In WHEN COMPANIES RULE, I recount its 400-year history from the East India Company to Amazon, what motivates the oligarchs who would be kings, and what we can do about them. Out in November, pre-order now: cup.columbia.edu/book/when-co...

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Mar 9

The book was a bestseller in part because it explained, four months before the American Revolution, that Britain was at risk of losing all her colonies if she kept setting trade policy to suit giant companies and the oligarchs who controlled them. This too feels depressingly current.

Book IV, Chapter 7: "The monopoly of the colony trade, besides, by forcing towards it a much greater proportion of the capital of Great Britain than what would naturally have gone to it, seems to have broken altogether that natural balance which would otherwise have taken place among all the different branches of British industry. The industry of Great Britain, instead of being accommodated to a great number of small markets, has been principally suited to one great market. Her commerce, instead of running in a great number of small channels, has been taught to run principally in one great channel. But the whole system of her industry and commerce has thereby been rendered less secure; the whole state of her body politic less healthful than it otherwise would have been. In her present condition, Great Britain resembles one of those unwholesome bodies in which some of the vital parts are overgrown, and which, upon that account, are liable to many dangerous disorders, scarce incident to those in which all the parts are more properly proportioned. A small stop in that great blood-vessel, which has been artificially swelled beyond its natural dimensions, and through which an unnatural proportion of the industry and commerce of the country has been forced to circulate, is very likely to bring on the most dangerous disorders upon the whole body politic."

Headline from Al Jazeera: "Trump's tariffs may end up blowing up the US dollar hegemony. Some of the US president's most daring policies to 'Make America Great Again' may inflict irreparable harm to the US economy.

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Mar 9

Smith particularly lambasted the regulatory capture of the British state by companies like the East India Company. These companies could never govern colonies well, because the needs of the people they ruled would always conflict with their motive to extract as much or as cheaply as possible.

Excerpt from Atal, "When Companies Rule," forthcoming Columbia University Press: 'As Smith wrote, the East India Company had just completed its conquest of Bengal. In The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, Smith reviewed the Company’s record as a territorial ruler. He found it both politically oppressive and economically unproductive. The Company’s monopoly restricted the ability of people under its rule in India to sell their own goods on the global market, while its position as the only buyer for Indian products pushed down prices. Being able to buy cheap and sell dear increased the Company’s profitability, but it hurt India’s prosperity. Company trading barriers caused shortages of key goods and contributed to famine, while pushing Indians into poverty. It was because of the “mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies,” Smith argued, that in the “fertile country [of Bengal], which had before been much depopulated, three or four hundred thousand people die of hunger in one year.” In this respect, the Company’s interests as a profit-seeking enterprise conflicted with its duties as a sovereign, to maximize the prosperity of its subjects. “A company of merchants,” he concluded, was “incapable of considering themselves as sovereigns, even after they have become such.” '

Excerpt from Atal, "When Companies Rule," forthcoming Columbia University Press: 'Moreover, Smith argued that corporations would inevitably enforce their political rule in militaristic ways. Given the authority to monopolize an area of trade, they would require, as the East India Company did, their own warehouses, naval patrols and judicial systems to enforce their monopoly. These, in turn, would require militarized defense: “With the right of possessing forts and garrisons in distant and barbarous countries, is necessarily connected the right of making peace and war,” Smith argued. “The joint stock companies, which have had the one right, have constantly exercised the other, and have frequently had it expressly conferred upon them. How unjustly, how capriciously, how cruelly they have commonly exercised it, is too well known from recent experience.” Chartered monopolies, in other words, turned any economy they governed into a tyranny, rather than a free market based on consensual exchange. Yet the expense of such tyranny meant these companies were rarely commercially profitable, deriving, as the East India Company did, much of their revenue from their direct taxation of natives. Smith concluded that “if the trading spirit of the English East India Company renders them very bad sovereigns, the spirit of sovereignty seems to have rendered them very bad traders.” '

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Mar 9

Smith understood that workers would form unions to counter-veil managers, but he warned that bosses would always call the state in on their side, a dangerous and violent form of regulatory capture.

Book I, Chapter 8 (paraphrase of long quotation): "We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate...Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate...Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen, who sometimes, too, without any provocation of this kind, combine, of their own accord, to raise the price of their labour...But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters, upon these occasions, are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders."

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Mar 9

Smith warned that economies in which managers hoard profits—rather than reinvesting in their businesses—will stagnate too. I wonder what he would make of our cash-rich tech and finance behemoths today…

Excerpt from Book II, Chapter 3: "The proportion between capital and revenue, therefore, seems everywhere to regulate the proportion between industry and idleness. Wherever capital predominates, industry prevails; wherever revenue, idleness. Every increase or diminution of capital, therefore, naturally tends to increase or diminish the real quantity of industry, the number of productive hands, and consequently the exchangeable value of the annual produce of the land and labour of the country, the real wealth and revenue of all its inhabitants."

Chart from Bloomberg: Big Tech's Cash Hoard Remains Huge

Headline from Bloomberg: Tech giants may plow $500 billion cash hoard into more buybacks

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Mar 9

Smith felt real anxiety about the inequality that would result from the expansion of “commercial society.” That anxiety was as much practical as moral. Economies in which workers cannot afford to share in the wealth their labor creates will stop growing.

From Book I, Chapter 8: "Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage, or as an inconveniency, to the society? The answer seems at first abundantly plain. Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part, can never be regarded as any inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged."

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Mar 9

250 years ago today, Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Contrary to popular belief, it is not a proto-libertarian paean to free markets, but a blistering critique of vested interests, corporate power and the British Empire. Some favorite bits:

Cover page, Wealth of Nations, First Edition 1776

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Mar 5

I regret to inform you that Ryan Grim is actually stupid enough not to understand this:

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Feb 5

In 2022, I proposed a course @uofgsocsci.bsky.social on the politics of pop culture in which polisci undergrads would make art in lieu of a final exam. Tonight I saw a former student on that course, still an undergrad, smash the lead role on a semi-professional stage.

Program for Spring Awakening, Call to Stage Productions 2025

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Dec 26

When I lecture on Frankenstein (the novel) in my politics of pop culture course I compare him to an incel. Film is definitely pulling on (and magnifying to extremes) a tendency in the text. Here's how he justifies his first murder:

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Dec 5

Adam Smith, on shopping for furniture and watches, 1753.

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Nov 28

All New Yorkers have an inner Jewish mother somewhere. This post speaks to my soul - a full house and laden tables is my happy place. And this is my happy plate. Turkey, cran relish, roast parsnips/potatoes/sprouts, braised green beans, carrots in mole, fennel salad, cornbread, broccoli gratin.

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Nov 23

Sunday night with the greatest movie ever made about imperial capitalism and the 20th century social revolutions that brought it down. Teaching prep is fun sometimes.

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Nov 5

You know that Trump doesn't care about climate change. But did you know that his tariffs may also prevent *other* countries from taking climate action? New by me for @uofgpolicy.bsky.social on the Trumpian shadow over COP30: tinyurl.com/mpf7thee

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Oct 8

Me, in February: the Trump Admin is going to try to force the EU to withdraw or weaken CBAM and the CSDDD. www.gla.ac.uk/explore/glas... The FT this morning: www.ft.com/content/678f... The planet cannot afford for Brussels to give Washington what it wants here.

Moreover, the EU is moving forward with its own trade restriction, a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which imposes tariffs on imports that don’t meet European environmental standards. The UK will adopt a similar system in 2027, aligning itself with Europe to secure smooth UK access to critical commodities. While the Biden Administration was in discussions about a plan to bring the US into this “climate club,” the Trump Administration is rapidly reversing US climate commitments. Indeed, the Administration has singled out countries imposing regulatory tariffs as potential targets for its country-by-country tariffs. As a result, by 2027, the UK will face a binary choice between regulatory alignment with (and market access to) Europe and a trade confrontation with the United States. The current “wait-and-see” approach prolongs, but does not resolve, this dilemma.

FT headline: US demands EU dismantle green regulations in threat to trade deal

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Aug 18

Actual LOL. A related myth to bust: when I talk about chipping away, I always find that students think that approach is somehow not "radical." But Weber is clear, it's the *ability* to keep boring the hard boards that makes radicalism possible. A lot of things click when students grasp that.

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Aug 2

This made the cover of today's @bostonglobe.com

Boston Globe newspaper with headline "At Brown, deal fuels outrage over curtailing trans rights."

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Aug 1

Wildest of all, the banks launched "chat-banking," a way to authorize transactions over WhatsApp or WeChat. While presented as an "African" innovation, these bots actually gave US and Chinese tech platforms access to SA customer data...and some were scrapped after security breaches.

Sample screenshot in which a customer can text the bank to "pay Mom R200."

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Aug 1

The new apps mostly offer additional services to the wealthiest - those who have multiple bank accounts. The dominant banks haven't given up market share. And replacing physical branches with apps - as many banks did - also hurts those who need to withdraw cash. So much for "inclusion."

Figure showing how app-based finance works in practice (through monopolization, class stratification and data extraction).

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Aug 1

We call these linked beliefs - that market competition, financial inclusion and African empowerment go together - the Afrofuturist imaginary. Like its science fictional namesake, this one relied on a fair bit of magical thinking about what the new FinTech experiments do in practice.

Figure showing the three parts of the Afrofuturist imaginary in theory (market openness, financial inclusion, African economic empowerment).

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Aug 1

Financial professionals believed that digital innovation would make South African companies leaders in the global financial industry and take them out of the shadow of Western dominance. They called this aspiration "Africanicity."

“Our aspiration is to be an entrepreneurial, digitally led African banking group,” said the CEO. “We are passionate about innovation and we are immensely proud to offer this innovative platform that will forever change the way our customers do banking. That's what we call Africanicity,” echoed the advertiser who managed the launch (FCB Africa Press, 2018).

Dr Maha@maharafiatal· Aug 1

South Africa is a middle-income country: most people have bank accounts (81%) and a smartphone (90%), but the informal economy is huge, cash is king, and broadband is a luxury. Many "underbanked" consumers have an account to draw cash, but don't have access to credit or the ability to build wealth.