Julia Greening

Bio: Julia Greening is a PhD student in Political Theory working on the history of political and economic thought. She holds previous degree in Political Economy (BA, University of Manitoba) and Economic and Social History (MPhil, University of Oxford). The throughline between these degrees has been an abiding interest in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of economic and social life with a particular focus on the role of ideas in socioeconomic change.

Research Statement: In the late 18th and early 19th century, political economy promised a new science of society, often representing Indigenous peoples as living examples of the non-capitalist past of complex capitalist society. Under the supervision of Barbara Arneil and Nazmul Sultan, my doctoral dissertation will explore the influence of British colonialism in North America on the early development of political economy taking a global history approach that seeks to recover the place of so-called ‘non-economic’ peoples in the history of economic thought. This research is motivated by the following questions: How were representations of First Nations in North America used to advocate for different social institutions, conceptions of progress and visions of the future? How did they differ from the representations of other non-European peoples? What is the basis for these conceptions of Indigeneity and what is their relationship to ethnography, travel writing and the rise of scientific racism? How do these representations compare with the reality of contemporaneous Indigenous life and thought in North America? Not least, how do metanarratives about civilizational progress persist in economic and political discourse today in ways that echo their use in the 19th century?