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Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the aftermath of Empire

10 October 2024, 5:00 pm–6:30 pm

Uncommon Wealth

Join UCL IIPP in conversation with Dr Kojo Koram, Reader in Law at Birkbeck College, University of London.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

IIPP Comms

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Join this fascinating discussion on Thursday 10th October 2024 at 17:00-18:30 (BST) at University College London (UCL).

About this talk:

Uncommon Wealth is the little known and shocking history of how Britain treated its former non-white colonies after the end of empire. It is the story of how an interconnected group of British capitalists enabled horrific inequality across the globe, profiting in colonial Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. However, the greed unleashed in this era would boomerang, now leaving many ordinary Britons wondering where their own prosperity has gone. Ranging from Jamaica to Singapore, Ghana to Britain, this is a blistering account of how buried decisions of decades past are ravaging Britain today.

Meet the panel:

  • Speaker: Dr Kojo Koram | Reader in Law at Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Chair: Dr Cecilia Rikap | Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)

About the Speakers

Kojo Koram

Reader in Law at Birkbeck College, University of London

Kojo Koram
Kojo Koram is an academic, teaching at the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. Born in Accra, Ghana and raised on Merseyside, he is now based in London. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in November 2011 and received his PhD in September 2017. In 2018, the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities awarded his PhD the prestigious Julien Mezey Award.

In addition to his academic writing, he has written for the New Statesman, the Guardian, Dissent, The Nation, and The Washington Post and has appeared on CNN and Sky News. He is the editor of The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line (Pluto Press 2019) and author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (John Murray 2022).

More about Kojo Koram

Cecilia Rikap

Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

Cecilia
Cecilia Rikap (PhD in economics from the Universidad de Buenos Aires) is associate professor in Economics and Head of Research at IIPP- UCL. Until joining UCL, she was a permanent Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy (IPE) at City, University of London and programme director of the BSc in IPE at the same university. She is a tenure researcher of the CONICET, Argentina’s national research council, and associate researcher at COSTECH lab, Université de Technologie de Compiègne.

Cecilia’s research is rooted in the international political economy of science and technology and the economics of innovation. She currently studies the rising concentration of intangible assets leading to the emergence of intellectual monopolies, among others from digital and pharma industries, the distribution of intellectual (including data) rents, resulting geopolitical tensions and the effects of knowledge assetization on the knowledge commons and development. She has published two books on these topics. 1) “Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism uncovered” (Routledge), recently won the EAEPE Joan Robinson Prize Competition. 2) “The Digital Innovation Race: Conceptualizing the Emerging New World Order” (Palgrave), co-authored with B.A.K. Lundvall, focuses on the artificial intelligence race and clashes of power between the US and Chinese Big Tech, the US state and the Chinese states. Her recent work includes corporate planning of global production and innovation systems driven by intellectual monopolization and how these leading corporations, in particular tech giants, are developing state-like features, thus reshaping core and peripheral states. More about Cecilia Rikap