Middle England’s empire: Social reproduction in the colonial global economy

Abstract

This article brings feminist critiques of capitalism into conversation with race-conscious International Political Economy to highlight the place of social reproduction in the colonial global economy. It does so by taking a provincial perspective, using Royal Leamington Spa as a case study to reveal how the provision of care for the elderly and the ill sustained colonial elites across the life course, while religious and educational practices helped transmit cultural values across generations and reproduce imperialism as an institutionalised social order. Whereas the finance houses of London, the factories of Manchester, and the ports of Liverpool and Bristol constitute nodal points for imperial circuits of capital, the spa town condenses the everyday practices through which bourgeois metropolitan empire was lived and made liveable. These findings point to a functional differentiation of economic space within the metropole and offer a critical reinterpretation of Middle England as a Whitened site of middle-class respectability.