Global Rentier Capitalism

Recent work on rent and rentierism has offered a distinctive and fresh approach to understanding and explaining contemporary capitalism. Drawing on political economy, economics, geography and sociology, this research has brought together distinct theoretical traditions in original and fertile ways to reshape the study of issues related to class, political-economic change and environmental challenges.

This book critically engages with these theoretical resources to analyse and evaluate economies in the Global North and South. It offers historical, theoretical and empirical accounts of rentierism, making important cross-disciplinary and global connections. Its four parts address global rentier capitalism under the headings of historical lessons, theoretical developments and empirical studies of rentierism in the Global North and South. It will be the first book of its kind to offer a global account of rentier capitalism.

It will be of immense interest to readers in economics, political economy, sociology, geography and development studies.

Balihar Sanghera is Reader in Sociology at the University of Kent. His research has focused on class, morality and rentier capitalism in Central Asia. He has published in leading journals, including the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Capital and Class, Theory and Society, International Sociology and The Sociological Review. He is a co-author with Elmira Satybaldieva of Rentier Capitalism and Its Discontents: Power, Morality and Resistance in Central Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and co-editor with Gideon Calder of Ethics, Economy and Social Science: Dialogues with Andrew Sayer (Routledge, 2022).