This book reveals the economic motivations underpinning colonial neocolonial and neoliberal
eras of global capitalism that are represented in critiques of inequality in postcolonial
fiction. Today's economic inequality suffered disproportionately by indigenous and minority
groups of postcolonial societies in both developed and developing countries is a direct
outcome of the colonial-era imposition of capitalist structures and practices. The longue durée
world-systems approach in this study reveals repeating patterns and trends in the mechanics of
capitalism that create and maintain inequality. As well as this it reveals the social and
cultural beliefs and practices that justify and support inequality yet equally which resist
and condemn it.Through analysis of narrative representations of wealth accumulation and
ownership structures of internal inequality between the rich and the poor within cultural
communities and the psychology of capitalism that engenders particular emotions and behaviour
this study brings postcolonial literary economics to the neoliberal debate arguing for the
important contribution of the imaginary to the pressing issue of economic inequality and its
solutions.
