Tuesday 9 June 2026 5:15pm to 6:45pm
Arts School, New Museums Site Lecture Theatre A
About
Today, extraordinary wealth seems to arrive from nowhere. The trick of conjuring this unearned wealth is, in fact, the key to understanding capitalism’s origins and a clue to why the catastrophe of climate collapse is upon us: value is created by consuming the future. The Alibi of Capital explains how this came about through the imperial expansion of the West, encumbering today’s generations with repayments on earlier extractions. Timothy Mitchell identifies the forms of capitalisation, credit, and coercion that turn prospective assets into present income. Rejecting the common idea that claims on the future create only financial or fictitious capital, he traces the terraforming projects – the destruction of rivers, the colonising of territory, the expansion of infrastructure, and the burning of carbon – through which the future has been squandered. Terms such as finance, technology, the economy, and growth function as alibis that conceal this devastating form of extraction.
Speaker Bio: Timothy Mitchell is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University. Educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge and Princeton University in the fields of law, history, and politics, he works across the disciplinary boundaries of history and the social sciences. His writings, which have been translated into Arabic and fifteen other languages, examine the history of colonialism, the politics of energy, the political economy of capitalism, and the making of expert knowledge. His books include Colonising Egypt, Rule of Experts, and Carbon Democracy. His latest book, The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow, was published in March 2026.
Please note that this Seminar will not take place in our usual venue. It will instead take place in Lecture Theatre A of the Arts School on the New Museums Site.
This event will be followed by a drinks reception.