ABSTRACT
I use Polanyi's (1944) concept of ‘self-protection of society’ to argue that political Islam and political Hinduism are reactions to the effects of self-regulating market systems imposed by European powers on Ottoman and South Asian geographies. I argue that the consolidation of the post-1857 British imperial formation in South Asia and the gradual disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East in the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries destabilized and transformed established networks and homogenized different spatial scales through which land, labor, and money relations customarily worked. In the process, society-centered, national, and transnational spatial scales of resistance like political Islam and political Hinduism emerged to contest and transform colonial ‘spatial fixes.’ I situate the emergence and development of these counter-movements first during 1870–1945, the epoch of the crisis of British hegemony, and the unfolding of high finance and the crisis of classical liberalism. The second epoch, starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is the epoch of the crisis of US hegemony and the unfolding of a neoliberal financial expansion, alongside the pursuit of an imperial military fix to the recurring problem of capital-overaccumulation.
