By Raewyn Connell
Raewyn Connell is an Australian feminist sociologist and Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney, best known for co-founding masculinity studies and developing the influential concept of hegemonic masculinity. Her work spans gender, class, education and global social theory, including the notable book Southern Theory. Connell has published extensively and is widely recognised for reshaping how sociologists understand gender and power.
Empire, economy, extraversion
The Global Economy of Knowledge refers to the way in which knowledge is produced and circulated on a world scale, in unequal relationships between global centres of power and the colonised, semi-colonised, and post-colonial world. The way of organising knowledge that is currently dominant in universities around the world is often called ‘Western science’. This name is misleading. It’s true that the system of research-based ‘disciplines’, such as botany or sociology, was mainly formulated in the universities, scientific societies, museums and journals of western Europe and North America. But this process depended on a massive flow of information from the colonised, semi-colonised, and post-colonial world, over the past 500 years. For intellectuals of the Imperial powers, the colonised world served as a vast data mine.
This is abundantly shown in the history of both natural and social sciences. For centuries, explorers, naval and military officers, colonial officials, missionaries, and eventually colonial universities, collected information and shipped it to the imperial centre. Scientific figures as well-known as Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt went out to the colonised world specifically to observe and collect. The process is still going on, though today the collection of data is increasingly automated. If we need a short name for our dominant knowledge system, we should call it not Western science but Imperial science.
The worldwide economy of knowledge created in this way still operates today, and has a structural similarity to the material economy of global capitalism. Raw materials, i.e. data, are imported from the colonised world and accumulated in the imperial centre. The knowledge institutions of the imperial centre process the data, developing methodologies and theories. The manufactured products, in the form of disciplinary knowledge and applied science, are then exported to the periphery.
As the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji has pointed out, the way that knowledge workers in the majority world do their work is profoundly shaped by this economy. They are required to adopt an attitude that Hountondji calls ‘extroversion’ – that is, being oriented to dominant intellectual authority that comes from outside their own societies. It’s the same pattern that Hussein Alatas from Singapore called ‘academic dependency’, and the Australian literary critic A. A. Phillips called the ‘cultural cringe’.
References
There is a very large literature on these subjects. Here are some valuable collections of research and theory, in several fields, that will provide ways into the debates.
- Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott and Máximo Sozzo, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
- Wendy Harcourt, ed. The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development. Palgrave, 2016.
- Eric Macé, ed. An Invitation to Non-Hegemonic World Sociology. Rowman & Littlefield, 2024.
- Leandro Rodriguez Medina and Sandra Harding, eds. Decentralizing Knowledges: Essays on Distributed Agency. Duke University Press, 2025.
