"Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it's much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration"
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George is doing something sly and bracing here: she strips the romance and pageantry out of empire and points to its upgraded operating system. “Debt” isn’t framed as an unfortunate byproduct of development; it’s pitched as a technology of rule. The blunt superlatives - “powerful,” “useful,” “much better” - are deliberately abrasive, because they force the listener to sit with an immoral efficiency. Colonialism, in her telling, wasn’t abandoned because it was wrong; it was retired because it was expensive.
The line’s real punch is in its contrast between visible coercion and invisible constraint. Armies and administrations announce domination; debt normalizes it. When control is exerted through repayment schedules, conditional loans, credit ratings, austerity mandates, and “reforms,” the violence is reframed as bookkeeping. The colonized subject becomes the debtor-citizen, disciplined not by a foreign flag but by the promise of “responsibility” and the threat of exclusion from global markets.
Context matters: George emerged as a leading critic of international financial institutions and “structural adjustment” politics, especially from the 1970s onward, when the IMF and World Bank increasingly tied lending to privatization, spending cuts, and market liberalization. Her quote compresses that critique into a single, media-ready provocation. The subtext is accusatory: debt isn’t neutral, and neither are the institutions that manage it. It’s empire with plausible deniability - domination that can insist, with a straight face, that it’s merely enforcing the rules.
The line’s real punch is in its contrast between visible coercion and invisible constraint. Armies and administrations announce domination; debt normalizes it. When control is exerted through repayment schedules, conditional loans, credit ratings, austerity mandates, and “reforms,” the violence is reframed as bookkeeping. The colonized subject becomes the debtor-citizen, disciplined not by a foreign flag but by the promise of “responsibility” and the threat of exclusion from global markets.
Context matters: George emerged as a leading critic of international financial institutions and “structural adjustment” politics, especially from the 1970s onward, when the IMF and World Bank increasingly tied lending to privatization, spending cuts, and market liberalization. Her quote compresses that critique into a single, media-ready provocation. The subtext is accusatory: debt isn’t neutral, and neither are the institutions that manage it. It’s empire with plausible deniability - domination that can insist, with a straight face, that it’s merely enforcing the rules.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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