Rentier Capitalism and the New Railroad and Telegraph Imperialism: The Political Economy of Transportation and Telecommunications Infrastructure in the Philippines

Over the course of the past two decades, the infrastructure for transportation and telecommunications across Southeast Asia has been dramatically transformed by economic growth, urbanization, industrial deepening, and technological change, with foreign investment and global integration enabling and impelling rapid-paced change. These trends have been accompanied by rising concern — and recurring controversy — about local corruption, cartels, and regulatory capture, on the one hand, and the geo-economic threats posed by the ‘rise of China’, the Belt and Road Initiative, and escalating tensions between the US and China, on the other. Against this backdrop, this lecture uses the case of the Philippines to investigate and unpack the political economy of transportation and telecommunications infrastructure, emphasizing the prevalence of rentier capitalism and the powerful influence and interests of Japan and the United States in these key sectors of Southeast Asian economies. 

 

 

John T. Sidel is the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics and the Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (Stanford University Press, 1999), (with Eva-Lotta Hedman) Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (Routledge, 2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (East-West Center, 2007), (with Jaime Faustino) Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (The Asia Foundation, 2000), and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2021). He is currently completing a book manuscript titled The Making and Unmaking of Islam in World Politics.