Timothy Mitchell’s previous books – Colonising Egypt (1988), Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (2002), Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011) – examine the entanglements between cultural, environmental and political forces in the making of modernity. This latest work expands on these earlier projects to present a new account of colonial capitalism and the contemporary socio-economic systems shaped by it. His argument is that from around the mid-nineteenth century onwards we have been plundering the future to pay for the present.

Rather than viewing money and profit as flows that follow from earlier accumulations, Mitchell wants us to view them as claims about the future. In tracing the history of interest, for example, he shows that rather than this being a way of representing how money ‘grows’, it is more clearly understood as a way of putting a discount on future money when it is purchased in the present. This is intimately tied to the history of infrastructure. Creating railway networks involved huge spending, and so promoters of railways developed new ways of projecting future incomes that would allow this outlay to be paid off. In effect, future passengers would have to pay for money spent in the present, and at a high enough rate to allow for profit as well. This allowed railway and other infrastructure initiatives to access wealth conjured from an imagined future that the building of the infrastructure would then contribute to bringing into being. Mitchell opens the book with a brief account of the rapid rise in Uber’s stock price after it went public. He argues that the joint-stock company is another tool to transfer wealth from the future to the present; future profits (in other words, the rates passengers will need to pay and the gap between these and what Uber pays drivers) are what drive stock prices, not current profit or loss. This nineteenth-century innovation has become the defining feature of twenty-first-century economic common sense. The twin forces of credit and interest, when used as the building blocks of an economic system, leave the present in debt to the past, reaching for growth tomorrow to service these debts and pay for today’s costs. The alibi is that you can get something for nothing, but in fact payment is simply delayed until the future.

This all might sound rather abstract, but the book is at its most compelling when covering specific histories to construct this wider narrative. In chapter 2, Mitchell presents the history of British interventions on the Nile as ‘Rivercide’, the destruction of existing ecological relations in order to create and tax future profits. He shows that systems of wells allowed far more reliable irrigation in the Nile Valley than presented by mainstream historians based on colonial sources, and indeed that fragile, flood dependent agriculture was more a product of dam infrastructure than a justification for it. What damming actually allowed was the capitalization of Nile management, its transformation into a product that could be exchanged on the market. In chapter 6, Mitchell shows how efforts to regularize land ownership in Egypt and elsewhere in the global south, intended to open up routes to credit and thus encourage new entrepreneurship, in fact made peasants newly vulnerable to losing their land, and led to ownership concentrating into fewer hands. The mortgage, rather than being a tool that enables property ownership, emerges as a mechanism to make it more precarious by putting smaller owners at risk of foreclosure. The beneficiaries from capitalizing land ownership are not individuals or families living on their own land, but larger owners, businesses, governments and multinationals that can now trade such land. This reader was reminded of how twenty-first-century students in the UK are asked to give up part of their future income to pay for their studies, running up a debt with their own future selves; no doubt others will find that Mitchell’s arguments resonate in distinct ways in their own contexts. At times, the shift from specific details to broader analysis can be a little abrupt, and the way the argument builds across the last two centuries may feel repetitive to some, but overall the book is poised, rigorous and elegantly written.

This is an important book for anyone working on modern history. For urban historians, it raises vital questions over where wealth comes from and how payment models for construction shape society. The climate crisis is not the main focus of the book, but is threaded through its analysis of how land, water and home became financial objects. Ongoing economic growth is essential to our exploitation of the future, but cannot be depended on when that future will see the breakdown of the climate we have had. A future that is perhaps already over-exploited is thus still further depleted and destabilized. This book offers an urgent new critique; all of us interested in the past and future of urban living will need to rise to its challenge of temporal rethinking.