Timothy Mitchell’s The Alibi of Capital examines how capitalism generates wealth by consuming the future through imperial expansion and environmental destruction. Mitchell traces the mechanisms of capitalisation, credit, and coercion that convert future assets into present income, arguing that concepts like finance, technology, and growth function as ideological cover for systematic extraction. The book connects historical imperial projects—river destruction, territorial colonisation, infrastructure expansion, and carbon exploitation—to contemporary climate catastrophe, revealing how present generations inherit debt from earlier resource depletion. Published by Verso, this work engages with critical theory regarding capitalism’s structural violence and temporal logic, making it essential to understanding how systemic extraction operates beneath the rhetoric of economic growth.
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