Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?

In this landmark book, the author of the acclaimed The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination of capitalism as it increasingly exists today in the ‘advanced’ economies of the Global North. Dominated by institutions and individuals profiting from the control of scarce, revenue-generating assets, Brett Christophers styles this contemporary socioeconomic system ‘rentier capitalism’, and he critically dissects its emergence, forms and implications. The empirical focus of Rentier Capitalism’s critique is the United Kingdom, a country and political economy that today bear all the hallmarks of rentier ascendancy: immense concentration of resources, constrained competition, vast inequalities of income and wealth, and growing economic stagnation. From finance to land, intellectual property to infrastructure and natural resources to digital platforms, Christophers identifies the key types of assets that scaffold UK rentier capitalism, the key actors that control and profit from them and the key consequences for everyone else. With profound lessons for other countries subject to rentier dominance or its growing spectre, Christophers’ examination of the UK case is indispensable to those wanting not just to understand rentierism but supplant it. Frequently invoked but never previously analysed and illuminated in all its depth and variety, rentier capitalism is here laid bare for the first time.