Postcolonial approaches to understanding economies are of increasing academic and political significance as questions about the nature of globalisation, transnational flows of capital and workers and the making and re-making of territorial borders assume centre stage in debates about contemporary economies and policy. Despite the growing academic and political urgency in understanding how 'other' cultures encounter 'the west', economics-oriented approaches within social sciences (e.g. Development Economics, Economic Geography and the discipline of Economics itself) have been slow to engage with the ideas and challenges posed by postcolonial critiques. In turn, postcolonial approaches have been criticised for their simplistic treatment of 'the economic' and for not engaging with existing economic analyses of poverty and wealth creation.