Nick Bernards is an Associate Professor in Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. He is a political economist with research interests in the past and present intersections of labour, finance, and global governance. His work is historically-oriented, with an emphasis on how long-run legacies of colonialism have shaped the present context of sustainable development practice. Prior to starting at Warwick in 2017, he held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University, Canada, funded
by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He completed a PhD in International Relations at McMaster University in 2016. Nick has published on a range of issues around labour, finance, and governance including colonial histories, agrarian finance, informal economies, technological change, and international labour regulation. His first book, The Global Governance of Precarity (Routledge, 2018), examines the governance of irregular forms of labour in sub-Saharan Africa through a historical study of the activities of the International Labour Organization. His most recent book, A Critical History of Poverty Finance (Pluto Press, 2022) looks at the global history of efforts to extend financial services to the poorest. The
book puts recent initiatives promoting the use of new financial technologies in the context of a longer history dating back to inter-war colonialism. The book draws on this history as a way of examining the limits of neoliberal models of development, showing how efforts to resolve poverty through the construction of new markets have often exacerbated existing patterns of uneven development.