| Sumario: | Economic anthropologists now carry out fieldwork in settings for which the ethnographic method was never designed, amongst powerful financial actors who are notoriously difficult to access, and in contexts which transcend geographical boundaries. This has engendered a re‐orientation of anthropology, to consider not only the economic lives of people but also the social life of devices and concepts. Drawing on ethnographic readings of corporate documents as well as fieldwork with various fee‐earning intermediaries, this article looks at two concepts, 'emerging markets' and 'human capital', that are directed towards the making of investability in financial imaginaries and thus play a critical role in the production of financialization. Although often portrayed as neutral forms of knowledge, such concepts of economy, it is argued, are implicated in processes of racialization and that financialization is enacted through and produces racial forms. Responding to recent calls to attend to the legacy of empire and colonialism in financial capitalism, and inspired by the Black Radical Tradition, this article shows how colonial ideas of racial ordering are incorporated into these economic concepts. Thus, the invocation of these concepts, which play a vital role in creating legitimacy for intermediaries and their interventions, entrenches racializing dynamics of financialized capitalism.
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