The approach challenges orthodox definitions of economic categories. Since the universal, ahistorical use of these categories is debatable, we accept, following historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘the[ir] dual nature’, and interrogate their ‘intellectual and social histories’. It is urgent, for example, to question the Western cultural logic that governs financial practices and instruments such as insurance and property rights, and to expose the coloniality of an equation that synonymises productivity and profit, or custody and patrimony.