My friend Couze Venn, who has died aged 79, was a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a pioneer of cultural, post-colonial and social theory, as well as being a generous and erudite man.

Born into a large Tamil family in Mauritius, he grew up speaking French, English and Creole. As a young child he suffered an accident in which he was burned with boiling water; it was so bad that he was not expected to live. Unable to go to school, he developed the habit of shutting himself away to read, an inclination that never left him.

Couze’s father, Goinsamy Venkatasamy, a civil servant and politician, agreed to send his son to university in Britain – on the proviso that he studied mathematics. Couze duly took a maths degree at St Andrews in 1961, although he was much more interested in philosophy.

It was in the heady years of the late 1960s that he first found a place for his intellectual fascination for “difficult” French work, becoming one of the originators of the journal Ideology & Consciousness, which introduced into Britain the work of French theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. He contributed to the 1984 book, Changing the Subject, which helped to shape critical work in psychology.

Couze’s first academic post was as a lecturer in cultural and post-colonial studies at North East London Polytechnic (now the University of East London). This led to his becoming deputy director in 1998 of the Theory, Culture & Society Centre at Nottingham Trent University, which produced the journal Theory, Culture and Society.

A highlight of his work there was the New Encyclopaedia Project, which tried to rethink the encyclopedia as a source of knowledge in the context of rapidly changing technologies, different traditions of knowing and competing constructions of “truth”. When the centre moved in 2004 to Goldsmiths, he moved with it.

Couze’s book Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity (2000), addressed the making of Europe as the “modern west”, arguing that postmodernism was inseparable from and underpinned by the suffering of postcoloniality.

His 2005 book, The Postcolonial Challenge, further developed this idea, exploring the place of neoliberalism within global poverty and the developing world. In Poverty, Inequality, Education (2014), written with his wife, Francesca Ashurst, he confronted the history of the pathologisation and criminalisation of poverty.

Towards the end of his life – still working, supervising, writing, editing and translating while becoming increasingly frail through prostate cancer – he wrote one last book. After Capital (2018) offered the most comprehensive account of the nature of capitalism to have been produced for many years, making the case for “creating a means of living together beyond profit, wealth or exploitation”.

Couze is survived by Francesca, their son, Hari, stepson Sam, stepdaughter Scarlett and granddaughter Ivy.