Colonialism and Modern Social Theory. Gurminder K. Bhambra

Preface and Acknowledgements

      In this book we discuss modern social theory in the context of the history of European colonialism and the construction of the United States as a nation with a ‘manifest destiny’ across the continent. The dominant accounts of modernity, which encompass ideas of liberty, democracy, and progress, are strongly determined by these events. Colonialism is largely absent from these understandings, yet it haunts everyday life in the self-defined centres of modernity. It forms the unacknowledged context of the ‘migrant crisis’ in Europe and of populist ressentiment and rejections of multiculturalism.

      We came to write this book after a period of research leave in the United States in 2014–15. This coincided with celebrations of fifty years since the passing of the Voting Rights Act in the United States and an increasing recognition that, rather than having been built upon, many of the gains of this period were being dismantled. Black Lives Matter had recently emerged as a distinctive new protest movement – new, that is, to those unfamiliar with the facts of what Michelle Alexander calls ‘the new Jim Crow’ and resistance to it. Among our many conversations, and with the benefit of distance, we necessarily turned to the issue of how our own context in the United Kingdom was similar. The referendum on Scottish independence was under way and was making evident the fractures within Britain, fractures that would open more dramatically with the referendum to leave the European Union a couple of years later.

These events were part of everyday lived experience, yet seemed at odds with the dominant sociological sensibility. An overwhelming majority of academics supported remaining in the European Union and, in the aftermath of the vote, there was a call that they needed to reconnect with ‘ordinary’ citizens. A similar call was issued in the United States after the election of Donald Trump to the office of president. It is right that there should be introspection about such moments, reflection on sociology’s broader failure to recognise the underlying currents and offer cogent analyses of the situation. Of course, it would have been better if these analyses had been available before the events – as the currents have been running over a long course. Just as the assumptions of economics came to be questioned after its failure to anticipate the financial crisis of 2008, so the assumptions of sociology and other social sciences are in question now.

      One response is in favour of a realignment with the current flow. This is evident in calls by some in the United States and Europe to recognise the ‘legitimate’ claims of a white working class that has been ‘left behind’. However, the apparent normalisation of these issues as being about ‘class’ and not about ‘identity’ reveals the strongest identity claim of all. After all, class issues could most easily have been addressed regardless of race and ethnicity, through inclusive social and economic policies. The focus on a special disadvantage to white workers, who were nonetheless relatively more advantaged than ethnic minority workers, indicated that the concern was less with economic disadvantage than with the inclusion of multicultural others.

      Here we want to identify the social structural