Colonialism and Modern Social Theory. Gurminder K. Bhambra
policies for land and territory for one’s ‘own’ citizens had been central to the European colonial project since much earlier times.
Across the nineteenth century, around 60 million Europeans left their countries of origin to make new lives and livelihoods for themselves on lands inhabited by others (Miège 1993). Each new cohort of Europeans was allocated land at the edges of the territory that had already been settled. This was done in order to extend political control over contested border territories. In this way Europeans from across the continent participated in the elimination and dispossession of the populations that preceded them and were thus complicit in the settler colonial project. At least seven million Germans moved to these lands – to the United States in the north and to Brazil and Argentina in the south – becoming, by the late nineteenth century, one of the largest immigrant groups in the north of the Americas (Bade 1995). Large-scale Polish emigration started in the period after the Franco-Prussian War in the late nineteenth century; by the turn to the twentieth century nearly 2 million Polish people had moved to the Americas, while about 300,000 Polish colonists went to Brazil, another settler colony, by 1939 (Zubrzycki 1953). Two million subjects of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary travelled to the Americas (Zahra 2016), as did more than 8 million Irish people (Delaney 2000); 1 million of the latter left as a result of the mid-century famine caused by British colonial rule. By 1890 nearly 1 million Swedes, one fifth of the total Swedish population, were living in lands colonised by (and as) the United States. In addition, 13.5 million British people moved to white settler colonies across the globe (Fedorowich and Thompson 2013).
As already indicated, in this book we treat the United States as a European empire. Some have claimed, on the basis of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, that the United States is the first new nation comparable with ones created after decolonisation in the twentieth century (Lipset 1963). However, it was white settler colonists in the Thirteen Colonies of the Eastern Seaboard that rebelled against the British government, demanding independence from what they regarded as illegitimate monarchic rule. In their terms, they were acting as free subjects empowered by the principles of Enlightenment. As Danielle Allen (2014) notes, the Declaration of Independence appealed ‘to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions’, which were ‘to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do’. The freedom of these colonies rested, however, on the appropriation of land from indigenous populations and on the creation of plantations worked by indigenous people, uprooted and enslaved Africans, as well as indentured servants from Europe; and the Declaration laid claim to the colonists’ right to treat these people as they did. After independence they expanded to the south and to the west, creating what Steven Hahn (2016) has called an American empire rather than a nation (see also Byrd 2011 and Frymer 2017). We do not, then, regard white settler independence movements, whether in the Americas or elsewhere, as postcolonial but as the very expression of European colonialism.2
European empires – and the conflicts between them – grew during the period in which sociological theory was consolidated, yet empire itself was hardly mentioned. When they were at their height, the popular nineteenth-century sociologist and social philosopher Herbert Spencer drew up a typology in which a ‘military’ or ‘militant’ society based on force and coercion gave way to an ‘industrial’ society based on voluntary production and exchange (Hart 2018). The sleight of hand that portrays these categories as opposed was made possible by representing each as an ‘ideal type’ and by separating the nation (‘industrial’) from its empire (‘militant’), notwithstanding that the nation represented itself and its institutions as imperial. Spencer was opposed to imperialism, but seemed unwilling to countenance that it was bound up with the systems of market exchange that he otherwise endorsed. A world once pacified into free trade could be represented separately from the mechanisms that created its conditions, and a moral sensibility oriented to peace and progress was left intact.
Spencer’s device is not idiosyncratic but typical of the way in which European social theory, at one and the same time, both acknowledged and displaced colonialism and empire. Within modern social theory, overseas possessions are a contingent fact, something in addition to the core aspects of national states and their associated national societies and how those are to be understood. By contrast, drawing on postcolonial thought, our argument is that colonialism and empire are central to modern social theory through effects that last to the present. As Aravamudan (2009: 40) has argued, ‘postcolonial interventions take aim at metropolitan etiologies that separate “domestic” from “overseas” political history’. Failure to recognise that the domestic and the overseas are coterminous is a severe weakness of contemporary social theory.
Contemporary Sociology and the Construction of Its Canons
What we propose, then, is a postcolonial intervention into the construction of modern social theory in its canonical form. Modern social theory represents a very particular kind of amnesia. Indeed, the significance of colonialism and empire is recognised in everyday culture – think, for example, of celebrations of ‘discoverers’ like Captain Cook and Christopher Columbus, of our knowledge of the Atlantic slave trade, or of the British empire itself; but it has no place within the system of theoretical categories that has developed in mainstream modern social theory. As might be expected, the expansive project of European colonialism could not go unremarked by writers who were living through it. This remains true even if they did not make it central to their reflections and were far from being critical of it. In part, the later amnesia is a consequence of developments within sociology itself, not least the construction of its own historical trajectory in the form of a canon.
As Raewyn Connell (1997) has argued, the idea of a set of founding figures who established a core conceptual framework or set of themes and thereby organised the discipline of sociology is relatively recent. According to her, this notion has two effects. One is to diminish the variety of voices of those who called themselves sociologists; the other is to amplify the voices of a few, who become the filter through which the history of the discipline is then viewed. In Connell’s view, the sociologists of the nineteenth century and their public – broadly, an educated and professional public – were, by necessity, fully aware of empire as the context that provided them with both opportunities and subject matter.
Empire made other peoples and places available to the ‘European gaze’, which in turn presented them and their beliefs and practices as both ‘other’ and ‘backward’ from the perspective of the achievements of European peoples – more specifically, north European peoples and their kin, in settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, and Australia. For Connell, much sociology, especially in the late nineteenth century, operated by cataloguing various practices associated with kinship, religion, political organisation, and so forth. It was therefore a fragmentary discipline, associated with developing an ‘encyclopaedic’ grasp of a mosaic of cultural practices of different peoples. In the next chapter we address aspects of this ‘gaze’ and the role it played in the development of stadial theory – that is, a theory according to which societal development comes about in progressive stages.
We do not claim that the idea of a canon is problematic in itself. As Frank Kermode (1985) argued, a canon represents a shorthand, a way of focusing attention on a specific aspect of a tradition. For Randall Collins (1997), it is a simple truism that a conversation carried out in the past had at the time many more interlocutors than come to be recognised retrospectively, in accounts of that past that focus on selected contributions – which thereby become canonical. He argues that this should not be the reason for a ‘guilt trip’. However, emphasising this rather misses Connell’s point, which is about how a conversation of the past is edited and which topics are carried forward. For our purposes, what Connell very nicely sets out is a disjunction that arises in representations of the history of sociology when the latter comes to be understood as being about the self-understanding of modernity rather than about an external understanding of modernity’s ‘others’. While empire is the unselfconscious context for the former, it is elided in the latter. The idea that sociology’s distinctive and specific topic is modern society emerges primarily in the post-Second World War period and is associated