Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Holmwood, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, Polity Press, 2021. £55 hbk, £17.99 pbk.
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In both Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Connected Sociologies (Bloomsbury, 2014), Gurminder Bhambra addressed colonialism in relation to sociological theory, and the concepts of modernity and ‘Eurocentrism’. Here I treat this jointly authored volume as a continuation of the project, and I conclude that it is close to failing completely.
In her earlier monographs Bhambra said little about the specific characteristics of colonialism in terms of timing, character, and impact from place to place, or about differences between the various instances of imperial rule, as her interest lay elsewhere. Stated succinctly, she argued that ‘whatever Europe is, cannot be understood outside of its imperial relationships’ (2007: 19), and Rethinking Modernity closed with what were in effect three theses on colonialism:
Rethinking Modernity called for ‘connected histories’ (following Subrahmanyam, 1997) as a means of addressing these issues, while Connected Sociologies pointed to ‘the historical connections generated by processes of colonialism, enslavement, dispossession and appropriation, that were previously elided in mainstream sociology in favour of narrower understandings, as well as to the use of “connections” as a way of recuperating these alternative histories, and, therefore, sociologies’ (3). But as no such connected histories or sociologies were provided, these aspects of the texts were no more than ‘promissory notes’ – this ironically being a term Bhambra herself applied (2014: 100) to Raewyn Connell’s far more substantial explorations in Southern Theory (2007).
At the same time, Connell’s account of the way that sociology emerged as a discipline only in the late nineteenth century, and underwent a significant ‘epistemological break’ after the First World War shattered illusions regarding the inevitable onward march of peace and progress (1997, 2007), undermined Bhambra’s analytical framework. Bhambra (seemingly unaware of Connell’s 1997 article at the time) argued in 2007 that all sociological theories of modernity ‘rested on the assumptions of rupture and difference – a temporal rupture that distinguishes a traditional, agrarian past from the modern, industrial present; and a fundamental difference that distinguishes Europe from the rest of the world’ (1), with its implication that they were ‘Eurocentric’ in that they reflected ‘the belief, implicit or otherwise, in the world historical significance of events believed to have developed endogenously within the cultural-geographical sphere of Europe’ (5, emphasis original). These sweeping claims required her at a minimum to be thoroughly familiar with ‘the social, cultural, political and economic changes that took place in Western Europe from the mid-sixteenth century onwards’ (2), among which she accorded prominence to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the ‘industrial revolution’, and to analyse in depth the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Weber (whom she identified as ‘the primary theorists of classical sociology’), along with significant precursors, among whom she named Montesquieu, Ferguson, and Adam Smith (2). To deliver in addition on the promise of ‘connected histories’ would have required in turn considerable archival research supported by linguistic skills.
This would be a tall order for anyone, and Bhambra did not attempt it. Her accounts of the constituent elements of ‘modernity’ as she saw them were cursory, and if Marx, Durkheim, Weber, or their predecessors ever used the term, let alone theorised it in a way that made it central to their analysis, she offered no evidence for it. In fact, she made only brief and perfunctory reference to the writings of those identified, and fell headlong into the error of reading back into the past a synthesis that came together, if at all, from the mid-twentieth century on, and primarily in textbooks at that. Lengthy sections of the book were only tangentially relevant to the strong claims advanced. It relied heavily on snippets from secondary sources taken out of context, and passed in silence over the fact that some of those same sources failed to support and often frankly refuted her argument (Bouwsma, 1979, Rüsen 1985, Roth, 1987, and De Vries 1994 being especially flagrant cases in point). Much more damagingly, even when aware that there were no grounds for relying upon the notion of any accepted understanding of a sociological canon prior to the late nineteenth century, and that Comte and Spencer were generally located within it once it emerged, while Marx and Weber were not, she ploughed on regardless, keeping Marx and Weber to the fore. Her attempt to rescue her thesis on sociological theory and modernity in response to Connell (2014: 98) was inevitably embarrassingly weak.
Does this matter? In some respects, maybe. But as regards the three theses on colonialism and empire, not at all. They are important in their own right, and worded as they are, they do not depend upon arguments for either rupture, or a form of ‘difference’ that involves endogeneity. Nor need they imply that the ‘modern state’ was exclusively the product of slavery, colonialism and imperialism, or that slavery, colonialism and empire were unknown outside ‘Europe’ or ‘the West’. They are, of course, ‘Eurocentric’, in that they argue strongly that European practices did and do still shape the world, though in malign ways that sustain and multiply severe inequalities. And rightly so. But there are other issues that do matter for the theses on colonialism. These are Bhambra’s characterisation of Marx, her failure to engage with political economy or its critique, and her consistent subordination of the logic of capitalism to colonialism. By treating Marx as a sociologist (he was not) she writes out the critique of political economy that was the essence of his work, and grossly distorts its character. By lumping him with Weber and Durkheim she renders invisible the extent to which the work of the latter two (like ‘marginal’ economics in the same period, or the ‘political science’ that produced the likes of ‘modernization theory’ and continues today) was largely conceived and taken up as an alternative to Marxism and to class antagonism as a focus of social analysis. And by ignoring political economy, classical or contemporary, she allows capitalism to feature as an aspect of ‘modernity’ without providing any analysis of its dynamics.
It is notable that the first of the three ‘theses on colonialism’ above makes no reference to capitalism. This is no momentary lapse. Instead of insisting that the playing out of the antagonisms inherent in the capitalist mode of production, past or present, cannot be understood except on a global scale that takes proper account of the history and continuing effects of slavery, colonialism and empire, which is both important and true, Bhambra writes capitalism out of her analysis altogether at crucial points. But if ‘Nisbet’s understanding of sociology emerging as a response to the problem of order created by the conditions of modernity – as exemplified by the twin revolutions of industrialism and revolutionary democracy – has been generally accepted within the discipline’ (2007: 52), it is precisely because ‘fundamental questions of order and the legitimation of power’ were posed, especially from the late nineteenth century on, by pro-bourgeois rule in individual states over a dispossessed majority endowed with political rights. It’s quite right to say that the fact that leading industrial states were also imperial states affected the way in which these issues presented themselves and were addressed. But Bhambra does not explore the history or the character of connections between capitalism on the one hand and slavery, empire and colonialism on the other. Are they fundamentally mutually supportive and self-reproducing, or not? Does the relationship between them change over time? Is it not possible that a pattern of accumulation based upon colonialism, enslavement, dispossession and appropriation can come to hinder the development of the kinds of practices (in innovation, for example) conducive to competitiveness in global markets (as argued, for example, by leading figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, and as a Marxist perspective would suggest)? The biggest failure of Rethinking Modernity, not remedied in Connected Sociologies, was that it appealed to the study of connections, but did not address those most relevant to the shaping of the contemporary world, assuming instead a one-way process.
The failure to engage seriously with Marx was at the heart of this: and the following example from Connected Sociologies is particularly striking:
‘Both Karl Marx (1976 [1867]) and Max Weber (1905 [NB, the entry in the bibliography is to the 1930 edition translated by Parsons]), for example, sought to outline the peculiar conditions of Europe vis-à-vis the rest of the world that they believed to have given rise to the world-historical processes of capitalism (for discussion, see Bhambra 2011a)’ (6).
The references are to Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1 respectively. But Marx did not seek ‘to outline the peculiar conditions of Europe vis-à-vis the rest of the world that [he] believed to have given rise to the world-historical processes of capitalism’. His project – the critique of political economy – was quite different: to figure out the logic of the capitalist mode of production in abstraction from such historical experience. He saw its origins in the social division of labour, the production of commodities, and the emergence of free labour, but this was a conceptual framework, not at all tied to time and place. He had nothing at all to say about ‘the peculiar conditions of Europe vis-á-vis the rest of the world’, or about the origins of capitalism. And in fact the 2011 essay to which Bhambra sends the reader for her evidence for these claims has no direct reference to any text by Marx (being largely concerned with twentieth century Marxists), and so offers no evidence at all on the point at issue. The one tangentially relevant statement, characteristically from a secondary source, shows her confusion:
‘Basically, the capitalist mode of production is said to rest on a singular relation between capital and labour that is argued to be its intrinsic form. This is the “purely economic” wage contract that, as Anderson puts it, paraphrasing Marx, rests in “the equal exchange between free agents which reproduces, hourly and daily, inequality and oppression”. No other relations – that is, forms of unfree labour such as slave labour or bonded labour – are allowed to be integral to the emergence and development of capitalism (Bhambra, 2011: 676, emphasis mine).
Two levels of analysis are run together here. The first two sentences are, not surprisingly given the source, perfectly accurate. The third confuses the logic of the capitalist mode of production, considered in abstraction from any specific historical circumstances, with the ‘emergence and development of capitalism’ as a historical phenomenon.
I come to Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, then, with three questions in mind. First, how are the theses on colonialism and empire taken forward? Second, are the weaknesses in Bhambra’s account of sociology as a discipline and the issue of ‘modernity’ addressed? And third, how are the work of Marx and the relationship between colonialism/empire on the one hand and capitalism on the other portrayed?
On the first of these points, it restates the project launched with Rethinking Modernity and highlights its contemporary significance:
‘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 popular ressentiment and rejections of multiculturalism’ (vii).
On the second, it makes some tactical/strategic adjustments, the most prominent of which, evident in the title, is that the focus on ‘sociology’ is extended to the more generic term of ‘modern social theory’, with politics and history added. Hobbes (29-32), Locke (32-8), and Hegel (46-50) are briefly discussed, and chapters on Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Du Bois follow. Connell’s critique is accepted (16), though without reflection on the implications for the reading of ‘modernity’ back into the ‘canon’, and it is acknowledged that Marx was a late addition and a rather special case (18). In addition, race is identified as ‘central to the social structures of modernity’ (viii); the American Revolution and the United States are added in; Spanish, Portuguese (and Italian) colonialisms are dropped on the grounds that ‘European social theory came to be associated with northern Europe’ (4); and a distinction between older ‘empires of domination’ and European ‘empires of conquest and extraction’ is introduced, but not developed at any length (8).
While Bhambra and Holmwood are now ‘seeking to address the categories that form mainstream sociology in order to reconstruct modern social theory through dialogue’, the focus on ‘modernity’ remains: ‘We seek a more adequate account of modernity, inclusive of its otherwise disregarded legacies of colonialism, so that we can more effectively address pressing issues of the present. In this way we are seeking to reconstruct mainstream social theory rather than to dismiss it’ (1). In particular, they suggest that the treatment of colonialism as premodern ‘makes it easier to neglect the fact that European colonialism transformed into imperialism’:
‘Identifying social theory with the period from 1830 onwards, then, makes it easier to normalise colonialism and to take for granted the overseas possessions of the national European states whose political structures of the rule of law, market exchange, bureaucratic administration, and political representation are proposed as part of the distinctive social and political configuration of modernity, independently of colonialism and imperialism. We shall argue instead that colonialism and imperialism are integral to modernity and not contingently related to it. Colonialism is not a manifestation of commercial enterprise in the last throes of feudalism, but is constitutive of the commercialism that would come to be seen as characteristic of modernity and integral to the development of the social and political institutions associated with it. By contrast, when empire is addressed, it is as a manifestation not of European modernity, but of the political organisation of earlier social formations. In this book we argue for the need to disentangle modern European empires from more general conceptions of empire (from before the existence of European colonial empires) and for the need to understand how modern European ‘nation’ states are shaped by their imperial and colonial past’ (6).
If there is one strong thesis to emerge from this, it is that colonialism is an integral aspect of contemporary global capitalism, but that modern social theory, where it addresses it at all, tends to relegate it to the past. But the first part of this argument is barely defended. The focus moves quickly from a brief review of empire to ‘Contemporary Sociology and the Construction of its Canons’ (15-21) and ‘Decolonising European Social Theory’ (21-24). The conclusion subsequently identifies ‘five fictions of modern social theory’, relating to: the idea of stages of society; liberty, autonomy and modern subjectivity; the idea of the nation state; class and formally free labour; and the fiction of sociological reasoning (211-215). Oddly, despite the fact that the introduction closes with the insistence that: ‘Addressing colonial histories is a necessary preliminary to the reconstruction of social theory’ (24), colonial histories are not directly addressed in the intervening pages. They focus instead, as noted above, on brief or extended discussions of a range of authors of ‘modern social theory’.
This is both puzzling and disappointing. As a consequence of a number of bad choices, the book is a big step in a wrong direction. As noted, it attempts a reconstruction of social theory without first addressing the colonial histories that it declares to be a ‘necessary preliminary’. Its limited foray into ‘modern social theory’ beyond sociology (Hobbes, Locke and Hegel) only serves to draw attention to the vast and much more relevant literature they do not consider. The strong thesis from Rethinking Modernity that all sociological theories of modernity rest on assumptions of rupture and difference is restated (5), but then forgotten: it is not deployed as a framework for the analysis of the five ‘sociologists’ considered at chapter length, and wouldn’t fit them if it was. In light of the continued talk of a canon, it is odd that Comte, Spencer and Parsons are not included. Then for Tocqueville, Marx, Weber and Durkheim, the argument is a negative one: broad overviews of their work are offered, with repeated reference to their failure to give due attention to colonialism or slavery, but beyond that no unifying analytical framework is in evidence. And a continued difficulty with political economy means at the same time that the relationship between colonialism, empire and slavery on the one hand and capitalism on the other is still not closely examined. In the end we are no further forward, and arguably further back, than we were with Rethinking Modernity – with its propositions on the significance of colonialism and empire undeveloped, and in danger of being brought into disrepute by the company they keep.
The opening to ‘modern social theory’ is problematic for two simple reasons. First, once you accept that there is no identifiable body of ‘mainstream sociology’ before the late nineteenth century, and throw the net wider, you come up against the fact that the dominant forms of social theory in the preceding centuries were the connected fields of law, theology, political economy, and political and moral philosophy. All demand consideration. Second, once you declare your concern to be with the modern state and colonialism, you do best to look first at the literature that bears most directly on this topic, particularly at the beginning of this period, as states grappled with the practical and moral implications of colonial rule, and in the mid-twentieth century, as they grappled with the challenge of decolonisation. For the early period, this makes the work of the Dominican friar Francisco de Vitoria and others in the ‘Salamanca School’ on Spanish colonialism in the ‘New World’ vitally important (Koskenniemi, 2021: 117-211). Bhambra and Holmwood exclude this, along with the entire record of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. For the period of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century, the large body of work published as Studies in Political Development under the auspices of the US Social Science Research Council Committee on Comparative Politics is far more relevant than that of the ‘modernization theorists’ profiled by Bhambra (2007: 57-64, 2014: 20-25). The authors of these volumes, Gabriel Almond, G. Bingham Powell and Lucian Pye prominent among them, drew critically on modernization theory but rejected from the start the idea of ‘unilinear evolutionism’, along with stark contrasts between traditional and modern, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and the like, insisting that all societies exhibited varying blends of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ features. Successful political development, whether in newly independent states or in the United States itself, required carefully constrained forms of democracy with a strong measure of elite control, to be secured by the deliberation retention and cultivation of some ‘traditional’ features – notably, a willingness to accept the guidance of your betters (Cammack, 1997: 35-62).
The damaging consequences of a strictly limited opening to ‘modern social theory’ are most evident in Chapter One, ‘Hobbes to Hegel: Europe and its Others’ (25-51). This proposes to advance three claims, the first of which is that arguments about sovereignty and private property are misrepresented ‘as an early imagining of capitalism, instead of understanding them in their proper context of colonialism. In this way capitalism is erroneously separated from colonialism’ (25). On the broad topic of ‘private property and possession in early liberal thought’, Bhambra and Holmwood then say that: ‘A central feature of modern liberalism – classic liberalism, as it is frequently called – is the justification of private property and its expression in the rule of law’ (26). True, but a lot depends on what you think of as ‘early’. The claim that arguments about sovereignty and private property are misrepresented as an early imagining of capitalism, instead of being understood in their proper context of colonialism is false, and can be advanced only if you go no further back than Hobbes and Locke, both of whom drew on debates that were centuries old. I’m no more of an authority myself on the justification of private property and its expression in the rule of law than they are, so I offer you two references to people who are. The first is Martti Koskenniemi’s magnificent monograph, running to over 1100 pages, and already cited above, To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power, 1300-1870 (2021). Looking there into the ‘conflict between Philip [III, of France] and [Pope] Boniface [that] had to do with two types of lawful authority – dominium proprietatis and dominium iurisdictionis, property and sovereignty in anachronistic translation’ (22), you find a discussion of the document De regimine principum (one of many with the same title, by various hands), written by the Augustinian friar and Professor of Theology Giles of Rome for the instruction of Philip between 1277 and 1280, with its admonition to the sovereign to respect private property and support the development of independent professions so that his people could ‘live well’:
‘Realistic observation of society demonstrated that a regnum organised through common property would occasion endless conflict and soon fall into shortage. Only owners of private property worked diligently and even the virtue of liberalitas could only be realised in conditions of private ownership. Ideals of poverty and sharing might be proper for the life of clerics but in temporal society, engagement with private property was crucial to ensuring that the subjects could live well. It was therefore prudent that the ruler manage property rights carefully, not so as to equalise properties but to eradicate greed. Most theologians agreed. In his quodlibet writings James of Viterbo described the king as the guardian, procurator and distributor of property rights’ (61).
This affords only a glimpse of debates that reach much further back in time, and would evolve in complex and nuanced ways over the following centuries. But it suggests that the questions of private property and commercial society were central from the earliest legal/theological debate over princely sovereignty (cf. 88-116), long before the first episodes of European colonialism. Francisco de Vitoria would draw on these and related debates. So, too, the brief and derivative discussion of Hobbes and Locke offered by Bhambra and Holmwood is replete with terms that signal their indebtedness to these debates, not least on the issues of ‘natural law’ and the state of nature. For a second reference, then, see David Singh Grewal’s authoritative discussion of Pufendorf on commerce and natural law (2022), and especially footnotes 6 and 7 (179-80), which put Hobbes and Locke in context, note the complexity of their positions, and signal a significant epistemological break between 17th- and 18th-century thought. As noted above, I’m no expert – and I’ve only recently come across Andrew Fitzmaurice’s monograph on the law of occupation (2014), which looks like another fundamental source. But it’s clear that Bhambra and Holmwood’s incautious flirtation with ‘modern social theory’ reveals a major omission in the project.
This is the background, then, to their persistent refusal to take political economy seriously – whether in relation to capitalism, or colonialism and slavery, or the connections between them. When they turn to ‘stadial theory and the idea of progress’ (38-46), they suggest that when writers of the mid- to late-eighteenth century period of the Scottish Enlightenment discussed slavery, ‘they treated it primarily as a feature of militaristic societies based on settled agriculture’ (44), despite its significance in the present day: ‘With this, contemporary forms of slavery did not have to be addressed in the context of the emergence of commercial society, but simply as a practice left over from previous societies, and one that would diminish as commerce extended its domain’ (45). ‘None of the social theorists of the eighteenth century,’ they conclude, ‘saw slavery (or other predations) as generative of commercial society or integral to its functioning, and thus in need of being explained and integrated into the understanding of commercial society itself’ (46). The first claim here is not true – various authors of the Scottish Enlightenment wrote at length on the use of slavery in the contemporary period. The second is true, but not in the way Bhambra and Holmwood suppose. The social theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment did not think of slavery as ‘generative of commercial society or integral to its functioning’, but this was because they saw it as hostile to the further development of commercial society, and in particular to innovation, invention, and competitiveness in global markets for machine-produced goods, as Hont’s account of their debate over rich and poor countries shows (2005: 267-322). Following another significant epistemological break, in which the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations supplanted what was essentially a cyclical theory of supremacy in trade, espoused by Machiavelli and energetically canvassed by David Hume, a consensus emerged that nations that dominated trade could maintain their competitive advantage indefinitely only if they continually pursued innovations that replaced workers with ever more productive machines.
Bhambra and Holmwood cite John Millar’s The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks in their support. But if they had read on from the opening sentence of his penultimate chapter they would have found the following:
We accordingly find that slavery remained all over Europe for several centuries after Christianity became the established religion: not to mention that this institution is still retained in Russia, in Poland, in Hungary, and in several parts of Germany; and that it is at present admitted without limitation, in the colonies which belong to the European nations, whether in Asia, Africa, or America (Millar, 2006: 265)
Thus the practice of slavery was no sooner extinguished by the inhabitants in one quarter of the globe, than it was revived by the very same people in another, where it has remained ever since, without being much regarded by the public, or exciting any effectual regulations in order to suppress it (ibid: 270)
'In whatever light we regard the institution of slavery, it appears equally inconvenient and pernicious. No conclusion seems more certain than this, that men will commonly exert more activity when they work for their own benefit, than when they are compelled to labour for the benefit merely of another. The introduction of personal liberty has therefore an infallible tendency to render the inhabitants of a country more industrious; and, by producing greater plenty of provisions, must necessarily increase the populousness, as well as the strength and security of a nation' (272)
Millar develops at length the argument that slavery is ‘always unfavourable to industry, and [tends] to hinder the improvement of a country’; and after noting the continuing existence of forms of bonded labour in the Scottish salt and mining industries, he goes on:
'The slavery established in our colonies is an object of greater importance, and is, perhaps, attended with difficulties which cannot be so easily removed. It has been thought, that the management of our plantations requires a labour in which free men would not be willing to engage, and which the white people are, from their constitution, incapable of performing. How far this opinion is well founded, according to the present manner of labouring in that part of the world, seems difficult to determine, as it has never been properly examined by those who are in a condition to ascertain the facts in question. But there is ground to believe that the institution of slavery is the chief circumstance that has prevented those contrivances to shorten and facilitate the more laborious employments of the people, which take place in other countries where freedom has been introduced. Notwithstanding the connection between our colonies and the mother country, the instruments proper for some of the most common branches of labour are little known in many parts of the West Indies. In Jamaica the digging of a grave gives full employment to two men for a whole day; as from the want of proper tools it is necessary to make a large hole no way adapted to the human figure. I am informed, that, unless it has been procured very lately, there is hardly a spade in the whole island. In procuring firewood for boiling sugar, &c. a work that takes up about five or six weeks yearly, no use is made of the saw, but the trees are cut with an ax into logs of about 30 inches in length. Instead of a flail the negroes make use of a single stick in threshing the Guinea-corn; so that in this and in winnowing, ten women are capable of doing no more work in a day, than, with our instruments and machinery, two men would perform in two hours. From the want of a scythe or sickle, they are obliged every night to cut with a knife, or pull with their hands, a quantity of grass sufficient to serve their horses, mules, and black cattle' (277).
'It affords a curious spectacle to observe, that the same people who talk in a high strain of political liberty, and who consider the privilege of imposing their own taxes as one of the unalienable rights of mankind, should make no scruple of reducing a great proportion of their fellow creatures into circumstances by which they are not only deprived of property, but almost of every species of right' (278).
The perspective here is one of ‘political economy’. Millar does not call for the immediate and unconditional abolition of slavery, but supports a proposal for the gradual introduction of wages, suggesting that the demonstration effect of greater productivity would lead to its general adoption.
The same obliviousness to the political economy of capitalist development and its relevance to slavery is apparent when Bhambra and Holmwood turn their attention to Tocqueville’s essays on emancipation, published in Le Siècle in 1843. As a result, an important element of ‘connected history’ is missed. They comment that ‘Tocqueville’s primary concern was to manage an orderly process of emancipation that would not adversely affect colonial economies or their beneficiaries’ (75-6), but confine their analysis primarily to his arguments in favour of compensation for slave-owning colonists. They take particular exception to the fact that he addressed the issue in relation to the recent British abolition process, and characterise his stance as seemingly standing ‘in stark contrast to his refusal to acknowledge the magnitude of the events of the Haitian revolution and what they might mean for debates on emancipation within France’ (76). This misses the point that Tocqueville’s approach over the six articles was governed by practical issues of comparative political economy. He argued that the abolition of slavery in British colonies, particularly where they were close to those of the French, made slave-based production in the latter impossible, due to the collapse of authority on the part of the colonists, and the evaporation of their willingness to invest further:
Qu’est-ce aujourd’hui que l’esclavage, dit un des premiers magistrats d’une de nos colonies, sinon un état de choses où l’ouvrier travaille le moins qu’il peut pour son maître, sans que celui-ci ose lui rien dire? De son côté, le maître, sans certitude du lendemain, n’ose rien changer, il redoute d’innover, il n’améliore point; à peine a-t-il le courage de conserver; les propriétés coloniales sont sans valeur; on n’achète point ce qui ne doit pas avoir de durée. Les propriétaires coloniaux sont sans ressources et sans crédit. Qui pourrait consentir à s’associer à une destinée qu’on ignore? (Tocqueville, 1866: 268).
Then, in a comment that raises significant questions about the assumption that the continuation of empire, let alone slavery, was deemed significant for France’s future (as Bhambra and Holmwood note, Tocqueville thought that it was), he suggests that if slavery has not been abolished, it is because many believe that not only slavery but also France’s colonies are not worth the trouble:
Parce qu’ils pensent que les colonies ne valent ni le temps, ni l’argent, ni l’effort que coûterait une pareille entreprise. Les colons se font, en ceci comme en beaucoup d’autres choses, une illusion singulière: ils attribuent à une sorte d’ardeur coloniale les résistances que l’abolition de l’esclavage rencontre au sein des chambres et dans les conseils de la couronne. Malheureusement, ils se trompent. On repousse l’émancipation, parce qu’on tient peu aux colonies et qu’on préfère laisser mourir le malade que payer le remède. Je suis si convaincu, pour ma part, que l’indifférence croissante de la nation pour ses possessions tropicales est aujourd’hui le plus grand et pour ainsi dire le seul obstacle qui s’oppose à ce que l’émancipation soit sérieusement entreprise, que je croirai la cause de celle-ci gagnée le jour ou le gouvernement et le pays seraient convaincus que la conservation des colonies est nécessaire à la force et à la grandeur de la France. C’est donc à établir cette première venté (sic) qu’il faut d’abord s’attacher (271-2).
Bhambra and Holmwood pass over this in silence – but the reference to the ‘growing indifference of the nation towards its tropical possessions’ calls into question the idea that the futures of capitalism and empire were necessarily tied together. Third, in a sequence of arguments over the following articles that Bhambra and Holmwood also ignore, he makes an extended analysis of the errors of British emancipation, and the adjustments needed in order to convert the slaves, once emancipated, into a productive workforce. Affecting to believe that the Mississippi, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean will have a greatly magnified role in the emerging world economy, he points to chronic labour shortages in British colonies where slavery has been abolished, and attributes this to the exodus of many former slaves to work on their own account on vacant land. For the French colonies, the dangers are magnified, he says, by the availability and attractiveness of work at relatively high wages in those colonies. His solution, set out in the crucial Article 5, is the key to his whole intervention: abolition should be subject to a 10-year interregnum, after which freed slaves should be forbidden to leave the colony or to work on their own account, while minimum and maximum wages should be set in order to limit competition in labour markets. The final article then returns to the case for compensation. A connection, unremarked, is that in his essay on the economics of negro emancipation in the United States (1911), Du Bois records the same initial response among former slave-owners in the South. There is a clear pattern, then, to the political economy of emancipation.
This is the prelude to a chapter on Marx. Despite some eccentric opinions (‘Marx was vehement in his opposition to colonialism, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that his greater concern was for the European peasantry and its dispersion’, 92; ‘It is easy to see why the rediscovery of the early Marx had such an impact: it helped to make sense of Marx’s own description of Capital as a critique of political economy and not simply of capitalism’, 96), they do pinpoint a central issue, and one that has been the subject of much recent debate: Marx, they say, judged that the ‘inherent organic laws of political economy’ would lead in the end to the ‘supreme rule of capital’, and the generalisation of free wage labour (93), but the evidence is both that unfree forms of labour persist, and that they reflect the legacy of empire and the racialisation of labour markets. However, this debate cannot be resolved by pointing to the role of colonialism, enslavement, dispossession and appropriation in ‘primitive accumulation’, and the continuation of unfree forms of labour either after the abolition of slavery or in the present day, or by identifying the welfare state in the UK or more widely as racially inflected. As Bhambra and Holmwood state, ‘It is important to recognise that Marx intended the construct of pure capitalism [I prefer ‘the capitalist mode of production’] to approximate the conditions and relationships to which capitalism increasingly tended’ (103). This being so, it is fruitless to charge his theory with being ‘a poor account of the history of wage differences’ (105), or indeed of gender or ‘racial’ differences across world labour markets, or to cite ‘welfare arrangements’ in Europe in evidence. The question is, are these phenomena permanent features of global capitalism, or are they all being transformed precisely as a consequence of the tendencies Marx identifies (Cammack, 2022: esp. Chs. 4 and 5)?
Less needs to be said about the chapters on Weber and Durkheim. That on Weber outlines his commitment to German imperialism (as did Mommsen, long ago; and see also the fuller account in Allen, 2017), then offers extended discussions of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and of ‘ideal types’, the latter expanding upon a discussion in Connected Sociologies (146-9). Typically, though, it does not explore the connection, if any, between his commitments to German empire and to democracy (that is, a mass franchise) in Germany itself. With Durkheim, the principal point made, at intervals throughout the chapter, is that Durkheim did not address the issue of colonialism. But that may not be a fatal flaw, if as seems possible from the account given, Durkheim could have applied his method, and his concepts, such as anomie, to the distinctive ‘social facts’ of colonial situations. But this is not a line of analysis that Bhambra and Holmwood pursue.
Finally, the chapter on Du Bois, while constituting a useful introductory overview, is again weak on the political economy of slavery and colonialism, and the relationship between colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. Du Bois, in common with other authors of whom Bhambra has been critical elsewhere (Bhambra 2021: 313-4), argued that it was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that ‘colonial imperialism’ became a dominant world force: in the wake of the industrial revolution a ‘new colonialism’/’new imperialism’ emerged as a consequence of new conditions in the world market. Rivalry between the leading states took the form of a desire to annex territories that could provide monopoly control of raw materials and protected markets for industrial production, a dynamic reflected first in the ‘subjugation of India’ but dominated by the late nineteenth century by demands from newly unified Germany for its ‘fair share’ of colonial territory. ‘There was an increased effort, however,’ Du Bois states, ‘to keep the wars against the natives of Asia and Africa confined to limits where they would not set the peoples of Europe aflame in their relations to each other … [And] on the whole, European diplomacy succeeded until 1914 in keeping most European nations from each other’s throats in armed rivalry for the proceeds of investment in Africa and Asia. Then it failed, and the world fell’ (Du Bois, 1945: 304).
This broad perspective runs counter to two of the leading arguments put forward by Bhambra and Holmwood: first, that the development of capitalism is to be explained in terms of colonialism and empire (Du Bois presents it as being the other way round), and second that there is a tendency to sever the connection between colonialism and imperialism, relegating the former to the past. Much of the interest of Color and Democracy (1945) lies precisely in the nuanced account that Du Bois offered of the prospects for decolonisation after the war. He foresaw a struggle between the retrograde forces favouring colonial imperialism on the one hand, and the global anti-colonial and democratic movements across the world on the other. At the heart of it was the fact that ‘the colonial system is a part of the battle between capital and labor in the modern economy’ (275, cited by Bhambra and Holmes without further discussion). Continuing support for empire in the US and the UK was dependent, he argued, on the imperfections of those two democracies - specifically, the domination of the US Senate by the grossly over-represented Southern and rural states, as a consequence of the post-independence settlement, and the continued role of the House of Lords in the UK. After the war, the balance of forces was changed, and a more progressive way forward was possible, in which a Great Crusade against Poverty, Ignorance and Crime might transform the whole world. This was a vision that sprang not from revolutionary politics, despite Du Bois’ sympathy for the Soviet Union, but from progressive liberal opinion within the UN system to which Du Bois was attached, and it lay behind his call for a new mandate system, avoiding the problems associated with that put in place after the First World War. There was a distinct element of paternalism about some of his formulations, and equally of belief in the progressive reform of capitalism, but importantly the prospects for progress depended absolutely on the ending of colonial rule, and support for development and democracy in newly independent states. In short, the ‘colonial system’, in Du Bois’ view, was not a necessary and permanent part of the capitalist system, but a fetter on its development. As it was to leading figures in the Scottish Enlightenment.
After all this, the conclusion identifies five ‘fictions’. First, Bhambra and Holmwood reject the idea of stages of society, declare that the ideas of a ‘state of nature’ and of a modern society are equally fictional, and propose that: ‘We need to move away from the idea of types of society that can be investigated separately from the relationships between them. We must instead understand how those connections structure ideas of difference and domination’ (211). So we must, but as yet such connections have not been examined in depth, and as noted above, some that are in plain view have escaped their notice. Second, they reject the idea of ‘a special nature of modern subjectivity’, associated with the ‘modern individual’: ‘The very idea of an “unfinished” project of modernity presupposes that modernity is a civilising project and that we should look at all premodern societies as inferior precursors, beset by traditional authority and inadequate selves, and not as bases of knowledge and sources of experience from which we can also learn’. Third, the idea of the sovereign nation state overlooks that ‘all European nation states (including the United States) were empires or participated in the construction of empires through the movement of their peoples’. This has led to inequalities in citizenship rights, ‘both inside and outside the newly established boundaries of the nation’. Fair enough, but again these issues remain to be explored in depth. Fourth, contra the Marxist emphasis on class and formally free labour, ‘Commodified labour power does not develop as the central form of capitalism; moreover, capitalist nation states are able to divide their populations between national citizens and colonial subjects’. As a result of the latter, forms of unfree labour persist, along with differential access to rights. True only in part: commodified labour power does develop as the central form of labour, but it does not immediately displace other forms. And as they earlier acknowledge (103), Marx’s focus was on the long-term tendencies implied by the logic of the capitalist mode of production. This is not a fiction, then, but a hypothesis. Fifth and last, the methodological claims made in sociology ‘all tend to present sociological reasoning uncritically as ahistorical and as a necessary condition for an objective enquiry’. This is a curious point on which to finish, as the text has not identified these supposed claims, and the statement is inherently improbable.
Overall, it is not clear whether the primary focus of Colonialism and Modern Social Theory is on issues regarding theories of modernity, or the significance of colonialism for global development. Regardless, neither case is made, primarily because the approach is too complicated, while some basic requirements are not met: there has been no demonstration yet that any sociologist structures their approach systematically around the concept of modernity (Parsons might be a good candidate) nor any systematic analysis of any specific case of colonial rule and its relationship to ‘fundamental questions of order and the legitimation of power’. The approach is at too great a level of generality, without clear supporting evidence. And there is a huge gap at the centre of the project, brought out by the partial shift to ‘modern social theory’, which is the failure to examine any legal doctrines relating to the justification and governance of colonial territories, their relationship to actual practices of rule, and variation from case to case and time to time. At the same time, the potential for developing the theses on colonialism in their own right, detached from all considerations of ‘modernity’, is limited by the insistence on subordinating the logic of capitalism to that of colonialism/imperialism. This in turn is part of a larger problem, which is the refusal to engage with any form of political economy. This being said, it remains important and true that the playing out of the antagonisms inherent in the capitalist mode of production, past or present, cannot be understood except on a global scale that takes proper account of the history and continuing effects of slavery, colonialism and empire. The fact that the case is made so badly here doesn’t mean to say that there isn’t one to be made.
References
Allen, Kieran. 2017. Weber: Sociologist of Empire. Pluto Press (re-issue of Max Weber: A Critical Introduction, 2004).
Bhambra, Gurminder. 2011. ‘Talking among Themselves? Weberian and Marxist Historical Sociologies as Dialogues without “Others”’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39, 3, 667–81.
Bhambra, Gurminder. 2021. Colonial global economy: towards a theoretical reorientation of political economy, Review of International Political Economy, 28, 2, 307-322.
Bouwsma, William J. 1979. The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History, American Historical Review, 84, 1, 1-15.
Cammack, Paul. 1997. Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World. Cassell/Leicester University Press.
Cammack, Paul. 2022. The Politics of Global Competitiveness. Oxford University Press.
Connell, Raewyn. 2007. Southern Theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science, Routledge, London and New York.
De Vries, Jan. 1994. The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution, Journal of Economic History, 54, 2, 249-270.
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1911. The Economics of Negro Emancipation in the United States, The Sociological Review, 4, 3, 303-313.
Fitzmaurice, Andrew. 2014. Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500-2000, Cambridge University Press.
Grewal, David Singh. 2022. ‘From the State of Nature to the State of Economy: Pufendorf on Commerce and Natural Law’, in Mark Somos and Anne Peters, eds, The State of Nature: Histories of an Idea, Brill, Ch. 7, pp. 177-215.
Hont, Istvan. 2005. Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Koskenniemi, Martti. 2021. To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power 1300–1870. Cambridge University Press.
Millar, John. [1806] 2006. The Origin of Distinction of the Ranks, Liberty Fund.
Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America, Nepantla, 1, 3, 533-580.
Quijano, Aníbal. 2007. Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality, Cultural Studies, 21, 2-3, 168-78.
Roth, Guenther. 1987. Rationalization in Max Weber’s Developmental History, in Sam Whimster and Scott Lash, eds, Max Weber: Rationality and Modernity, Allen and Unwin.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1997. Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia, Modern Asian Studies, 31, 3, 735-762.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. [1843] 1866. ‘L’émancipation des esclaves’, in Michel Lévy, ed, Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, vol. IX, pp. 265-298.
In her earlier monographs Bhambra said little about the specific characteristics of colonialism in terms of timing, character, and impact from place to place, or about differences between the various instances of imperial rule, as her interest lay elsewhere. Stated succinctly, she argued that ‘whatever Europe is, cannot be understood outside of its imperial relationships’ (2007: 19), and Rethinking Modernity closed with what were in effect three theses on colonialism:
- ‘The modern state and colonization emerged together in the sixteenth century and together posed the fundamental questions of order and the legitimation of power that are still being addressed today’ (149).
- ‘What is generally rendered invisible in most considerations of modernity is the colonial relationship which has comprised a significant aspect of modernity from its inception and has been no less systematic than the interconnections that have otherwise been represented within dominant sociological approaches’ (151).
- ‘While the privileging of Europe, and the West, in the context of a history of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery that covered almost the entirety of the globe would be understandable, what is less so, is the failure of most theorists who privilege Europe and the West then also to consider the histories of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery that enabled Europe, and the West, to achieve this dominance (145-6).
Rethinking Modernity called for ‘connected histories’ (following Subrahmanyam, 1997) as a means of addressing these issues, while Connected Sociologies pointed to ‘the historical connections generated by processes of colonialism, enslavement, dispossession and appropriation, that were previously elided in mainstream sociology in favour of narrower understandings, as well as to the use of “connections” as a way of recuperating these alternative histories, and, therefore, sociologies’ (3). But as no such connected histories or sociologies were provided, these aspects of the texts were no more than ‘promissory notes’ – this ironically being a term Bhambra herself applied (2014: 100) to Raewyn Connell’s far more substantial explorations in Southern Theory (2007).
At the same time, Connell’s account of the way that sociology emerged as a discipline only in the late nineteenth century, and underwent a significant ‘epistemological break’ after the First World War shattered illusions regarding the inevitable onward march of peace and progress (1997, 2007), undermined Bhambra’s analytical framework. Bhambra (seemingly unaware of Connell’s 1997 article at the time) argued in 2007 that all sociological theories of modernity ‘rested on the assumptions of rupture and difference – a temporal rupture that distinguishes a traditional, agrarian past from the modern, industrial present; and a fundamental difference that distinguishes Europe from the rest of the world’ (1), with its implication that they were ‘Eurocentric’ in that they reflected ‘the belief, implicit or otherwise, in the world historical significance of events believed to have developed endogenously within the cultural-geographical sphere of Europe’ (5, emphasis original). These sweeping claims required her at a minimum to be thoroughly familiar with ‘the social, cultural, political and economic changes that took place in Western Europe from the mid-sixteenth century onwards’ (2), among which she accorded prominence to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the ‘industrial revolution’, and to analyse in depth the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Weber (whom she identified as ‘the primary theorists of classical sociology’), along with significant precursors, among whom she named Montesquieu, Ferguson, and Adam Smith (2). To deliver in addition on the promise of ‘connected histories’ would have required in turn considerable archival research supported by linguistic skills.
This would be a tall order for anyone, and Bhambra did not attempt it. Her accounts of the constituent elements of ‘modernity’ as she saw them were cursory, and if Marx, Durkheim, Weber, or their predecessors ever used the term, let alone theorised it in a way that made it central to their analysis, she offered no evidence for it. In fact, she made only brief and perfunctory reference to the writings of those identified, and fell headlong into the error of reading back into the past a synthesis that came together, if at all, from the mid-twentieth century on, and primarily in textbooks at that. Lengthy sections of the book were only tangentially relevant to the strong claims advanced. It relied heavily on snippets from secondary sources taken out of context, and passed in silence over the fact that some of those same sources failed to support and often frankly refuted her argument (Bouwsma, 1979, Rüsen 1985, Roth, 1987, and De Vries 1994 being especially flagrant cases in point). Much more damagingly, even when aware that there were no grounds for relying upon the notion of any accepted understanding of a sociological canon prior to the late nineteenth century, and that Comte and Spencer were generally located within it once it emerged, while Marx and Weber were not, she ploughed on regardless, keeping Marx and Weber to the fore. Her attempt to rescue her thesis on sociological theory and modernity in response to Connell (2014: 98) was inevitably embarrassingly weak.
Does this matter? In some respects, maybe. But as regards the three theses on colonialism and empire, not at all. They are important in their own right, and worded as they are, they do not depend upon arguments for either rupture, or a form of ‘difference’ that involves endogeneity. Nor need they imply that the ‘modern state’ was exclusively the product of slavery, colonialism and imperialism, or that slavery, colonialism and empire were unknown outside ‘Europe’ or ‘the West’. They are, of course, ‘Eurocentric’, in that they argue strongly that European practices did and do still shape the world, though in malign ways that sustain and multiply severe inequalities. And rightly so. But there are other issues that do matter for the theses on colonialism. These are Bhambra’s characterisation of Marx, her failure to engage with political economy or its critique, and her consistent subordination of the logic of capitalism to colonialism. By treating Marx as a sociologist (he was not) she writes out the critique of political economy that was the essence of his work, and grossly distorts its character. By lumping him with Weber and Durkheim she renders invisible the extent to which the work of the latter two (like ‘marginal’ economics in the same period, or the ‘political science’ that produced the likes of ‘modernization theory’ and continues today) was largely conceived and taken up as an alternative to Marxism and to class antagonism as a focus of social analysis. And by ignoring political economy, classical or contemporary, she allows capitalism to feature as an aspect of ‘modernity’ without providing any analysis of its dynamics.
It is notable that the first of the three ‘theses on colonialism’ above makes no reference to capitalism. This is no momentary lapse. Instead of insisting that the playing out of the antagonisms inherent in the capitalist mode of production, past or present, cannot be understood except on a global scale that takes proper account of the history and continuing effects of slavery, colonialism and empire, which is both important and true, Bhambra writes capitalism out of her analysis altogether at crucial points. But if ‘Nisbet’s understanding of sociology emerging as a response to the problem of order created by the conditions of modernity – as exemplified by the twin revolutions of industrialism and revolutionary democracy – has been generally accepted within the discipline’ (2007: 52), it is precisely because ‘fundamental questions of order and the legitimation of power’ were posed, especially from the late nineteenth century on, by pro-bourgeois rule in individual states over a dispossessed majority endowed with political rights. It’s quite right to say that the fact that leading industrial states were also imperial states affected the way in which these issues presented themselves and were addressed. But Bhambra does not explore the history or the character of connections between capitalism on the one hand and slavery, empire and colonialism on the other. Are they fundamentally mutually supportive and self-reproducing, or not? Does the relationship between them change over time? Is it not possible that a pattern of accumulation based upon colonialism, enslavement, dispossession and appropriation can come to hinder the development of the kinds of practices (in innovation, for example) conducive to competitiveness in global markets (as argued, for example, by leading figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, and as a Marxist perspective would suggest)? The biggest failure of Rethinking Modernity, not remedied in Connected Sociologies, was that it appealed to the study of connections, but did not address those most relevant to the shaping of the contemporary world, assuming instead a one-way process.
The failure to engage seriously with Marx was at the heart of this: and the following example from Connected Sociologies is particularly striking:
‘Both Karl Marx (1976 [1867]) and Max Weber (1905 [NB, the entry in the bibliography is to the 1930 edition translated by Parsons]), for example, sought to outline the peculiar conditions of Europe vis-à-vis the rest of the world that they believed to have given rise to the world-historical processes of capitalism (for discussion, see Bhambra 2011a)’ (6).
The references are to Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1 respectively. But Marx did not seek ‘to outline the peculiar conditions of Europe vis-à-vis the rest of the world that [he] believed to have given rise to the world-historical processes of capitalism’. His project – the critique of political economy – was quite different: to figure out the logic of the capitalist mode of production in abstraction from such historical experience. He saw its origins in the social division of labour, the production of commodities, and the emergence of free labour, but this was a conceptual framework, not at all tied to time and place. He had nothing at all to say about ‘the peculiar conditions of Europe vis-á-vis the rest of the world’, or about the origins of capitalism. And in fact the 2011 essay to which Bhambra sends the reader for her evidence for these claims has no direct reference to any text by Marx (being largely concerned with twentieth century Marxists), and so offers no evidence at all on the point at issue. The one tangentially relevant statement, characteristically from a secondary source, shows her confusion:
‘Basically, the capitalist mode of production is said to rest on a singular relation between capital and labour that is argued to be its intrinsic form. This is the “purely economic” wage contract that, as Anderson puts it, paraphrasing Marx, rests in “the equal exchange between free agents which reproduces, hourly and daily, inequality and oppression”. No other relations – that is, forms of unfree labour such as slave labour or bonded labour – are allowed to be integral to the emergence and development of capitalism (Bhambra, 2011: 676, emphasis mine).
Two levels of analysis are run together here. The first two sentences are, not surprisingly given the source, perfectly accurate. The third confuses the logic of the capitalist mode of production, considered in abstraction from any specific historical circumstances, with the ‘emergence and development of capitalism’ as a historical phenomenon.
I come to Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, then, with three questions in mind. First, how are the theses on colonialism and empire taken forward? Second, are the weaknesses in Bhambra’s account of sociology as a discipline and the issue of ‘modernity’ addressed? And third, how are the work of Marx and the relationship between colonialism/empire on the one hand and capitalism on the other portrayed?
On the first of these points, it restates the project launched with Rethinking Modernity and highlights its contemporary significance:
‘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 popular ressentiment and rejections of multiculturalism’ (vii).
On the second, it makes some tactical/strategic adjustments, the most prominent of which, evident in the title, is that the focus on ‘sociology’ is extended to the more generic term of ‘modern social theory’, with politics and history added. Hobbes (29-32), Locke (32-8), and Hegel (46-50) are briefly discussed, and chapters on Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Du Bois follow. Connell’s critique is accepted (16), though without reflection on the implications for the reading of ‘modernity’ back into the ‘canon’, and it is acknowledged that Marx was a late addition and a rather special case (18). In addition, race is identified as ‘central to the social structures of modernity’ (viii); the American Revolution and the United States are added in; Spanish, Portuguese (and Italian) colonialisms are dropped on the grounds that ‘European social theory came to be associated with northern Europe’ (4); and a distinction between older ‘empires of domination’ and European ‘empires of conquest and extraction’ is introduced, but not developed at any length (8).
While Bhambra and Holmwood are now ‘seeking to address the categories that form mainstream sociology in order to reconstruct modern social theory through dialogue’, the focus on ‘modernity’ remains: ‘We seek a more adequate account of modernity, inclusive of its otherwise disregarded legacies of colonialism, so that we can more effectively address pressing issues of the present. In this way we are seeking to reconstruct mainstream social theory rather than to dismiss it’ (1). In particular, they suggest that the treatment of colonialism as premodern ‘makes it easier to neglect the fact that European colonialism transformed into imperialism’:
‘Identifying social theory with the period from 1830 onwards, then, makes it easier to normalise colonialism and to take for granted the overseas possessions of the national European states whose political structures of the rule of law, market exchange, bureaucratic administration, and political representation are proposed as part of the distinctive social and political configuration of modernity, independently of colonialism and imperialism. We shall argue instead that colonialism and imperialism are integral to modernity and not contingently related to it. Colonialism is not a manifestation of commercial enterprise in the last throes of feudalism, but is constitutive of the commercialism that would come to be seen as characteristic of modernity and integral to the development of the social and political institutions associated with it. By contrast, when empire is addressed, it is as a manifestation not of European modernity, but of the political organisation of earlier social formations. In this book we argue for the need to disentangle modern European empires from more general conceptions of empire (from before the existence of European colonial empires) and for the need to understand how modern European ‘nation’ states are shaped by their imperial and colonial past’ (6).
If there is one strong thesis to emerge from this, it is that colonialism is an integral aspect of contemporary global capitalism, but that modern social theory, where it addresses it at all, tends to relegate it to the past. But the first part of this argument is barely defended. The focus moves quickly from a brief review of empire to ‘Contemporary Sociology and the Construction of its Canons’ (15-21) and ‘Decolonising European Social Theory’ (21-24). The conclusion subsequently identifies ‘five fictions of modern social theory’, relating to: the idea of stages of society; liberty, autonomy and modern subjectivity; the idea of the nation state; class and formally free labour; and the fiction of sociological reasoning (211-215). Oddly, despite the fact that the introduction closes with the insistence that: ‘Addressing colonial histories is a necessary preliminary to the reconstruction of social theory’ (24), colonial histories are not directly addressed in the intervening pages. They focus instead, as noted above, on brief or extended discussions of a range of authors of ‘modern social theory’.
This is both puzzling and disappointing. As a consequence of a number of bad choices, the book is a big step in a wrong direction. As noted, it attempts a reconstruction of social theory without first addressing the colonial histories that it declares to be a ‘necessary preliminary’. Its limited foray into ‘modern social theory’ beyond sociology (Hobbes, Locke and Hegel) only serves to draw attention to the vast and much more relevant literature they do not consider. The strong thesis from Rethinking Modernity that all sociological theories of modernity rest on assumptions of rupture and difference is restated (5), but then forgotten: it is not deployed as a framework for the analysis of the five ‘sociologists’ considered at chapter length, and wouldn’t fit them if it was. In light of the continued talk of a canon, it is odd that Comte, Spencer and Parsons are not included. Then for Tocqueville, Marx, Weber and Durkheim, the argument is a negative one: broad overviews of their work are offered, with repeated reference to their failure to give due attention to colonialism or slavery, but beyond that no unifying analytical framework is in evidence. And a continued difficulty with political economy means at the same time that the relationship between colonialism, empire and slavery on the one hand and capitalism on the other is still not closely examined. In the end we are no further forward, and arguably further back, than we were with Rethinking Modernity – with its propositions on the significance of colonialism and empire undeveloped, and in danger of being brought into disrepute by the company they keep.
The opening to ‘modern social theory’ is problematic for two simple reasons. First, once you accept that there is no identifiable body of ‘mainstream sociology’ before the late nineteenth century, and throw the net wider, you come up against the fact that the dominant forms of social theory in the preceding centuries were the connected fields of law, theology, political economy, and political and moral philosophy. All demand consideration. Second, once you declare your concern to be with the modern state and colonialism, you do best to look first at the literature that bears most directly on this topic, particularly at the beginning of this period, as states grappled with the practical and moral implications of colonial rule, and in the mid-twentieth century, as they grappled with the challenge of decolonisation. For the early period, this makes the work of the Dominican friar Francisco de Vitoria and others in the ‘Salamanca School’ on Spanish colonialism in the ‘New World’ vitally important (Koskenniemi, 2021: 117-211). Bhambra and Holmwood exclude this, along with the entire record of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. For the period of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century, the large body of work published as Studies in Political Development under the auspices of the US Social Science Research Council Committee on Comparative Politics is far more relevant than that of the ‘modernization theorists’ profiled by Bhambra (2007: 57-64, 2014: 20-25). The authors of these volumes, Gabriel Almond, G. Bingham Powell and Lucian Pye prominent among them, drew critically on modernization theory but rejected from the start the idea of ‘unilinear evolutionism’, along with stark contrasts between traditional and modern, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and the like, insisting that all societies exhibited varying blends of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ features. Successful political development, whether in newly independent states or in the United States itself, required carefully constrained forms of democracy with a strong measure of elite control, to be secured by the deliberation retention and cultivation of some ‘traditional’ features – notably, a willingness to accept the guidance of your betters (Cammack, 1997: 35-62).
The damaging consequences of a strictly limited opening to ‘modern social theory’ are most evident in Chapter One, ‘Hobbes to Hegel: Europe and its Others’ (25-51). This proposes to advance three claims, the first of which is that arguments about sovereignty and private property are misrepresented ‘as an early imagining of capitalism, instead of understanding them in their proper context of colonialism. In this way capitalism is erroneously separated from colonialism’ (25). On the broad topic of ‘private property and possession in early liberal thought’, Bhambra and Holmwood then say that: ‘A central feature of modern liberalism – classic liberalism, as it is frequently called – is the justification of private property and its expression in the rule of law’ (26). True, but a lot depends on what you think of as ‘early’. The claim that arguments about sovereignty and private property are misrepresented as an early imagining of capitalism, instead of being understood in their proper context of colonialism is false, and can be advanced only if you go no further back than Hobbes and Locke, both of whom drew on debates that were centuries old. I’m no more of an authority myself on the justification of private property and its expression in the rule of law than they are, so I offer you two references to people who are. The first is Martti Koskenniemi’s magnificent monograph, running to over 1100 pages, and already cited above, To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power, 1300-1870 (2021). Looking there into the ‘conflict between Philip [III, of France] and [Pope] Boniface [that] had to do with two types of lawful authority – dominium proprietatis and dominium iurisdictionis, property and sovereignty in anachronistic translation’ (22), you find a discussion of the document De regimine principum (one of many with the same title, by various hands), written by the Augustinian friar and Professor of Theology Giles of Rome for the instruction of Philip between 1277 and 1280, with its admonition to the sovereign to respect private property and support the development of independent professions so that his people could ‘live well’:
‘Realistic observation of society demonstrated that a regnum organised through common property would occasion endless conflict and soon fall into shortage. Only owners of private property worked diligently and even the virtue of liberalitas could only be realised in conditions of private ownership. Ideals of poverty and sharing might be proper for the life of clerics but in temporal society, engagement with private property was crucial to ensuring that the subjects could live well. It was therefore prudent that the ruler manage property rights carefully, not so as to equalise properties but to eradicate greed. Most theologians agreed. In his quodlibet writings James of Viterbo described the king as the guardian, procurator and distributor of property rights’ (61).
This affords only a glimpse of debates that reach much further back in time, and would evolve in complex and nuanced ways over the following centuries. But it suggests that the questions of private property and commercial society were central from the earliest legal/theological debate over princely sovereignty (cf. 88-116), long before the first episodes of European colonialism. Francisco de Vitoria would draw on these and related debates. So, too, the brief and derivative discussion of Hobbes and Locke offered by Bhambra and Holmwood is replete with terms that signal their indebtedness to these debates, not least on the issues of ‘natural law’ and the state of nature. For a second reference, then, see David Singh Grewal’s authoritative discussion of Pufendorf on commerce and natural law (2022), and especially footnotes 6 and 7 (179-80), which put Hobbes and Locke in context, note the complexity of their positions, and signal a significant epistemological break between 17th- and 18th-century thought. As noted above, I’m no expert – and I’ve only recently come across Andrew Fitzmaurice’s monograph on the law of occupation (2014), which looks like another fundamental source. But it’s clear that Bhambra and Holmwood’s incautious flirtation with ‘modern social theory’ reveals a major omission in the project.
This is the background, then, to their persistent refusal to take political economy seriously – whether in relation to capitalism, or colonialism and slavery, or the connections between them. When they turn to ‘stadial theory and the idea of progress’ (38-46), they suggest that when writers of the mid- to late-eighteenth century period of the Scottish Enlightenment discussed slavery, ‘they treated it primarily as a feature of militaristic societies based on settled agriculture’ (44), despite its significance in the present day: ‘With this, contemporary forms of slavery did not have to be addressed in the context of the emergence of commercial society, but simply as a practice left over from previous societies, and one that would diminish as commerce extended its domain’ (45). ‘None of the social theorists of the eighteenth century,’ they conclude, ‘saw slavery (or other predations) as generative of commercial society or integral to its functioning, and thus in need of being explained and integrated into the understanding of commercial society itself’ (46). The first claim here is not true – various authors of the Scottish Enlightenment wrote at length on the use of slavery in the contemporary period. The second is true, but not in the way Bhambra and Holmwood suppose. The social theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment did not think of slavery as ‘generative of commercial society or integral to its functioning’, but this was because they saw it as hostile to the further development of commercial society, and in particular to innovation, invention, and competitiveness in global markets for machine-produced goods, as Hont’s account of their debate over rich and poor countries shows (2005: 267-322). Following another significant epistemological break, in which the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations supplanted what was essentially a cyclical theory of supremacy in trade, espoused by Machiavelli and energetically canvassed by David Hume, a consensus emerged that nations that dominated trade could maintain their competitive advantage indefinitely only if they continually pursued innovations that replaced workers with ever more productive machines.
Bhambra and Holmwood cite John Millar’s The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks in their support. But if they had read on from the opening sentence of his penultimate chapter they would have found the following:
We accordingly find that slavery remained all over Europe for several centuries after Christianity became the established religion: not to mention that this institution is still retained in Russia, in Poland, in Hungary, and in several parts of Germany; and that it is at present admitted without limitation, in the colonies which belong to the European nations, whether in Asia, Africa, or America (Millar, 2006: 265)
Thus the practice of slavery was no sooner extinguished by the inhabitants in one quarter of the globe, than it was revived by the very same people in another, where it has remained ever since, without being much regarded by the public, or exciting any effectual regulations in order to suppress it (ibid: 270)
'In whatever light we regard the institution of slavery, it appears equally inconvenient and pernicious. No conclusion seems more certain than this, that men will commonly exert more activity when they work for their own benefit, than when they are compelled to labour for the benefit merely of another. The introduction of personal liberty has therefore an infallible tendency to render the inhabitants of a country more industrious; and, by producing greater plenty of provisions, must necessarily increase the populousness, as well as the strength and security of a nation' (272)
Millar develops at length the argument that slavery is ‘always unfavourable to industry, and [tends] to hinder the improvement of a country’; and after noting the continuing existence of forms of bonded labour in the Scottish salt and mining industries, he goes on:
'The slavery established in our colonies is an object of greater importance, and is, perhaps, attended with difficulties which cannot be so easily removed. It has been thought, that the management of our plantations requires a labour in which free men would not be willing to engage, and which the white people are, from their constitution, incapable of performing. How far this opinion is well founded, according to the present manner of labouring in that part of the world, seems difficult to determine, as it has never been properly examined by those who are in a condition to ascertain the facts in question. But there is ground to believe that the institution of slavery is the chief circumstance that has prevented those contrivances to shorten and facilitate the more laborious employments of the people, which take place in other countries where freedom has been introduced. Notwithstanding the connection between our colonies and the mother country, the instruments proper for some of the most common branches of labour are little known in many parts of the West Indies. In Jamaica the digging of a grave gives full employment to two men for a whole day; as from the want of proper tools it is necessary to make a large hole no way adapted to the human figure. I am informed, that, unless it has been procured very lately, there is hardly a spade in the whole island. In procuring firewood for boiling sugar, &c. a work that takes up about five or six weeks yearly, no use is made of the saw, but the trees are cut with an ax into logs of about 30 inches in length. Instead of a flail the negroes make use of a single stick in threshing the Guinea-corn; so that in this and in winnowing, ten women are capable of doing no more work in a day, than, with our instruments and machinery, two men would perform in two hours. From the want of a scythe or sickle, they are obliged every night to cut with a knife, or pull with their hands, a quantity of grass sufficient to serve their horses, mules, and black cattle' (277).
'It affords a curious spectacle to observe, that the same people who talk in a high strain of political liberty, and who consider the privilege of imposing their own taxes as one of the unalienable rights of mankind, should make no scruple of reducing a great proportion of their fellow creatures into circumstances by which they are not only deprived of property, but almost of every species of right' (278).
The perspective here is one of ‘political economy’. Millar does not call for the immediate and unconditional abolition of slavery, but supports a proposal for the gradual introduction of wages, suggesting that the demonstration effect of greater productivity would lead to its general adoption.
The same obliviousness to the political economy of capitalist development and its relevance to slavery is apparent when Bhambra and Holmwood turn their attention to Tocqueville’s essays on emancipation, published in Le Siècle in 1843. As a result, an important element of ‘connected history’ is missed. They comment that ‘Tocqueville’s primary concern was to manage an orderly process of emancipation that would not adversely affect colonial economies or their beneficiaries’ (75-6), but confine their analysis primarily to his arguments in favour of compensation for slave-owning colonists. They take particular exception to the fact that he addressed the issue in relation to the recent British abolition process, and characterise his stance as seemingly standing ‘in stark contrast to his refusal to acknowledge the magnitude of the events of the Haitian revolution and what they might mean for debates on emancipation within France’ (76). This misses the point that Tocqueville’s approach over the six articles was governed by practical issues of comparative political economy. He argued that the abolition of slavery in British colonies, particularly where they were close to those of the French, made slave-based production in the latter impossible, due to the collapse of authority on the part of the colonists, and the evaporation of their willingness to invest further:
Qu’est-ce aujourd’hui que l’esclavage, dit un des premiers magistrats d’une de nos colonies, sinon un état de choses où l’ouvrier travaille le moins qu’il peut pour son maître, sans que celui-ci ose lui rien dire? De son côté, le maître, sans certitude du lendemain, n’ose rien changer, il redoute d’innover, il n’améliore point; à peine a-t-il le courage de conserver; les propriétés coloniales sont sans valeur; on n’achète point ce qui ne doit pas avoir de durée. Les propriétaires coloniaux sont sans ressources et sans crédit. Qui pourrait consentir à s’associer à une destinée qu’on ignore? (Tocqueville, 1866: 268).
Then, in a comment that raises significant questions about the assumption that the continuation of empire, let alone slavery, was deemed significant for France’s future (as Bhambra and Holmwood note, Tocqueville thought that it was), he suggests that if slavery has not been abolished, it is because many believe that not only slavery but also France’s colonies are not worth the trouble:
Parce qu’ils pensent que les colonies ne valent ni le temps, ni l’argent, ni l’effort que coûterait une pareille entreprise. Les colons se font, en ceci comme en beaucoup d’autres choses, une illusion singulière: ils attribuent à une sorte d’ardeur coloniale les résistances que l’abolition de l’esclavage rencontre au sein des chambres et dans les conseils de la couronne. Malheureusement, ils se trompent. On repousse l’émancipation, parce qu’on tient peu aux colonies et qu’on préfère laisser mourir le malade que payer le remède. Je suis si convaincu, pour ma part, que l’indifférence croissante de la nation pour ses possessions tropicales est aujourd’hui le plus grand et pour ainsi dire le seul obstacle qui s’oppose à ce que l’émancipation soit sérieusement entreprise, que je croirai la cause de celle-ci gagnée le jour ou le gouvernement et le pays seraient convaincus que la conservation des colonies est nécessaire à la force et à la grandeur de la France. C’est donc à établir cette première venté (sic) qu’il faut d’abord s’attacher (271-2).
Bhambra and Holmwood pass over this in silence – but the reference to the ‘growing indifference of the nation towards its tropical possessions’ calls into question the idea that the futures of capitalism and empire were necessarily tied together. Third, in a sequence of arguments over the following articles that Bhambra and Holmwood also ignore, he makes an extended analysis of the errors of British emancipation, and the adjustments needed in order to convert the slaves, once emancipated, into a productive workforce. Affecting to believe that the Mississippi, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean will have a greatly magnified role in the emerging world economy, he points to chronic labour shortages in British colonies where slavery has been abolished, and attributes this to the exodus of many former slaves to work on their own account on vacant land. For the French colonies, the dangers are magnified, he says, by the availability and attractiveness of work at relatively high wages in those colonies. His solution, set out in the crucial Article 5, is the key to his whole intervention: abolition should be subject to a 10-year interregnum, after which freed slaves should be forbidden to leave the colony or to work on their own account, while minimum and maximum wages should be set in order to limit competition in labour markets. The final article then returns to the case for compensation. A connection, unremarked, is that in his essay on the economics of negro emancipation in the United States (1911), Du Bois records the same initial response among former slave-owners in the South. There is a clear pattern, then, to the political economy of emancipation.
This is the prelude to a chapter on Marx. Despite some eccentric opinions (‘Marx was vehement in his opposition to colonialism, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that his greater concern was for the European peasantry and its dispersion’, 92; ‘It is easy to see why the rediscovery of the early Marx had such an impact: it helped to make sense of Marx’s own description of Capital as a critique of political economy and not simply of capitalism’, 96), they do pinpoint a central issue, and one that has been the subject of much recent debate: Marx, they say, judged that the ‘inherent organic laws of political economy’ would lead in the end to the ‘supreme rule of capital’, and the generalisation of free wage labour (93), but the evidence is both that unfree forms of labour persist, and that they reflect the legacy of empire and the racialisation of labour markets. However, this debate cannot be resolved by pointing to the role of colonialism, enslavement, dispossession and appropriation in ‘primitive accumulation’, and the continuation of unfree forms of labour either after the abolition of slavery or in the present day, or by identifying the welfare state in the UK or more widely as racially inflected. As Bhambra and Holmwood state, ‘It is important to recognise that Marx intended the construct of pure capitalism [I prefer ‘the capitalist mode of production’] to approximate the conditions and relationships to which capitalism increasingly tended’ (103). This being so, it is fruitless to charge his theory with being ‘a poor account of the history of wage differences’ (105), or indeed of gender or ‘racial’ differences across world labour markets, or to cite ‘welfare arrangements’ in Europe in evidence. The question is, are these phenomena permanent features of global capitalism, or are they all being transformed precisely as a consequence of the tendencies Marx identifies (Cammack, 2022: esp. Chs. 4 and 5)?
Less needs to be said about the chapters on Weber and Durkheim. That on Weber outlines his commitment to German imperialism (as did Mommsen, long ago; and see also the fuller account in Allen, 2017), then offers extended discussions of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and of ‘ideal types’, the latter expanding upon a discussion in Connected Sociologies (146-9). Typically, though, it does not explore the connection, if any, between his commitments to German empire and to democracy (that is, a mass franchise) in Germany itself. With Durkheim, the principal point made, at intervals throughout the chapter, is that Durkheim did not address the issue of colonialism. But that may not be a fatal flaw, if as seems possible from the account given, Durkheim could have applied his method, and his concepts, such as anomie, to the distinctive ‘social facts’ of colonial situations. But this is not a line of analysis that Bhambra and Holmwood pursue.
Finally, the chapter on Du Bois, while constituting a useful introductory overview, is again weak on the political economy of slavery and colonialism, and the relationship between colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. Du Bois, in common with other authors of whom Bhambra has been critical elsewhere (Bhambra 2021: 313-4), argued that it was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that ‘colonial imperialism’ became a dominant world force: in the wake of the industrial revolution a ‘new colonialism’/’new imperialism’ emerged as a consequence of new conditions in the world market. Rivalry between the leading states took the form of a desire to annex territories that could provide monopoly control of raw materials and protected markets for industrial production, a dynamic reflected first in the ‘subjugation of India’ but dominated by the late nineteenth century by demands from newly unified Germany for its ‘fair share’ of colonial territory. ‘There was an increased effort, however,’ Du Bois states, ‘to keep the wars against the natives of Asia and Africa confined to limits where they would not set the peoples of Europe aflame in their relations to each other … [And] on the whole, European diplomacy succeeded until 1914 in keeping most European nations from each other’s throats in armed rivalry for the proceeds of investment in Africa and Asia. Then it failed, and the world fell’ (Du Bois, 1945: 304).
This broad perspective runs counter to two of the leading arguments put forward by Bhambra and Holmwood: first, that the development of capitalism is to be explained in terms of colonialism and empire (Du Bois presents it as being the other way round), and second that there is a tendency to sever the connection between colonialism and imperialism, relegating the former to the past. Much of the interest of Color and Democracy (1945) lies precisely in the nuanced account that Du Bois offered of the prospects for decolonisation after the war. He foresaw a struggle between the retrograde forces favouring colonial imperialism on the one hand, and the global anti-colonial and democratic movements across the world on the other. At the heart of it was the fact that ‘the colonial system is a part of the battle between capital and labor in the modern economy’ (275, cited by Bhambra and Holmes without further discussion). Continuing support for empire in the US and the UK was dependent, he argued, on the imperfections of those two democracies - specifically, the domination of the US Senate by the grossly over-represented Southern and rural states, as a consequence of the post-independence settlement, and the continued role of the House of Lords in the UK. After the war, the balance of forces was changed, and a more progressive way forward was possible, in which a Great Crusade against Poverty, Ignorance and Crime might transform the whole world. This was a vision that sprang not from revolutionary politics, despite Du Bois’ sympathy for the Soviet Union, but from progressive liberal opinion within the UN system to which Du Bois was attached, and it lay behind his call for a new mandate system, avoiding the problems associated with that put in place after the First World War. There was a distinct element of paternalism about some of his formulations, and equally of belief in the progressive reform of capitalism, but importantly the prospects for progress depended absolutely on the ending of colonial rule, and support for development and democracy in newly independent states. In short, the ‘colonial system’, in Du Bois’ view, was not a necessary and permanent part of the capitalist system, but a fetter on its development. As it was to leading figures in the Scottish Enlightenment.
After all this, the conclusion identifies five ‘fictions’. First, Bhambra and Holmwood reject the idea of stages of society, declare that the ideas of a ‘state of nature’ and of a modern society are equally fictional, and propose that: ‘We need to move away from the idea of types of society that can be investigated separately from the relationships between them. We must instead understand how those connections structure ideas of difference and domination’ (211). So we must, but as yet such connections have not been examined in depth, and as noted above, some that are in plain view have escaped their notice. Second, they reject the idea of ‘a special nature of modern subjectivity’, associated with the ‘modern individual’: ‘The very idea of an “unfinished” project of modernity presupposes that modernity is a civilising project and that we should look at all premodern societies as inferior precursors, beset by traditional authority and inadequate selves, and not as bases of knowledge and sources of experience from which we can also learn’. Third, the idea of the sovereign nation state overlooks that ‘all European nation states (including the United States) were empires or participated in the construction of empires through the movement of their peoples’. This has led to inequalities in citizenship rights, ‘both inside and outside the newly established boundaries of the nation’. Fair enough, but again these issues remain to be explored in depth. Fourth, contra the Marxist emphasis on class and formally free labour, ‘Commodified labour power does not develop as the central form of capitalism; moreover, capitalist nation states are able to divide their populations between national citizens and colonial subjects’. As a result of the latter, forms of unfree labour persist, along with differential access to rights. True only in part: commodified labour power does develop as the central form of labour, but it does not immediately displace other forms. And as they earlier acknowledge (103), Marx’s focus was on the long-term tendencies implied by the logic of the capitalist mode of production. This is not a fiction, then, but a hypothesis. Fifth and last, the methodological claims made in sociology ‘all tend to present sociological reasoning uncritically as ahistorical and as a necessary condition for an objective enquiry’. This is a curious point on which to finish, as the text has not identified these supposed claims, and the statement is inherently improbable.
Overall, it is not clear whether the primary focus of Colonialism and Modern Social Theory is on issues regarding theories of modernity, or the significance of colonialism for global development. Regardless, neither case is made, primarily because the approach is too complicated, while some basic requirements are not met: there has been no demonstration yet that any sociologist structures their approach systematically around the concept of modernity (Parsons might be a good candidate) nor any systematic analysis of any specific case of colonial rule and its relationship to ‘fundamental questions of order and the legitimation of power’. The approach is at too great a level of generality, without clear supporting evidence. And there is a huge gap at the centre of the project, brought out by the partial shift to ‘modern social theory’, which is the failure to examine any legal doctrines relating to the justification and governance of colonial territories, their relationship to actual practices of rule, and variation from case to case and time to time. At the same time, the potential for developing the theses on colonialism in their own right, detached from all considerations of ‘modernity’, is limited by the insistence on subordinating the logic of capitalism to that of colonialism/imperialism. This in turn is part of a larger problem, which is the refusal to engage with any form of political economy. This being said, it remains important and true that the playing out of the antagonisms inherent in the capitalist mode of production, past or present, cannot be understood except on a global scale that takes proper account of the history and continuing effects of slavery, colonialism and empire. The fact that the case is made so badly here doesn’t mean to say that there isn’t one to be made.
References
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