Colonialism and Modern Social Theory. Gurminder K. Bhambra

that have been challenged. While the primary focus of this book is upon those substantive claims and how the colonial context bears upon them, we also address seemingly abstract methodological arguments, which have arisen in the context of denying the need for a more fundamental reconstruction of categories and concepts.

      Theoretical development necessarily takes place through dialogue, and that dialogue is fundamentally altered by changes in the audience of social theory and its practitioners. Nelson powerfully demonstrates the significance of epistemological communities – and also their changing and overlapping natures, which are consequent upon the emergence of feminism and the inclusion of women in the academy. Feminism did not simply introduce new ways of knowing the world, it also transformed previously dominant ones, ways that had seemed secure. In this book we are arguing for a similar process with regard to colonialism and its legacy, both within modern social structures and within representations in modern European social theory.

While much postcolonial analysis is oriented towards the Middle East and South Asia (see Said 1995 [1978], Spivak 1988, Bhabha 1994) and decolonial studies focus on South America, the Caribbean, and, to a lesser extent, Africa (see Keita 2002, Mignolo 2007, Quijano 2007, Tageldin 2014, Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015), the one part of the world most in need of such analysis is Europe itself. Europe is in urgent need of decolonisation and, paradoxically, this kind of process can happen only by taking seriously its colonial histories and by explicitly working through their contemporary manifestations. The world subjugated by Europe cannot examine issues in the present without taking into account that the past of having been colonised is central. Within Europe, however, there appears to be no recognition of a corresponding obligation (Césaire 2000 [1955]; for discussion, see Viveros-Vigoya 2020). Colonisation, it is assumed, was something that happened elsewhere – albeit at the hands of Europeans – and consequently has no perceived bearing on contemporary European politics. This is so both in terms of issues related to national polities in Europe and in terms of their relations to one another (as for example in the construction of the European Union) and to the rest of the world (Bhambra 2009).

      In this book, then, we address how colonialism was the context for the particular forms and practices of knowledge associated with modern social theory as it is expressed within the ‘western’ academy and its canons. We draw on the understandings of scholars who write from postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, but we are not concerned here to set out the nature of their arguments. They have been discussed elsewhere (see Bhambra 2007, 2014). Rather we are concerned with the colonial entanglement of mainstream European social theory and, in particular, with those writers who have come to be regarded as figures central to it. In this sense we are engaging in a critique of the canon, but not with the purpose of either adding to it or denying it. Our purpose is to show how the canon – which we discuss below – has been used to develop concepts and categories for the understanding of modernity that elide its broader colonial context. By restoring that context, we seek to renew European social theory as an entity capable of learning from others and of contributing to general social theory, as one part of a global project.

At this point we should enter a caveat. Although European colonialism is more extensive than that exercised by Europe’s northern powers, since Spain, Portugal, and Italy were colonial states too, European social theory came to be associated with northern Europe. Whereas this dominance is usually paired up with a particular sociological argument that connects Protestant Europe with capitalist modernity, we shall argue that it derives from the connection between colonialism and commercial enterprise. As already indicated, we are seeking to provide not a comprehensive account of European social thought but an account that pays heed to writers whose work is regarded as definitive for contemporary social theory.

The Idea of Modern Society

      Contemporary sociology, in its Eurocentric mode, is formed around a straightforward historiography of modernity. This is a historiography that typically rests on ideas of the modern world as emerging out of processes of political and economic revolution – specifically, processes associated on the one hand with the eighteenth-century American Revolution and French Revolution and, on the other, with industrialisation, in Britain and elsewhere, in the subsequent century. These are what Robert Nisbet (1966) called ‘the two revolutions’. The same historiography is seen as being underpinned by earlier cultural changes across Europe brought about by the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the scientific revolution (Bhambra 2007). Such understandings conflate Europe with modernity – and in this context the United States is treated as if it were coextensive with Europe, as one of its settler colonies. In this way they render the process of becoming modern, at least in the first instance, one of endogenous European development. At the same time, the rest of the world is regarded as external to these world-historical processes, and colonial connections are presented as insignificant to their development.

For many commentators, theoretical reflection on the processes in question takes place in two phases. The first phase would be the emergence of a distinctively European voice, associated with an eighteenth-century Enlightenment and involving reflection on religion, politics, and culture. This voice is taken to be philosophical in orientation and not to have yet developed a full sociological sensibility (Heilbron 1995). The second phase would be a development of the mid to late nineteenth century that culminates in the period of classical sociological theory associated with Weber and Durkheim. Here a dominant sociological account of modernity comes to rest on two fundamental assumptions: rupture and difference (Bhambra 2007). A temporal rupture distinguishes a traditional, agrarian past from the modern, industrial present, and this distinction goes hand in hand with a fundamental cultural differentiation of Europe from the rest of the world – or, in the words of Stuart Hall (1992), with a separation of ‘the West from the rest’. These paradigmatic assumptions have framed both the standard methodological problems raised by modern social inquiry and the explanations proposed in resolving them. It is these assumptions that we question.

      While accounts of the Industrial Revolution and French Revolution – and, by implication, of modernity itself – have not remained unchanged over time, what has remained constant is the framing of the European origins and subsequent global diffusion within which these events are located. Whatever their other differences, the early sociologists believed themselves to be living through a (or perhaps the) great transformation in history; and they were concerned to understand how it had begun, as they wished to influence how it would be brought to the completion that, in their view, was inherent in it. Not only were others not recognised within accounts of the now canonical two revolutions, but the potential contribution of other events (and of the experiences of non-western others) to the sociological paradigm of modernity has rarely been considered. As Steven Seidman (1996: 314) remarks, sociology’s self-conscious emergence coincided with the high point of western imperialism, and yet ‘the dynamics of empire were not incorporated into the basic categories, models of explanation, and narratives of social development of the classical sociologists’.

      Our argument is that modern social theory entails a double displacement. Empire has an earlier phase, namely colonialism. This phenomenon emerged from the fifteenth century onwards. It preceded the Enlightenment and was continuous with it. Colonialism was attributed to the European ‘discovery’ of new worlds and involved the appropriation of lands, their settlement, and the development of commercial trade in the resources extracted from them. The early period of colonialism, which involved the use of forced labour in mines and on plantations, is usually understood as a premodern phenomenon that is not essential to the development of modernity. This 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