Colonialism and Modern Social Theory. Gurminder K. Bhambra

colonialism’ (Smith 1980). Included among these populations were those of the colonising powers, but also a wider variety of Europeans, for example Poles, Hungarians, and Swedes. Those who were colonised and dispossessed in this process were incorporated into empires of domination and extraction, where the ruling polity understood itself as ‘national’. Colonised others were not part of the national order, for which legitimacy was claimed. While in some cases they were recognised as subjects, they were not subjects insofar as legitimacy claims were concerned.

      The modern world has been significantly shaped through historical processes and structures that have been in place since the late fifteenth century. These have formed our institutions and fashioned our understandings. Others were initially understood as ‘non-believers’, but by the mid to late eighteenth century they were considered ‘ancestors’. As Locke wrote in the late seventeenth century and as will be further discussed in the next chapter, ‘in the beginning all the World was America’. That is, in their discovery of the Americas, Europeans believed that they were encountering earlier versions of themselves. This laid the groundwork for particular understandings of hierarchies among populations across the world. If those peoples encountered by early European travellers were effectively understood as being – in sociological terms – their ‘ancestors’, then Europeans could both show them their predetermined future and be unconcerned about their passing away. The former was sanctioned by the belief in ‘progress’, the latter suggested that the disappearance of other cultures and peoples was not a consequence of European actions but a quasi-natural phenomenon. In this way Europeans justified to themselves their domination of others, and this justification was incorporated into modern social theory, as secular justifications replaced religious ones.

At its simplest, then, modern social theory is properly understood as a product of European societies from the fifteenth century onwards, embodied initially in philosophical reflections about social changes that were beginning to transform those societies. Looking back, it is straightforward to see these changes in terms of European exploration of new worlds in the Americas and in the Indian Ocean, together with the expansion of trade in precious metals and luxury commodities such as spices, exotic foodstuffs, and stimulants such as sugar, tobacco, and coffee. The forms of colonialism undertaken by European powers varied, but included the incorporation of territories into monarchic property to be governed by designated officials (in the case of English colonies, lord proprietors). A dominant form was the royal charter given to merchants for overseas trade. These ventures involved violent encounters with others, both to enforce trade and to require labour in mines and on plantations. Most European powers sanctioned trading companies – the English East India Company, the Royal African Company, the Dutch East India Company, the French East India Company, and so on – supported by wealthy speculators and frequently aligned with courts and more or less rudimentary parliaments (Phillips and Sharman 2020).

      From the early 1600s, for example, royal charters were given to English merchants to explore opportunities for commerce and trade in Asia (e.g. the East India Company, chartered in 1600) and to travel westwards to colonise and convert the territories and populations of the Americas (e.g. the Virginia Company, chartered in 1606).¹ Jamestown was the first permanent settlement made by English colonists; it was established in 1607 and followed by others along the eastern seaboard, all of which led to the establishment of the Thirteen Colonies. These were based on the displacement, dispossession, and elimination of indigenous peoples in those territories and by the takeover, most notably, of the fur trade via the Hudson’s Bay Company (chartered in 1670) (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014).

      These companies were among what we would now think of as the first major capitalist corporations. As Thomas Macaulay (1848) set out, in 1676 every proprietor (or shareholder) in the East India Company received, as a bonus, a quantity of stock equal to that which was held, plus dividends amounting to an average of 20 per cent annually. He is reported to have stated: ‘Treasure flowed to England in oceans.’ The Dutch East India Company, for its part, was the first to come up with the ideas of transferable shares and separation of the role of management from ownership (Gelderblom, de Jong, and Jonker 2013). In truth, as Srinivas Aravamudan (2009) puts it, the true innovation was ‘colonialism by corporation’. The companies employed militias to enforce their presence and maintain ports in foreign lands in order to facilitate their trade. Over the seventeenth century, corporate sovereignty over foreign lands was transferred to national sovereignty ‘back home’, as positions of rulership appointed by national governments replaced rule by the corporation and its officers on behalf of shareholders.

European overseas expansion occurred alongside a long century of brutal conflicts on the European land mass. These conflicts redrew boundaries, as conflicting religious loyalties among Catholics and Protestants were mobilised in wars associated with the break-up of the main European political system, the Holy Roman Empire (an ‘empire’ in Eisenstadt’s sense). Among these wars were the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) between Habsburg Spain and its ‘provinces’ – which included Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg – and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) between Catholic and Protestant powers. These religious conflicts were expressed not only between states, nascent or otherwise, but within them; and they were manifest also in the English Civil War of 1642–52. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 settled the Thirty Years’ War and established the sovereignty of separate European states and the relations between them. This was, as we have seen, an iconic moment in the history of European self-understandings and understandings of the mutually binding nature of relations among states within an international order. However, as discussed earlier, nations outside Europe were not recognised and had no claim to sovereignty.

      Competition between supposedly national powers was conducted via colonisation and military conflict designed to maintain a national interest in the domination of others. Thus all European powers – from Britain (with its separate nations of England and Scotland before union in 1707) to Portugal and Spain, France and the Netherlands, Sweden and Russia – were engaged in colonial expansion and competition. Warfare on the European landmass was transferred to the seas and to other lands. Indeed, during the eighteenth century European wars were frequently fought overseas, in competition for territory, such that they could be characterised as the first ‘world wars’ in history.

      As we shall see in later chapters, imperial competition would also bring war back to the European continent. Weber and Durkheim, for example, would both confront a world war that neither of their theories was equipped to explain. Equally, techniques designed to quell resistance and rebellion in colonies would be used against domestic resistance – for example, events were more usually discussed only in terms of domestic class conflict, as happened in the 1848 revolutions across Europe.

The incorporation of other lands under European powers involved settlement and transfer of populations. This meant a massive movement of Europe’s own populations, as well as the transfer of other populations through enslavement, indenture, and other forms of coerced labour, initially through plantations established by the trading corporations. This was not only a feature of early modernity but something integral to the development and mature phase of modernity. As colonialism expanded, it also came to be formalised into political institutions and cultural expressions. Thus the most obvious thing to be said about Britain (along with other European countries, such as France) throughout the nineteenth and indeed down to the mid-twentieth century is that it was an empire. In other words, its reach and self-definition went beyond its national boundaries.

      While not all European countries succeeded in becoming empires, they all made an attempt at it: the last quarter of the nineteenth century was characterised as a ‘scramble for Africa’ in which European powers sought to divide up the African continent among themselves – that is, between the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Spain (see Brooke-Smith 1987). Further, as we have noted, European populations from across the continent were involved in ‘emigrationist colonialism’ (Smith 1980). Over four centuries, the population movements from Europe to the New World and beyond coalesced into a phenomenon that was markedly different from other, more quotidian movements and encounters. This is because European movement was linked to colonial settlement, which was central to the displacement, dispossession, and elimination of populations across the globe. While the idea of Lebensraum