P. 94 “The very spaces where Marx and Engels imagined the American cotton monopoly would be broken were those of empire … yet nothing in Marx’s immanent critique of Hegel and of his treatment of alienated labour foreclosed the inclusion of colonial forms of labour, of chattel slavery alongside wage slavery, of forced labour alongside free labour. The problem arose precisely because of what he uncritically accepted from Hegel and the wider tradition of European social theory, namely a stadial theory of society and of human ‘progress’. Marx was so keen to look forward beyond capitalism that he could not see the wider aspects of the past and present that structured future possibilities.”
P. 124 “the modern capitalism that Weber addressed was strongly associated with colonialism. This is true of internal colonialism, where the association was manifest in the reinforcement of Germany’s eastern borders through settlement and in the reinforcement of German identity against ethnic Poles and Jews; and it is also true of external colonialism, that is, German expansion into Africa and the Pacific region. The link with colonialism is further implicity in the very organisation of Weber’s Protestant Ethic study … the spirit of capitalism is associated with settler colonialism in the United States via the figure of Benjamin Franklin, the primary source of Weder’s delineation of the distinctiveness of the spirit of capitalism. It was predation, not piety, that was unleashed globally through what Lebovics calls ‘rapacious and rebellious men of wealth’” (“The Uses of America in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government’ Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (4) 567-81)
P. 129 “Weber understood the nation as a simple natural category – he gave no recognition to historical complexity or contemporary contradiction – and presented it as the fundamental value with which a German social science should operate – despite the call for social science to be value-free… The German empire may have lasted only 30 years, from 1884 to 1915, but imperialism was a constitutive aspect of the project of nation state formation, as identified by Weber himself. Nations, he argued, were not defined merely by ethnic or cultural homogeneity, but by the act of welding a community with shared political destinies and struggles for power… there is an obvious split between domestic populations, on behalf of which the claim for legitimacy is made, and overseas populations, who must accept their domination as ‘fact’.
P. 193 “The significance of slavery for the social development of America, Du Bois argued, rested upon ‘the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy’. In his view, this relationship demonstrated the limits of democracy in the matter of determining who was to be free, who was to be schooled, and who had the right to vote – in other words, who was considered a full citizen. Citizenship was defined in terms of whether the worker – here the black worker – had control over his or her own labour. Du Bois connected the black worker in the United states under slavery with that ‘dark vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America … that great majority of mankind on whose bent and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern industry… according to Du Bois the social and political emancipation of the colonial working class would be a precondition for the general emancipation of labour, including in the United States. This was a global argument similar to the one about African American suffrage in the South, according to which it was the actions of emancipated African Americans that produced a general improvement for all, albeit one from which they were subsequently excluded.”
P. 200 Du Bois Wrote “that, when working people in European countries began to demand ‘costly social improvements from their governments’ the financial burdens were likely to be balanced through increased investment in (and extractivism from) the colonies. In this way “democracy in Europe and America will continue to impede and nullify democracy in Asia and Africa. The social and economic improvements that he argued were necessary to realise a proper emancipation of African Americans and of other colonised people came to be part of the postwar settlement for white majority populations in Europe and the United States. These improvements were paid for from a patrimony of enslavement and colonialism…. The problem of democracy, he state, was the poverty in which most people live: the poverty of the colonised, the poverty of the smaller nations, and also the poverty within the colonising countries.”
P. 209 We have not attempted to deny the importance of class, gender, or other divisions that have preoccupied European sociology over the decades since the Second World War. We have sought to show how bringing the colonial contact and the imperial realities of modernity into focus will produce a fundamental shift in our ways of understanding what falls under the jurisdiction of sociology. Our book has been influenced by calls to ‘decolonise’ the university, but what does that mean when colonialism has been so thoroughly effaced from the self–understanding of academia. For those who practice sociology in places that were under European colonial combination, what this means is relatively clear. It means addressing how their institutions were produced or reproduced as part of a colonial system and how structures and curricula were shaped y their particular location in that system. For sociologists who work in institutions of the former metropoles, the answer is less clear because the shaping of these institutions y colonialism is less obvious to them. … the issue is not simply to add colonialism to sociology’s repertoire of topics, but to show how that repertoire must change and how the concepts and methodologies with which it is associated must be transformed. What does it mean to ‘decolonise’ a curriculum in which colonialism is not recognised? Paradoxically if our book is to be understood as an attempt at ‘decolonisation’, it is one that has had to proceed by putting colonialism into the picture .. modern social theory begins by being saturated with the presence of colonialism and the interpretative issues it posed. How do we engage with others when their presence is an obstacle to our interests? How do we use others to further our own interests? These were unavoidable questions in the early modern period. As colonialism became institutionalised, these questions receded from the centre to the periphery. … European nations … included the United States … were engaged in colonial and imperial projects continuously throughout self-proclaimed modernity, and so their impacts could not be denied … we argue for a renewal of social theory and sociology … central … is to recognise and address five fictions that currently organise understandings…
Fiction 1 : The idea of stages of society
The first fiction is associated with the idea of a ‘state of nature’ … against the ‘state of society’… fosters a concern to delineate the characteristics of modern society against which other societies can be described and classified. We regard the idea of modern society as equally fictional, because it carried the imprint of the original fiction. Once stages of society are delineated, it becomes possible to arrange them hierarchically in conformity with ideas of development and progress and to associate particular kinds of social relationships with each type of society … colonialism and its practices of appropriation – of territories, of resources, and of people – have an explicitly but ambiguous place within these constructure… people are characterized as being at a lower stage of development and an entire vocabulary of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarity’ is applied to them, notwithstanding the brutality of those who describe themselves as ‘civilized’. 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.
Fiction2 Liberty, autonomy and modern subjectivity
“Modern society is assumed to inaugurate a distinctive kind of subjectivity, associated with the modern individual and his or her self-determining capacity to act on the basis of reason and self-interest. This is the individual ‘capable of property’ in contrast to individuals who are either incapable of or indifferent to property. … this kind of individualism is represented as having developed within a religious tradition … but it is also a development that leaves religion behind. In the tradition of modern social theory, especially that associated with Kant and Hegel, modern reason is about developing autonomy and freedom and subjecting institutions such as those of religion to a criticism led by reason. … When critical theory regards private property as a limit on self- emancipation, it does so after having postulated that the development of private property was itself a necessary stage in the process that leads to its transcendence. The very idea of an ‘unfinished’ project of modernity presupposes that modernity is a civilizing 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.
Fiction 3 The idea of the nation state
“In the realisation of rights, contingencies of exclusion can be overcome through a process of recognition of their false limitation (ie false from the perspective of a proper understanding of their underlying nature). This is a standard interpretation of the extension of political rights from properties males to all males, then from men to women, and so on. However, in the case of issues of race and ethnicity, inequalities are constructed both inside and outside the newly established boundaries of the nation. From the outside, subjects of empire are denied inclusion among beneficiaries when the patrimony of empire is distributed; from the inside, they are denied full citizenship in the newl understood nation. As a result, people who in reality share the common political heritage of empire and now represented as ‘immigrants within its metropoles and are seen as threats to the nation’s solidarity and social contract.
Fiction 4: Class and formally free labour
“The class division that Marx described depends on the centrality of formally free labour and on the commodification of labour power in capitalist modernity. We have argued that these two features are called into question once we understand the colonial (and imperial) nature of modernity. Commodified labour power does not develop as the central form of capitalism; moreverm capitalist nation states are able to divide their populations between national citizens and colonial subjects. As Du Bois noted, this opens possibilities for a ‘decommodification’ of labour power within the metropole by using colonial patrimonies in the provision of strtuified and other collective goods. At the same time, colonial subjects are denied the status of free labour and subordinated to various forms of indenture… in the metropole indenture retyurns in the form of treating migrant labour as not worthy of the rights and rewards associated with the citizenship status afforded to nationals.
Fiction 5: the fiction of sociological reasoning.
“Methodological claims that are made in this discipline. They all tend to present sociological reasoning as ahistorical and as a necessary condition for an objective inquiry. In this way sociological reasoning is assimilated to the general claim of the Enlightenment, and sociology aligns itself with a critical project that continues that claim… we do not argue for some form of relativism or for multiple perspectives …. We argue for a transformation of our own perspective as a result of learning from others. The first step in any process of learning is the recognition of a limitation in one’s understanding. We have shown that colonialism has structured European modernity as well as European thought, hence recognising its significance opens an opportunity to practice sociology differently.
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