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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 populist ressentiment and rejections of multiculturalism.

We came to write this book after a period of research leave in the United States in 2014–15. This coincided with celebrations of fifty years since the passing of the Voting Rights Act in the United States and an increasing recognition that, rather than having been built upon, many of the gains of this period were being dismantled. Black Lives Matter had recently emerged as a distinctive new protest movement – new, that is, to those unfamiliar with the facts of what Michelle Alexander calls ‘the new Jim Crow’ and resistance to it. Among our many conversations, and with the benefit of distance, we necessarily turned to the issue of how our own context in the United Kingdom was similar. The referendum on Scottish independence was under way and was making evident the fractures within Britain, fractures that would open more dramatically with the referendum to leave the European Union a couple of years later.

These events were part of everyday lived experience, yet seemed at odds with the dominant sociological sensibility. An overwhelming majority of academics supported remaining in the European Union and, in the aftermath of the vote, there was a call that they needed to reconnect with ‘ordinary’ citizens. A similar call was issued in the United States after the election of Donald Trump to the office of president. It is right that there should be introspection about such moments, reflection on sociology’s broader failure to recognise the underlying currents and offer cogent analyses of the situation. Of course, it would have been better if these analyses had been available before the events – as the currents have been running over a long course. Just as the assumptions of economics came to be questioned after its failure to anticipate the financial crisis of 2008, so the assumptions of sociology and other social sciences are in question now.

One response is in favour of a realignment with the current flow. This is evident in calls by some in the United States and Europe to recognise the ‘legitimate’ claims of a white working class that has been ‘left behind’. However, the apparent normalisation of these issues as being about ‘class’ and not about ‘identity’ reveals the strongest identity claim of all. After all, class issues could most easily have been addressed regardless of race and ethnicity, through inclusive social and economic policies. The focus on a special disadvantage to white workers, who were nonetheless relatively more advantaged than ethnic minority workers, indicated that the concern was less with economic disadvantage than with the inclusion of multicultural others.

Here we want to identify the social structural basis of this newly articulated identity politics and to understand how such a basis has been elided from contemporary sociology as a consequence of the conceptual frameworks bequeathed in the development of modern social theory. In none of the writers who make up the usual canon of modern social theory is there a discussion of race as central to the social structures of modernity. We trace this absence to a failure to account for the centrality of colonialism and empire within the modern world.

As we explain in the Introduction, our focus is self-consciously on European social theory and on European and US colonialism. In this sense, our book has a paradoxical quality. It answers recent appeals to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum by insisting on the need for a full acknowledgement of the nature of colonialism and its determining role in the construction of the modern world, including its ‘metropolitan centres’. In doing so, our book does not claim that modern social theory has become irrelevant. While the concepts of sociology and social theory have been represented as universal, they embody particular experiences and epistemological claims. This limitation is an opportunity for reconstruction, to be achieved by taking the colonial context into account and by learning from others. This process is the same, both inside and outside the academy.

If, as Danielle Allen argues, you have always occupied the public space, then the demand by others to be part of that space too, and on equal terms, will seem a provocation and making room will be experienced as a loss. However, what is experienced in this way is the loss of an advantage over people who were previously excluded and dominated. In the circumstances, what needs to be done is not simply a matter of adding new voices, but one of transforming the public space so that it works for all. For example, from the perspective of Black Lives Matter, all lives do indeed matter. Yet those who argue ‘all lives matter’ fail to acknowledge the specific structures that maintain their own lives while damaging the lives of others. Black Lives Matter represents the self-organization of African American communities and the necessary protection of their lives. The injunction to others is to address the social structures that have made this movement necessary.

An equivalent issue in Europe is that of multicultural equality. All European empires were empirically multicultural and multireligious, but experienced no difficulty in managing the consequent differences from a position of hierarchical organization and domination. The current perception of a threat to European identity as a result of immigration fails to recognise that, in the course of colonial history, European populations moved in greater numbers and with greater effect on the populations they encountered than is the case in the course of migration to Europe. Those who argue that there is a national patrimony to which local citizens have a claim before any migrant others do suppress the fact that that patrimony was produced under colonial domination and extraction: it is the legacy of imperial subjects as much as of national citizens. Arguments that social rights of citizenship should be restricted do not understand how rights, when limited, become privileges. The threat to European values comes not from the outside or from multicultural others but from within, in the form of a failure to understand one’s own history and its consequences for the configuration of the present.

Our approach to these issues has been shaped by conversations with colleagues and friends at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In particular, we would like to thank Danielle Allen and Didier Fassin as curators of seminars on these topics as well as our fellow participants. We would especially like to thank Sara Edenheim, Paul Gowder, Hugh Gusterson, Michael Hanchard, Gary Fine, Urs Linder, Charles M. Payne, Nicole Reinhardt, Valentin Seidler, Yuki Seidler, Cécile Stehrenberger, and Mara Viveros Vigoya. These conversations began much earlier in the United Kingdom, with Desmond King and Robbie Shilliam. They have continued and greatly enriched our understandings.

We have both taught modules on social and sociological theory over the years and thank our students, colleagues, and the institutions where we worked for the opportunity to think through these issues in a variety of contexts. Gurminder would like to thank her colleagues at the University of Sussex – in particular Buzz Harrison, Ali Kassem, Louiza Odysseos, and Anna Stavrianakis – and her colleagues in Sweden – in particular Gunlög Fur, Peo Hansen, Johan Höglund, and Stefan Jonsson. John would like to thank colleagues at the University of Nottingham – in particular Christian Karner, Roda Madziva, and James Pattison – and colleagues in Prague – Jan Balon, Radim Hladík, Jan Maršálek, and Marek Skovajsa. Thanks are also due to the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Science and to the Czech Research Council for research funding associated with the history of sociology drawn on in the book.

We would like to thank Steve Kemp, Desmond King, Robbie Shilliam, and Andrew Wells for their close engagement with the manuscript at its various stages and for alerting us to errors and pitfalls for the removal of which we are really grateful. We would also like to thank Ipek Demir, Vicky Margree, Lucy Mayblin, William Outhwaite, and Mia Rodriguez-Salgado for their comments and suggestions for improving the manuscript. For conversations and collegial sustenance during the period of writing this manuscript, we owe a debt of gratitude to Bob Antonio, Michaela Benson, James Hampshire, Pauline von Hellerman, Zdenek Kavan, Julia McClure, Kathryn Medien, Karim Murji, Adam Seligman, and Heba Youssef.

Our editor at Polity Press, Jonathan Skerrett, has been especially supportive of the project, as has Karina Jákupsdóttir. We would also like to thank Manuela Tecusan for her close and thoughtful attention to the manuscript.