Читать книгу Colonialism and Modern Social Theory - Gurminder K. Bhambra - Страница 9

For the most part, European social theory has been in denial of the colonial and imperial past of Europe and the significance of this past for how social theory has been configured. Such denial takes several forms. One is the absence of a discussion of European colonialism and imperialism and their legacies when reflecting on contemporary global social, economic, and political issues. Another, seemingly paradoxical form is the claim that we have spent too much time discussing the colonial past, that we should just move on from it and beyond any perceived need to make amends for it. A third form of denial is to argue that, in any case, empire and its typical forms of domination are by no means exclusive to Europe. By contrast, in this book we begin from a position that focuses explicitly on Europe, its colonial and imperial histories, and the ways in which these continue to shape the world. We also suggest that there was something distinctive about European empires by comparison with other forms of empire, something that does require redress. This redress would have two aspects. One concerns the policies that mitigate the inequalities that colonialism bequeathed. The other consists in a reconstruction of the categories and concepts through which modern inequalities are understood. In the present book we deal with this second aspect. While the first is materially the most important one, a major obstacle to its realisation is the failure to make the legacies of colonialism central to our understanding of modern society and its problems.

Standard histories of the emergence of the state within Europe usually regard the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia as central to the delineation and consolidation of the ideas of national sovereignty and political equality among states. In truth, the sovereignty in question was that of ‘princes’ and has come to be represented as national sovereignty retrospectively, once princely power was itself curtailed. The Treaty of Westphalia put an end to the Thirty Years’ War between Protestant and Catholic powers in Europe – one of the many wars conducted among royal houses and their shifting alliances. It gave the contending princes sovereignty, that is, an authority that came to be associated with territorial boundaries. The key issue, however, is that, in subsequent centuries, European states did not simply exercise their sovereignty within the territorial boundaries of national states. They also exerted power and violence over territories and populations elsewhere. Sovereignty – more properly, mutual non-intervention – was to be respected, and then more in theory than in practice, only in relation to other European powers; it was not regarded as significant in encounters with peoples and lands beyond Europe. Indeed, as Antony Anghie (2006) argues, the doctrine of sovereignty was itself an explicit statement of the relationship between European powers and allowed the exercise of sovereignty over non-European others as an expression of that sovereignty. This explicitly legitimised, for Europeans, the terms of an imperialism that would incorporate the non-European world into the ambit of European powers – as a ‘right to colonise’ – at the same time as proclaiming these powers’ own sovereignty and right to be inviolable.

Of course, there have been and are many different types of political system in world history. Perhaps the two dominant types associated with the state are the empire and the nation (Clemens 2016). Empires have a longer history than nations and are seen to have existed across many civilisations in a variety of forms – from the ancient Egyptian patrimonial empire to the Chinese feudal empire, passing through Greek and Roman empires of the classical world based on city states and nomadic–sedentary empires such as the Mughal empire. There were also empires of conquest, which resulted specifically from European expansion and colonisation and included primarily the Spanish–American, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British empires. In his comprehensive study of empires, Shmuel Eisenstadt (1963) compares a variety of empires and, although he notes differences between the political systems under consideration, suggests that there are general characteristics that are common to all of them. In truth, his discussion of European empires in the modern period is very limited, in part because he associates modernity with the development of the nation state, and not with empire. He relegates empires instead to earlier periods in history, despite the fact that the reach of empire is geographically far more extensive in the modern period than it was in antiquity or the Middle Ages.

We distinguish between empires of domination and empires of conquest and extraction and argue that, by assuming the latter form, European colonialism came to create a very different type of empire. Broadly, there is a type of empire that emerges out of pre-existing political formations and, in its expansion and socioeconomic development, takes on the general features identified by Eisenstadt. This type includes the new political form that emerges as a consequence of (1) initiatives taken by rulers indigenous to the territory and (2) the development of centralised administrative and political organs designed to govern a defined, if expanding, territory. Incorporation may give rise to resistance, but it is also generally inclusive, being part of the order of rules and obligations that organise the claims to territory. By contrast, the type we refer to as the modern European empire of conquest and extraction operated at a distance and came to differ from this model in three significant ways. First, expansion involved the subjugation of populations who were subject to rule, but were not part of the order of rule. Second, this subjugation was organised on the assumption of the civilisational, religious, or racial superiority of the invading population. Third, the land and resources of the subjugated population were deemed to be available to the invading population to do with as it pleased. In our view, these elements suggest a qualitative difference between forms of empire. Not to recognise this difference is to perpetuate a false equivalence between political systems that ought to be understood as distinct.

The other aspect to keep in mind here is that the French, British, and Dutch empires (among others) were established during the same period when, it is claimed, they became nation states. The problem is the idea that these states are nation states that have empires – instead of more appropriately understanding what we call nation states as being imperial states, that is, empires organised around the core idea of a national project (one transferred from princes to parliaments). To collapse all varieties of empire into the same form and then to distinguish between empires and nations involves the same sleight of hand. It prevents us from examining what comes to be distinctive about European empires and their post-imperial claim of an underlying essential nation to which empire itself was merely a contingent phenomenon. Within modern European social theory, then, the question of the legitimacy of political rule is primarily discussed in terms of the nation. Since colonisation and the establishment of imperial rule over others cannot be legitimised through such a discourse, it is usually evaded as a matter of relevant concern.

Indigenous peoples in Abya Yala or Turtle Island, territories that we call ‘the Americas’ today, were eliminated and dispossessed by European invaders, who claimed their land and resources in the name of European powers and with the authority of religion. Africans were removed from their own lands and forcibly transported across the ocean, to be coerced into labour on plantations in the New World. The wealth and resources of India were drained primarily by British traders, then by the British government, to the benefit of the ‘mother country’ and its ‘settler offshoots’. After the much vaunted abolition of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century, millions of Indian and Chinese labourers were taken to work on the very same plantations, through systems of indenture (Thiara 1995, Allen 2017). African countries, depleted of their populations through the European trade in human beings, were then colonised for their land and other resources. The Belgian king, for example, appropriated the territory, resources, and population of the Congo (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002). He extracted a personal fortune through enforced labour in the rubber industry that also led to the deaths of millions of people.

European colonialism was both a collective and an individual endeavour. It was carried out by states and heads of states, but also by European populations, through what has been called ‘emigrationist 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 – ‘living space’ – was explicitly articulated in Germany in the late nineteenth century (Smith 1980), expansionist policies for land and territory for one’s ‘own’ citizens had been central to the European colonial project since much earlier times.

Across the nineteenth century, around 60 million Europeans left their countries of origin to make new lives and livelihoods for themselves on lands inhabited by others (Miège 1993). Each new cohort of Europeans was allocated land at the edges of the territory that had already been settled. This was done in order to extend political control over contested border territories. In this way Europeans from across the continent participated in the elimination and dispossession of the populations that preceded them and were thus complicit in the settler colonial project. At least seven million Germans moved to these lands – to the United States in the north and to Brazil and Argentina in the south – becoming, by the late nineteenth century, one of the largest immigrant groups in the north of the Americas (Bade 1995). Large-scale Polish emigration started in the period after the Franco-Prussian War in the late nineteenth century; by the turn to the twentieth century nearly 2 million Polish people had moved to the Americas, while about 300,000 Polish colonists went to Brazil, another settler colony, by 1939 (Zubrzycki 1953). Two million subjects of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary travelled to the Americas (Zahra 2016), as did more than 8 million Irish people (Delaney 2000); 1 million of the latter left as a result of the mid-century famine caused by British colonial rule. By 1890 nearly 1 million Swedes, one fifth of the total Swedish population, were living in lands colonised by (and as) the United States. In addition, 13.5 million British people moved to white settler colonies across the globe (Fedorowich and Thompson 2013).

As already indicated, in this book we treat the United States as a European empire. Some have claimed, on the basis of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, that the United States is the first new nation comparable with ones created after decolonisation in the twentieth century (Lipset 1963). However, it was white settler colonists in the Thirteen Colonies of the Eastern Seaboard that rebelled against the British government, demanding independence from what they regarded as illegitimate monarchic rule. In their terms, they were acting as free subjects empowered by the principles of Enlightenment. As Danielle Allen (2014) notes, the Declaration of Independence appealed ‘to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions’, which were ‘to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do’. The freedom of these colonies rested, however, on the appropriation of land from indigenous populations and on the creation of plantations worked by indigenous people, uprooted and enslaved Africans, as well as indentured servants from Europe; and the Declaration laid claim to the colonists’ right to treat these people as they did. After independence they expanded to the south and to the west, creating what Steven Hahn (2016) has called an American empire rather than a nation (see also Byrd 2011 and Frymer 2017). We do not, then, regard white settler independence movements, whether in the Americas or elsewhere, as postcolonial but as the very expression of European colonialism.²

European empires – and the conflicts between them – grew during the period in which sociological theory was consolidated, yet empire itself was hardly mentioned. When they were at their height, the popular nineteenth-century sociologist and social philosopher Herbert Spencer drew up a typology in which a ‘military’ or ‘militant’ society based on force and coercion gave way to an ‘industrial’ society based on voluntary production and exchange (Hart 2018). The sleight of hand that portrays these categories as opposed was made possible by representing each as an ‘ideal type’ and by separating the nation (‘industrial’) from its empire (‘militant’), notwithstanding that the nation represented itself and its institutions as imperial. Spencer was opposed to imperialism, but seemed unwilling to countenance that it was bound up with the systems of market exchange that he otherwise endorsed. A world once pacified into free trade could be represented separately from the mechanisms that created its conditions, and a moral sensibility oriented to peace and progress was left intact.

Spencer’s device is not idiosyncratic but typical of the way in which European social theory, at one and the same time, both acknowledged and displaced colonialism and empire. Within modern social theory, overseas possessions are a contingent fact, something in addition to the core aspects of national states and their associated national societies and how those are to be understood. By contrast, drawing on postcolonial thought, our argument is that colonialism and empire are central to modern social theory through effects that last to the present. As Aravamudan (2009: 40) has argued, ‘postcolonial interventions take aim at metropolitan etiologies that separate “domestic” from “overseas” political history’. Failure to recognise that the domestic and the overseas are coterminous is a severe weakness of contemporary social theory.