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‘Modernity’ is a key orienting concept within the social sciences within many universities globally (Bhambra 2007). Indeed, for most scholars, modernity is a relatively uncontroversial and useful shorthand for a series of events which occurred in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and which fundamentally changed European societies for ever. Anthony Giddens, for example, explains that modernity refers to ‘modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence’ (Giddens 1990: 1). This generality, he notes, leaves the exact content of ‘modernity’ (and its effects) open for discussion; but two things, when and where it emerged, are undisputed.

Colonial expansion led to the proliferation of forms of knowledge for making sense of the world, as well as ways of organizing this knowledge (Mignolo 2005). As the social sciences developed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the divisions between the disciplines often followed colonial modes of thinking about the world in relation to ‘modern’ societies and, conversely, ‘traditional’ societies. For example, sociology historically (and to a large extent contemporaneously) dealt with ‘modern’ societies and the conditions of living in modernity (Bhambra 2007), while anthropology and human geography dealt with ‘traditional’ societies and ‘primitive’ peoples (Asad 1979; Deloria 1988). Disciplines such as political science and economics started from the position of understanding politics as a western phenomenon (usually originating in ancient Greece), or the capitalist economy as a product of modernity, and later expanded out from this geographical starting point (Hay 2002; Marx 1990 [1887]; Skinner 1979; Waltz 1959; for debates on this in international politics, see Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015; Hobson 2004). Modernity, then, has both explicitly preoccupied many social scientists and implicitly provided the underlying framework from which the world today is understood. That is, as comprised of, for example modern and traditional, developed and developing, societies. For migration studies, this dichotomous way of construing the world, distinguishing between developed and developing countries, or more recently the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’, has been the central assumption upon which all else rests.

Postcolonial and decolonial scholars agree that modernity is centrally a concept rooted in the project of European (and later western) self-understanding which went hand-in-hand with colonial expansion. It is about understanding how some societies came to be ‘modern’ (and superior), in relation to ‘others’ who are ‘traditional’ (and inferior). The whole idea of modernity is therefore dependent on the story of the ‘European miracle’. As Gurminder K. Bhambra has argued (2007), this story rests on two fundamental assumptions: rupture and difference. She writes of this in terms of ‘a temporal rupture that distinguishes a traditional, agrarian past from the modern, industrial present; and a fundamental difference that distinguishes Europe from the rest of the world’ (2007: 1, emphasis added). The Renaissance, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution are central to this narrative as they demonstrate how modern societies endogenously produced the unique features that distinguished them from elsewhere: rationality and science, art and literature, human rights and democracy, and technological advancement. From Europe, this was first exported to the white settler colonies but has long been seen to have much broader relevance. As Bhambra (2007: 4) points out, ‘the Western Experience has been taken both as the basis for the construction of the concept of modernity and, at the same time, that concept is argued to have a validity that transcends the Western experiences’. But the world was very much globally interconnected through this period, and none of these developments or struggles happened in isolation. Indeed, the story of the ‘European miracle’ itself is selective in that it more often than not ignores colonialism and enslavement and is therefore incomplete.

Central to understanding modernity are the vectors of time and space. Temporally, modernity happened, or happens, at particular times in particular places. The temporal aspect of modernity (its arrival) is usually thought of as occurring within the context of a linear conception of time and progress which originated with the Enlightenment. Thus ‘the present was described as modern and civilized, the past as traditional and barbarian. The more you go towards the past, the closer you get to nature’ (Mignolo 2011a: 152). Europe, therefore, progressed from nature, through tradition, to enlightenment, others did not. But because progress towards modernity occurs within a linear conception of time, Europe (or ‘the West’ as a symbolic geography) will always be ‘ahead’. If others accelerate, they may ‘catch up’. The achievement of modernity is thus a kind of long-drawn-out race. But the rules are not always clear. For example, if a country is seen to have caught up economically, because it has become wealthy, it is likely that other aspects, such as the religiosity of the population, or dominant cultural practices, will be viewed as ‘backward’, indicating that the country (and its nationals) is indeed still ‘behind’ in time (Shimazu 1998).

A linear conception of time allows for the periodization of events and for the tracking of progress from a state of nature to that of civilization. A linear conception of time is therefore a precondition for the western understanding of history. As Zygmunt Bauman explains, ‘the history of time began with modernity. Indeed, modernity is, apart from anything else, perhaps even more than anything else, the history of time: modernity is the time when time has a history’ (Bauman 2000: 110). Europe transcended its past through developing a historical consciousness articulated through the practices of academic history, archaeology, archiving, periodizing and cataloguing. As these conventions were thought to be absent elsewhere, other places were thought to lack a historical consciousness. Other forms of knowledge were therefore inferior, and non-western cultures either lacked history or needed Europeans to properly record their history and recount it to them (Bhambra 2007; Cohn 1996, cited in Bhambra 2007: 22).

Societies outside of Europe did have alternative conceptions of time in general, for example approaching time as cyclical, and alternative ways of making sense of the relationship between past and present events. But this fact did not diminish the assessment by colonizers that these places were without history. This was the case in India. British colonials did not find evidence of the recording of history which correlated with their understanding of what history should look like, and they determined that because Indians had a cyclical conception of time they were incapable of knowing their own history or of deciphering between myth and fact (Thapar 2002). Thapar (2002) argues that in fact early Indian texts indicate both cyclical and linear conceptions of time in operation, but this was not apparent to British colonials during the colonial period, in part because they were making sense of India within the context of colonial worldviews which rendered the inferiority of Indian society an existential necessity.

Mignolo (2011a) draws our attention to the fact that in the first centuries of colonialism the difference between colonial conqueror and the objects of conquest was articulated in terms of barbarism: ‘others’ were barbarians. With the development through the Enlightenment, following Hegel, of ideas of linear time, and thus progress from barbarism, ‘barbarians’ became ‘primitives’. Primitives are still barbarians, but they are very specifically defined in temporal terms: as being of the past and capable of change (enlightenment, civilization) into the future. Over time, and into the present, the concept of linear time has thus facilitated the classification of cultural differences according to their proximity to either modernity (the present and future) or tradition (the past). But as we know from Said (1995 [1978]), places elsewhere to the western academy only exist in these ways to the extent that Occidentals understand them as such. The Orient exists only in the minds (and works) of Occidentals.

Of course, this view of time as linear is only one way in which human beings have theorized the temporal, as noted above. The contemporary western and now globalized understanding of time as linear is relatively recent and is not the approach to time that dominates everywhere. Equally, the emphasis on progress, and particularly on western history as a story of progression towards civilization, necessitates the telling of history in a particular, incomplete way. Spatially, modernity first emerged in Europe as a way of making sense of perceived changes that were happening there in relation to elsewhere. In other words, the European miracle is a place-specific, or parochial, way of understanding world history. This is significant because, as Bhambra (2007: 11) points out, ‘the way in which we understand the past has implications for the social theories we develop to deal with the situations we live in today’. The self-conception of Europeans as modern therefore depends upon the conceptualization of other places as not modern: ‘the translation of geography into chronology was the work of colonization, of the coloniality of knowledge and power’ (Mignolo 2011a: 152).

While migration studies has tended to be dominated by well-funded research undertaken in the ‘developed’ or ‘First World’ of the ‘Global North’ or ‘the West’, it has then disproportionately focused on migration from the ‘developing’ or ‘Third’ World’ to the ‘First World’. That research institutions in the ‘Global North’ are better funded than those in the ‘Global South’ is (generally speaking) a consequence of long histories of colonial-era plunder, appropriation, exploitation, and wealth accumulation (Collyer et al. 2019; Keim et al. 2014). But the fact that this is not generally understood and reflected upon in the North then has implications for the social theories we develop to deal with international migration today (to paraphrase Bhambra). Because without acknowledging colonial history, South–North migrations become the primary migrations of interest in the world, become potentially illegitimate, become something detached from sedimented and unequal global racial and economic power relations. They become about individualized aspirations and motivations for a ‘better life’ set apart from the broader global historical contexts in which they might be understood.

How can we start to think against this current? Decoloniality offers us some of the theoretical tools to start to unthink what we have learnt about modernity. From decolonial scholars we gain the concept of coloniality/modernity, which articulates the intertwining of colonialism and colonial ways of viewing the world in hierarchical and civilizational terms (coloniality) with the rise of ‘modernity’ as a structuring frame through which the specialiness of Europe can be conceptualized (Escobar 2007; Mignolo 2000; Quijano 2000). Coloniality and modernity, then, are two sides of the same coin. Or, in other words, modernity was ‘colonial from its point of departure’ (Quijano 2000: 548). Capitalism, for example, did not endogenously emerge in Europe as a consequence of enlightenment, rationalism and industrial development. Rather, slavery and colonialism produced a concentration of wealth in European societies which funded the Industrial Revolution, allowed for global trading dominance and also offered technological inspiration for the emerging industries. For example, the cotton mills of Northern England used technologies taken from India (Bhambra 2007). Thus the emergence of capitalism is first and foremost a global colonial story, a story of racism and differentiation, despite the seductive power (for some) of the story of inherent European brilliance (Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2013; Banaji 2007; Bhattacharyya 2018; Hobson 2004). The point, really, is that modernity has its darker sides (Mignolo 2011a). It is not all wealth, democracy, freedom of speech and expression, employment, consumerism, and clean drinking water. It is also exploitation, appropriation, racism and subjugation.

No longer exclusively an affair of Europe or ‘the West’, modernity appears now to be everywhere: ‘the triumph of the modern lies precisely in its having become universal. From now on, it’s modernity all the way down, everywhere, until the end of times’, as Escobar (2007) has pointed out. In this context, ‘not only is radical alterity expelled forever from the realm of possibilities, all world cultures and societies are reduced to being a manifestation of European history and culture’ (Escobar 2007). By ‘radical alterity’, Escobar refers here to different ways of living; different sets of ambitions for the political, economic and social organization of societies; different ways of understanding and being and acting in the world beyond the hegemonic ideology of modernity spreading globally from an imagined western epicentre. The ‘coloniality’ concept in coloniality/modernity does not, therefore, simply refer to colonialism. Instead, it is about a colonially inspired Orientalism in Said’s (1995 [1978]) terms, a worldview.

This ‘coloniality’ has been analytically disaggregated into a range of spheres, notably power, knowledge and being, as discussed in the Introduction. The coloniality of power refers to ‘the interrelation among modern forms of exploitation and domination’, or how western global domination is dependent on exploitation (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 242). Coloniality of knowledge relates to the ‘impact of colonization on the different areas of knowledge production’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 242). That is, where authoritative and influential knowledge is produced and proliferated, which knowledges are produced by which people, and which languages and media hold legitimacy and have greater global reach. This concept has clear relevance for migration studies and should give us pause to consider who produces ‘global’ knowledge, in which languages is it disseminated, where are they located and who is excluded from this conversation? Paul Gilroy (1993: 6) has articulated this from a different perspective (that of cultural studies) as ‘the struggle to have blacks conceived as agents, as people with cognitive capacities, and even with an intellectual history’. The coloniality of knowledge either denies this to be the case or admits it to be plausible but scratches its head in terms of where to find such an intellectual history. For the western academy, and indeed beyond, intellectual history is white.

‘Coloniality of being’ refers ‘to the lived experience of colonization and its impact on language’, or the way in which one speaks and thinks of one’s place in the world through the filter of coloniality (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 242). We might think of this in relation to W. E. B. Du Bois’s work on double consciousness. To be African American was, for Du Bois, to live with a double consciousness, simultaneously black and American, always living with this ‘two-ness’ and always seeing oneself through the eyes of white America. This concept of double consciousness has been elaborated and applied beyond the nineteenth-century US context (see Gilroy 1993) and its overlap with Maldonado-Torres’s (2007) concept of the ‘coloniality of being’ (in the Latin American context) might help to elaborate our understanding of both concepts. How we think about our place in the world is therefore related to how we imagine our geographical and temporal location in relation to modernity.

These insights into the spatial and temporal dimensions of modernity, which problematize the idea of traditional developing societies who are behind in time and need to catch up through modernizing, unravel many of the dominant understandings of contemporary international migration. They raise a set of questions which, if taken seriously, would alter the basis upon which much funded research on migration is undertaken. For example, whose mobility is, in this context, problematized and whose is not? When we look at this problematization in the context of colonial histories, what sorts of explanation for it appear plausible and which do not? What kinds of historical and contemporary interconnections have given rise to particular migration patterns and responses to them? Why would migration from a generalized ‘Global South’ be construed as threatening in the North? How do migrants understand the relations and differences between the places they have come from, and are going to, and how is their migration understood against the backdrop of histories of colonialism and ideas of modernity and unmodernity? In short, through thinking of modernity as a culturally produced time/space construct, we must then start to think through the lens of historical, as well as contemporary, interconnections. This is a theme we return to below.