Julian Go

Introduction: Entangling Postcoloniality and Sociological Thought

What is “postcolonial sociology”? While the study of postcoloniality has taken on the form of “postcolonial theory” in the humanities, sociologys approach to postcolonial issues has been comparably muted. This essay considers postcolonial theory in the humanities and its potential utility for reorienting sociological theory and research. After sketching the historical background and context of postcolonial studies, three broad areas of contribution to sociology are highlighted: reconsiderations of agency, the injunction to overcome analytic bifurcations, and a recognition of sociologys imperial standpoint.

Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism:

While early theory and research on cosmopolitanism have been criticized for their European focus, a number of works have incorporated non-Eurocentric perspectives. This article contributes to this literature by examining the colonial production of cosmopolitan orientations as evidenced in the writings of Frantz Fanon. Colonialism has been treated as a deviation in the historical sociology of cosmopolitanism, but Fanon helps disclose how colonialism has also contributed to a particular form of cosmopolitanism that has been overlooked in existing theory and research: postcolonial cosmopolitanism. This form of cosmopolitanism, forged from the spaces of colonialism’s contradictions, emphasizes global citizenship and humanism but strives to remember rather than repress the history of modern empire. It seeks to negate colonialism’s contradictions and thus realize the ideals which Europe had initially pronounced but which it failed to institute.

Global historical sociology

Would it be an exaggeration to claim that there has been a “global” revolution in the social sciences? Witness, in disciplinary history, the rise of “global history” and “transnational history”. Ever since Akira Iriye’s (1989) call for historians “to search for historical themes and conceptions that are meaningful across national boundaries,” historians have institutionalized transnational history as a prominent subfield, one that can be seen in journals, books, conferences, course offerings, and job lines. Witness, too, the proliferation of “globalization” studies (e.g. Castells 1996; Held et al 1999; Beck 2006; Beck 2012) and the attempt to institutionalize a “global sociology” (Burawoy 2000; Burawoy 2008), moves intended to explore new cosmopolitan identities and trace social processes at transnational and global scales (also see Wallerstein 2001). Consider finally the discipline of International Relations (IR). For much of its disciplinary history, IR has studied the workings of a small part of the world (the West) through a relatively sparse analytical lens (the “states under anarchy” problematique). In recent years, IR scholarship has begun to make clear the ways in which the emergence of the discipline was intimately associated with issues of colonial management (e.g. Vitalis 2010, 2016), the diverse range of polities that constitute the international system (e.g. Phillips and Sharman 2015), and the myriad of social forces, from market exchanges to cultural flows, that make up “the international” (e.g. Hobson, Lawson and Rosenberg 2010). The academy’s most overtly “international” discipline is finally going “global” (Tickner and Blaney eds. 2012).

Real Mythic Histories: Circulatory Networks and State-Centrism

In Mythologies, Barthes famously observes that a Paris Match cover photo of a West African military schoolboy in a French uniform saluting, presumably, the tricolor is a myth. It asserts as obviously true, “that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under the flag,” and in doing so it asserts as a reality the image of an empire characterized by consensually shared transracial pride. Myth, Barthes (1972: xx) writes, “transforms history into nature ... Myth ... purifies [things], it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact.” The work of justification and naturalization that Barthes ascribes to the photo occurs on a foundation made of more basic myths: amongst these are the myth of an entity called France, and the myth of an empire.

Asian Incorporation and the Collusive Dynamics of Western “Expansion” in the Early Modern World

Introduction This chapter advances Global Historical Sociology (GHS) by offering a new interpretation of Europeans’ incorporation into an Asian-dominated global economy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Two main flaws have tarnished classical accounts of European expansion into Asia: bello-centrism and Eurocentrism. Specifically, conventional accounts either celebrated or lamented Europeans’ allegedly precocious bellicosity as the key to their success in imposing themselves on supposedly supine Asian societies (Cipolla 1965; Pannikar 1969; Parker 1996). Alternatively, revisionists have stressed themes of Asian indifference to explain how Europeans managed to infiltrate an Asian-dominated global economy (Chaudhuri 1991; Clulow 2014: 10; Kling 1979). This revisionist school correctly stresses Asian powers’ preponderance over the Europeans before the mid-eighteenth century. But it also reinforces tropes of Asian passivity, casting European “expansion” as the result of locals’ passive acceptance of Western encroachment rather than the product of a dynamic process of “contained conflict” (Subrahmanyam 1990: 250) and eventual (if uneasy) mutual accommodation. Against both impositionist and indifference accounts, I advance here an incorporative argument to explain European “expansion” into precolonial maritime Asia. Consistent with Global Historical Sociology’s relational rather than substantialist ontology (Go and Lawson Introduction), my argument conceives European intruder polities and Asian host polities alike as territorially nonexclusive power networks, which promiscuously intersected and enmeshed during the first three centuries of Europeans’ incorporation into maritime Asia. With rare exceptions, Europeans lacked the means to unilaterally impose themselves on their hosts. Instead, they relied on local customs of commercial extraterritoriality, and drew on compatible practices of patrimonial rule and congruent conceptions of patriarchal hierarchy uniting both Europeans and Asians, to insinuate their way into maritime Asian entrepots. Far from regarding European entry with indifference, Asian rulers actively sought to pull Europeans into extant political and commercial networks for their own purposes, while the existence of sophisticated and extraverted indigenous merchant elites in Asian ports was likewise a critical precondition for the success of the company sovereigns (Erikson Chapter 8). Exemplifying the “interactive multiplicity” (Go and Lawson Introduction) that is the hallmark of Global Historical Sociology’s conception of the international, early modern Asia hosted a diverse menagerie of European and local polity types, which interpenetrated without ever converging to a dominant form (Phillips and Sharman, 2015).

The Crisis of Europe and Colonial Amnesia: Freedom Struggles in the Atlantic Biotope

Introduction In 2011, many commentators of the Eurozone crisis began to utilize a grammar redolent of colonial rule. For instance, Ulrich Beck, a European cosmopolitan par excellence, wondered whether the European Union might have become “a European Empire with a German stamp”. Beck (2011a) noted that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s sense of power “conforms to the imperial difference between lender and borrower countries”. For many social democratic commentators, the danger of the crisis lay in the defeat of labour by capital, and in the new context of EU institutional “empire” and global capitalism, this defeat had quickened the erosion of social democracy, thus deciding the fate of the European project (Garton Ash, 2011; see also Georgiou, 2010; Giddens, 2012; Ryner, 2010). Against this fate, Jürgen Habermas mounted a plea to save the old “biotope of Europe” (Dietz, 2011). For Habermas, nation-states are the constitutive components of this threatened ecosystem, and their internal and collective democratization has been its key cultivating process. Habermas, like many others, identified the genesis of this European biotope in the collective continental fight against fascism waged during the Second World War. But despite the worry that Europe might be “colonizing” itself, this angst-ridden imaginary of the Eurozone crisis has been absent of any sustained engagement with the substantive historical and global dimensions of European colonialism. European social democrats and cosmopolitans alike have been mostly unconcerned as to the colonial struggles that were inseparable to the time period that saw the rise of the European project. Those commentators who have mentioned colonial legacies have tended to do so by adding some (worthy) comments on labour migration, multiculturalism and resurgent racism. Yet these issues are mostly discussed as recent developments and are not deployed to critically interrogate the generative moments of the European project itself. Hence the implication is