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.
Contemporary Sociology and the Construction of Its Canons
What we propose, then, is a postcolonial intervention into the construction of modern social theory in its canonical form. Modern social theory represents a very particular kind of amnesia. Indeed, the significance of colonialism and empire is recognised in everyday culture – think, for example, of celebrations of ‘discoverers’ like Captain Cook and Christopher Columbus, of our knowledge of the Atlantic slave trade, or of the British empire itself; but it has no place within the system of theoretical categories that has developed in mainstream modern social theory. As might be expected, the expansive project of European colonialism could not go unremarked by writers who were living through it. This remains true even if they did not make it central to their reflections and were far from being critical of it. In part, the later amnesia is a consequence of developments within sociology itself, not least the construction of its own historical trajectory in the form of a canon.
As Raewyn Connell (1997) has argued, the idea of a set of founding figures who established a core conceptual framework or set of themes and thereby organised the discipline of sociology is relatively recent. According to her, this notion has two effects. One is to diminish the variety of voices of those who called themselves sociologists; the other is to amplify the voices of a few, who become the filter through which the history of the discipline is then viewed. In Connell’s view, the sociologists of the nineteenth century and their public – broadly, an educated and professional public – were, by necessity, fully aware of empire as the context that provided them with both opportunities and subject matter.
Empire made other peoples and places available to the ‘European gaze’, which in turn presented them and their beliefs and practices as both ‘other’ and ‘backward’ from the perspective of the achievements of European peoples – more specifically, north European peoples and their kin, in settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, and Australia. For Connell, much sociology, especially in the late nineteenth century, operated by cataloguing various practices associated with kinship, religion, political organisation, and so forth. It was therefore a fragmentary discipline, associated with developing an ‘encyclopaedic’ grasp of a mosaic of cultural practices of different peoples. In the next chapter we address aspects of this ‘gaze’ and the role it played in the development of stadial theory – that is, a theory according to which societal development comes about in progressive stages.
We do not claim that the idea of a canon is problematic in itself. As Frank Kermode (1985) argued, a canon represents a shorthand, a way of focusing attention on a specific aspect of a tradition. For Randall Collins (1997), it is a simple truism that a conversation carried out in the past had at the time many more interlocutors than come to be recognised retrospectively, in accounts of that past that focus on selected contributions – which thereby become canonical. He argues that this should not be the reason for a ‘guilt trip’. However, emphasising this rather misses Connell’s point, which is about how a conversation of the past is edited and which topics are carried forward. For our purposes, what Connell very nicely sets out is a disjunction that arises in representations of the history of sociology when the latter comes to be understood as being about the self-understanding of modernity rather than about an external understanding of modernity’s ‘others’. While empire is the unselfconscious context for the former, it is elided in the latter. The idea that sociology’s distinctive and specific topic is modern society emerges primarily in the post-Second World War period and is associated with the expansion of mass higher education. This produces a new audience for sociological writing, an audience of students rather than simply a wider public audience. A sociology that was fragmented around studies of global differences made available to western eyes by empire was in need of integration and a new jurisdiction. As Jeffrey Alexander (1987) has argued, the ‘classics’ – a canon of founding figures – became a means of integrating the discipline.
The expansion of mass higher education also coincided with ongoing anticolonial movements against imperial regimes across the world. European empires were largely dismantled in the postwar period. A new jurisdiction for sociology became associated with the idea of modernity and the development of national societies. This separated ‘nations’ from their erstwhile colonial and imperial engagements and turned the focus of sociology inwards. The problems of sociological concern were increasingly understood to be social divisions and exclusions internal to national societies and familiar to the new generations of students, who often were the first members of their family to attend university. In this context, issues of class and gender came to the fore, as would issues of sexuality a little later.
Most sociological accounts of European modernity begin with Nisbet’s two revolutions as key formative events. However, it was not until the implications of these events became clearer that the main contours of modernity could properly be outlined – or at least so the story initiated by the new jurisdiction, or field for the application of sociology, went.
Robert Nisbet’s (1966) acclaimed book The Sociological Tradition drew a distinction between the characteristics of traditional society and those of modern society according to which the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution were decisive in creating a break with the past that ushered in the new society. This model involved the representation of earlier
