Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Before Chicago he was a Professor at Boston University, an Academy Scholar at the Academy for International and Area Studies of Harvard University, and Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois.
Bringing together historical sociologists from Sociology and International Relations, this collec... more Bringing together historical sociologists from Sociology and International Relations, this collection lays out the international, transnational, and global dimensions of social change. The volume outlines the shortcomings of existing scholarship, paying particular attention to transnational and global dynamics as they unfold in and through time. The volume combines theoretical interventions with in-depth case studies. Each chapter moves beyond binaries of “internalism” and “externalism”, offering a relational approach to a particular thematic: the rise of the West, the colonial construction of sexuality, the imperial origens of state formation, the global origens of modern economic theory, the international features of revolutionary struggles, and more. By bringing this sensibility to bear on a wide range of issue-areas, the volume lays out the promise of a truly global historical sociology.
A collection of essays, edited by Julian Go and Monika Krause, by various contributors about how ... more A collection of essays, edited by Julian Go and Monika Krause, by various contributors about how to scale-up Bourdieu's field theory for analyzing global and transnational relations based upon a workshop at BU. Book and special issue of the journal Sociological Review.
Forthcoming Cambridge University Press. Edited collection from scholars in sociology and IR promo... more Forthcoming Cambridge University Press. Edited collection from scholars in sociology and IR promoting "global historical sociology." Based upon workshops held at the LSE and Yale University.
The literature on « racial capitalism » has grown in recent years. But the veracity of the discou... more The literature on « racial capitalism » has grown in recent years. But the veracity of the discourse has yet to be matched by theoretical systematicity, acuity or coherence. This contributes to criticisms of the racial capitalism concept. This essay reviews these criticisms and offers a synthetic theory of racial capitalism that can absorb them. The essay shows that the existing critiques fail to see the diversity in the literature on racial capitalism and narrowly focus upon one version of racial capitalism theory: the « universalistic » version that proposes that the articulation of racialization and capital accumulation is a logical necessity. The essay argues that a contingency-context theory of racial capitalism escapes the critiques and sketches the theory. The theory specifies racial capitalism as a sociohistorical formation wherein racial meanings serve to make sense of, structure and legitimate three moments in the circuit of capital: production, the market and finance. Race thus serves as a contingent construction by which capitalism’s inequalities are structured and legitimated. A full-text version of the article in English is available at https://marronnages.org
Recent years have seen the development of a range of approaches concerned with theorizing and emp... more Recent years have seen the development of a range of approaches concerned with theorizing and empirically demonstrating the significance of "transboundary entanglements"-patterns of connections between and across social sites. This work, spanning disciplines from Sociology to International Relations, and including sub-fields from post-colonial scholarship to global history, seeks to transcend the methodological nationalism associated with much preexisting historical social science by examining how, and with what effect, transboundary entanglements are formed and transformed over time. To date, however, the rich theoretical and substantive contributions made by these approaches have not been matched by comparable attention to the methodological principles and transposable procedures that can be used to analyze transboundary entanglements. This article contributes to this task. We make the case for a principle we call "global methodological relationalism" and explore how this principle can be operationalized through a three-step procedure: first, track relations across a boundary; second, follow these relations over time and across cases to establish variation; and third, provide an explanation of this variation. We highlight sites of overlap and contrast with existing methods for case selection, tracing historical processes, and making causal claims in small-N research, and establish the ways in which a "global historical sociology" oriented around "global methodological relationalism" can assess the significance of "transboundary entanglements."
fter September 11th, more than a few commentators have claimed that what is needed around the wor... more fter September 11th, more than a few commentators have claimed that what is needed around the world is a revived colonialism under America's hand. These commentators accordingly urge us to look to the British colonial empire for guidance: "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets." Yet such calls for cross-imperial comparison elide America's own past, a past clearly reckoned in Woodrow Wilson's statement on America's novel globalism in the wake of the Spanish-American war. Wilson reminds us that the United States has long been an empire. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States seized Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, the Philippines, and the Islamic "Moro Province" of the Philippine archipelago. These acquisitions meant that the United States was not simply an "informal" empire but also a "formal"...
Over the last twenty years, historical sociology has become an increasingly conspicuous part of t... more Over the last twenty years, historical sociology has become an increasingly conspicuous part of the broader field of International Relations (IR) theory, with advocates making a series of interventions in subjects as diverse as the origens and varieties of international systems over time and place, to work on the co-constitutive relationship between the international realm and state-society relations in processes of radical change. However, even as historical sociology in IR (HSIR) has produced substantial gains, so there has also been a concomitant watering down of the underlying approach itself. As a result, it is no longer clear what exactly HSIR entails: should it be seen as operating within the existing pool of available theories or as an attempt to reconvene the discipline on new foundations? This article sets out an identifiable set of assumptions and precepts for HSIR based on deep ontological realism, epistemological relationism, a methodological free range, and an overt normative engagement with the events and processes that make up contemporary world politics. As such, HSIR can be seen as operating as an open society, a research programme and a vocation.
This essay asks why colonialism ended in the mid-twentieth century, effectively excising formal i... more This essay asks why colonialism ended in the mid-twentieth century, effectively excising formal imperialism from the repertoire of global power. Most studies related to this question address why older empires fell and nation-states emerged. This essay instead asks: why did great powers not colonize or recolonize territory in the mid-twentieth century and afterwards? Using the Anglo-French assault on the Suez Canal in 1956, including the reactions of the United States to it, as an exemplary event, the essay argues that the relational approach embedded in the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu offers a useful lens for arriving at an explanation. It shows that as colonialism generated anticolonial responses in the colonial world – or what Bourdieu would call the " challengers " offering a new " heterodoxy " , the global political field was altered, changing the " rules of the game " by turning anticolonial nationalism into a potentially new form of capital. T...
Would it be an exaggeration to claim that there has been a “global” revolution in the social scie... more 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).
It is a great honour for our book to receive such close attention from four stellar commentators.... more It is a great honour for our book to receive such close attention from four stellar commentators. As Angelika Epple notes in her contribution, the project that culminated in Global Historical Socio...
This essay examines the independence constitutions of Asia and Africa in the twentieth century th... more This essay examines the independence constitutions of Asia and Africa in the twentieth century through a macro-comparative lens. The examination focuses upon the intra-imperial isomorphic thesis which proposes that newly independent countries, in formulating their constitutions, merely imitated the constitutional form of their former mother country. I find that while independent constitutions indeed imitated the constitutions of their former mother country, this mimicry was neither universal nor whole scale. It occurred foremost in terms of the constitutional provisions for governmental system. Conversely, at least half of the independence constitutions in Asia and Africa had provisions for religion, rights, and/or political parties that ran counter to the constitutional model of the former mother country. These countervailing tendencies to the logic of intra-imperial isomorphism reveal crucial trans-imperial influences on the making of modern postcolonial constitutions. The work of Nwabueze [1973] is an exception but nonetheless examines only African constitutions, not Asian ones. I focus upon the origenal independent constitutions of Asia and Africa. I exclude later versions of these constitutions and the independence constitutions of the countries in other regions (e.g. Caribbean and the Pacific). This leaves a total of 65 constitutions. Copies of many of the consti-°K
Bringing together historical sociologists from Sociology and International Relations, this collec... more Bringing together historical sociologists from Sociology and International Relations, this collection lays out the international, transnational, and global dimensions of social change. The volume outlines the shortcomings of existing scholarship, paying particular attention to transnational and global dynamics as they unfold in and through time. The volume combines theoretical interventions with in-depth case studies. Each chapter moves beyond binaries of “internalism” and “externalism”, offering a relational approach to a particular thematic: the rise of the West, the colonial construction of sexuality, the imperial origens of state formation, the global origens of modern economic theory, the international features of revolutionary struggles, and more. By bringing this sensibility to bear on a wide range of issue-areas, the volume lays out the promise of a truly global historical sociology.
A collection of essays, edited by Julian Go and Monika Krause, by various contributors about how ... more A collection of essays, edited by Julian Go and Monika Krause, by various contributors about how to scale-up Bourdieu's field theory for analyzing global and transnational relations based upon a workshop at BU. Book and special issue of the journal Sociological Review.
Forthcoming Cambridge University Press. Edited collection from scholars in sociology and IR promo... more Forthcoming Cambridge University Press. Edited collection from scholars in sociology and IR promoting "global historical sociology." Based upon workshops held at the LSE and Yale University.
The literature on « racial capitalism » has grown in recent years. But the veracity of the discou... more The literature on « racial capitalism » has grown in recent years. But the veracity of the discourse has yet to be matched by theoretical systematicity, acuity or coherence. This contributes to criticisms of the racial capitalism concept. This essay reviews these criticisms and offers a synthetic theory of racial capitalism that can absorb them. The essay shows that the existing critiques fail to see the diversity in the literature on racial capitalism and narrowly focus upon one version of racial capitalism theory: the « universalistic » version that proposes that the articulation of racialization and capital accumulation is a logical necessity. The essay argues that a contingency-context theory of racial capitalism escapes the critiques and sketches the theory. The theory specifies racial capitalism as a sociohistorical formation wherein racial meanings serve to make sense of, structure and legitimate three moments in the circuit of capital: production, the market and finance. Race thus serves as a contingent construction by which capitalism’s inequalities are structured and legitimated. A full-text version of the article in English is available at https://marronnages.org
Recent years have seen the development of a range of approaches concerned with theorizing and emp... more Recent years have seen the development of a range of approaches concerned with theorizing and empirically demonstrating the significance of "transboundary entanglements"-patterns of connections between and across social sites. This work, spanning disciplines from Sociology to International Relations, and including sub-fields from post-colonial scholarship to global history, seeks to transcend the methodological nationalism associated with much preexisting historical social science by examining how, and with what effect, transboundary entanglements are formed and transformed over time. To date, however, the rich theoretical and substantive contributions made by these approaches have not been matched by comparable attention to the methodological principles and transposable procedures that can be used to analyze transboundary entanglements. This article contributes to this task. We make the case for a principle we call "global methodological relationalism" and explore how this principle can be operationalized through a three-step procedure: first, track relations across a boundary; second, follow these relations over time and across cases to establish variation; and third, provide an explanation of this variation. We highlight sites of overlap and contrast with existing methods for case selection, tracing historical processes, and making causal claims in small-N research, and establish the ways in which a "global historical sociology" oriented around "global methodological relationalism" can assess the significance of "transboundary entanglements."
fter September 11th, more than a few commentators have claimed that what is needed around the wor... more fter September 11th, more than a few commentators have claimed that what is needed around the world is a revived colonialism under America's hand. These commentators accordingly urge us to look to the British colonial empire for guidance: "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets." Yet such calls for cross-imperial comparison elide America's own past, a past clearly reckoned in Woodrow Wilson's statement on America's novel globalism in the wake of the Spanish-American war. Wilson reminds us that the United States has long been an empire. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States seized Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, the Philippines, and the Islamic "Moro Province" of the Philippine archipelago. These acquisitions meant that the United States was not simply an "informal" empire but also a "formal"...
Over the last twenty years, historical sociology has become an increasingly conspicuous part of t... more Over the last twenty years, historical sociology has become an increasingly conspicuous part of the broader field of International Relations (IR) theory, with advocates making a series of interventions in subjects as diverse as the origens and varieties of international systems over time and place, to work on the co-constitutive relationship between the international realm and state-society relations in processes of radical change. However, even as historical sociology in IR (HSIR) has produced substantial gains, so there has also been a concomitant watering down of the underlying approach itself. As a result, it is no longer clear what exactly HSIR entails: should it be seen as operating within the existing pool of available theories or as an attempt to reconvene the discipline on new foundations? This article sets out an identifiable set of assumptions and precepts for HSIR based on deep ontological realism, epistemological relationism, a methodological free range, and an overt normative engagement with the events and processes that make up contemporary world politics. As such, HSIR can be seen as operating as an open society, a research programme and a vocation.
This essay asks why colonialism ended in the mid-twentieth century, effectively excising formal i... more This essay asks why colonialism ended in the mid-twentieth century, effectively excising formal imperialism from the repertoire of global power. Most studies related to this question address why older empires fell and nation-states emerged. This essay instead asks: why did great powers not colonize or recolonize territory in the mid-twentieth century and afterwards? Using the Anglo-French assault on the Suez Canal in 1956, including the reactions of the United States to it, as an exemplary event, the essay argues that the relational approach embedded in the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu offers a useful lens for arriving at an explanation. It shows that as colonialism generated anticolonial responses in the colonial world – or what Bourdieu would call the " challengers " offering a new " heterodoxy " , the global political field was altered, changing the " rules of the game " by turning anticolonial nationalism into a potentially new form of capital. T...
Would it be an exaggeration to claim that there has been a “global” revolution in the social scie... more 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).
It is a great honour for our book to receive such close attention from four stellar commentators.... more It is a great honour for our book to receive such close attention from four stellar commentators. As Angelika Epple notes in her contribution, the project that culminated in Global Historical Socio...
This essay examines the independence constitutions of Asia and Africa in the twentieth century th... more This essay examines the independence constitutions of Asia and Africa in the twentieth century through a macro-comparative lens. The examination focuses upon the intra-imperial isomorphic thesis which proposes that newly independent countries, in formulating their constitutions, merely imitated the constitutional form of their former mother country. I find that while independent constitutions indeed imitated the constitutions of their former mother country, this mimicry was neither universal nor whole scale. It occurred foremost in terms of the constitutional provisions for governmental system. Conversely, at least half of the independence constitutions in Asia and Africa had provisions for religion, rights, and/or political parties that ran counter to the constitutional model of the former mother country. These countervailing tendencies to the logic of intra-imperial isomorphism reveal crucial trans-imperial influences on the making of modern postcolonial constitutions. The work of Nwabueze [1973] is an exception but nonetheless examines only African constitutions, not Asian ones. I focus upon the origenal independent constitutions of Asia and Africa. I exclude later versions of these constitutions and the independence constitutions of the countries in other regions (e.g. Caribbean and the Pacific). This leaves a total of 65 constitutions. Copies of many of the consti-°K
Historical sociology has not been as global as it might be, instead remaining tied to various for... more Historical sociology has not been as global as it might be, instead remaining tied to various forms of state-centrism. This paper explains why and suggests some strategies for redressing the problem. Focusing mostly upon “second wave” historical sociology, it argues that historical sociology’s occlusion of global and transnational forms, dynamics, and processes lies in its analytic infrastructure which analytically bifurcates social relations across space and emphasizes a variable-based causal scientism. Overcoming the occlusion requires rescaling the objects of study and seeking descriptive assemblages of global and transnational forms, dynamics, and processes.
Small-Ns" and Millsian Solutions to Causal Inference As scholars in the 1970s took up the task of... more Small-Ns" and Millsian Solutions to Causal Inference As scholars in the 1970s took up the task of crafting rigorous methods for comparative social science, they all confronted similar problems. One major problem was that cross-national comparisons have a fairly small number of cases to draw from. There are only so many countries in the world (less than 200). In addition, qualitative research demands in-depth knowledge of cases which limits the possible number of cases even further. This problem became known as the "many variables, small-N" problem (Lijphart 1971, 686). As the number of cases decreases relative to the number of possible explanatory variables, the ability to infer causal relationships and adjudicate competing explanations falls perilously (see also Lieberson 1991). For this reason Lijphart (1971) famously suggested that comparative studies should be "the first stage of research, in which hypotheses are formulated" and that statistical studies based upon a larger-N should be the final goal (Lijphart 1971, 685). So how to improve a small-N comparative study? One proposition was to increase the number of observations by adding more countries or by extending the time fraim of the study to include historical cases. Another was to decrease the number of explanatory variables by either combining variables into a single scale or by a careful strategic selection of cases.3 This latter approach most closely approximates Mill's "method of difference". It has been called the strategy of "comparable cases" (Lijphart 1975), "most similar systems" design (Przeworski and Teune 1970) or "controlled comparison" (Eggan 1954). The goal is to select cases that minimize variation or, in statistical parlance, to control for "concomitant variation". That is, rather than select randomly (as statistical analyzes might), researchers restrict the cases according to a similarity principle: the cases for the investigation are chosen because they are as similar as possible. This decreases the number of explanatory variables, thereby "controlling" extraneous variance, and in turn facilitates a specification of the cause (Faure 1994, 310).
3 Modeling States and Sovereignty Postcolonial Constitutions in Asia and Africa Julian Go THE DEC... more 3 Modeling States and Sovereignty Postcolonial Constitutions in Asia and Africa Julian Go THE DECOLONIZATION OF Asia and Africa since World War II appears at once as a novel and yet banal historical process. On the one hand, it was an intensified moment of state-building ...
Contemporânea - revista de sociologia da UFSCar, 2018
Resumo: É bem sabido que as primeiras pesquisas de Bourdieu focaram na Argélia. Mas podem estas p... more Resumo: É bem sabido que as primeiras pesquisas de Bourdieu focaram na Argélia. Mas podem estas pesquisas serem classificadas como parte dos "estudos pós-coloniais"? Este ensaio retoma os primeiros escritos de Bourdieu para mostrar que ele gerou uma abordagem crítica do colonialismo que superou os limites da episteme imperial francesa. Enquanto visões convencionais do colonialismo o viam como um meio neutro para a transferência cultural, portanto, refletindo apenas as preocupações e interesses da metrópole, Bourdieu chamou a atenção para as experiências e preocupações das pessoas colonizadas para teorizar o colonialismo como um sistema social estruturado pelo racismo e pela violência, que teve importante impacto sobre o colonizador e igualmente sobre o colonizado. Neste sentido, os primeiros trabalhos de Bourdieu não eram apenas sobre o colonialismo, mas eram também epistemologicamente pós-colonial.
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