2011 Dusell Colonialism and Its Legacies
2011 Dusell Colonialism and Its Legacies
2011 Dusell Colonialism and Its Legacies
Preface
Jacob T. Levy
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Iris Marion Young and Jacob T. Levy
This book began as an editorial collaboration between Iris Marion Young and
me. Unsurprisingly, she brought to the project a much broader and deeper
knowledge of the various subjects and literatures under discussion here. She
had hopes of beginning serious research of her own in postcolonial theory
and had begun her project (now published as her final monograph,
Responsibility for Justice) about economic connections between the wealthy
West and developing countries, a project that also led her to think about
colonialism’s ongoing political and economic legacies. I had the opportunity
and good fortune to be able to learn from her during this project’s
development, but even now I know that I am well behind where she was
when we started. Her death in 2006 has meant that the final editorial work
has been mostly mine. But measured by intellectual contribution and editorial
vision, this has been far more her work.
Since he wrote his contribution to this volume, Emmanuel Eze has also
passed away. This volume is dedicated to their memories.
Acknowledgments
This book contains many essays that were delivered at a conference of the
Conference for the Study of Political Thought in Chicago in 2004. That
conference was supported by a collaborative research grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and by the Norman Wait Harris Fund of the
Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago. We thank all
the participants in that conference, and in particular the discussants: Steven
Pincus, Maria Torres, Kirstie McClure, Thomas McCarthy, Richard Boyd,
Patricia Nordeen, Charles Mills, and Fred Dallmayr.
The conference, and associated research group prior to it, and work on the
present book were also supported by a grant from the Social Sciences
Division of the University of Chicago. Fione Dukes, in her capacity as
administrator of these grants, made an indispensable contribution. John
Comaroff, Steven Pincus, and Patchen Markell took part in the research
group and helped to form the agenda for the conference. Markell’s
participation then and his intellectual, moral, and logistical support since
were especially important to the conference and this book and are deeply
appreciated.
Additional thanks are due to the students in Young’s graduate seminar on
postcolonial theory, and those in Levy’s seminar on European studies, and to
Levy’s co-instructor Mark Antaki.
Neil Roberts, Victor Muñiz-Fraticelli, Emily Nacol, Teisha Ruggerio,
Douglas Hanes, Sarah Wellen, Mylène Freeman, Stephanie Ovens, and Ju-
Hea Jang contributed valuable research and editorial assistance at various
stages of the project.
Introduction
Iris Marion Young and Jacob T. Levy[1]
NOTES
1. Editor’s note: Unavoidably, the text that follows was completed by me and never seen by Iris
Marion Young. It is a coauthored essay; many passages in it were written by her, and we discussed its
shape and content at length. I prefer to bring our collaboration to completion as a collaboration, even at
the risk of putting some words under her name which she lacked the opportunity to read or revise. —
Jacob T. Levy
2. This began to change with the publication of Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (New York:
Basic Books, 1977) and Charles Beitz’s, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1979). But the beginning was slow to turn into anything more than that.
Impressionistically, only by the mid-1990s did international and global questions become especially
prominent in the discipline.
3. On this feature of social contract theory, see Dipesh Chakrabarty’s contribution to this volume, as
well as Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
4. The chapters in this book discuss and engage with many of these works. A sample of some of the
most important and influential includes Anthony Pagden, “Dispossessing the Barbarian: The Language
of Spanish Thomism and the Debate over the Property Rights of the American Indians,” in Pagden, ed.,
The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987); Robert A. Williams, The American Indian in the Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of
Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); James Tully, “Rediscovering America: The Two
Treatises and Aboriginal Rights,” in An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Bhikhu Parekh, “Liberalism and Colonialism: A Critique
of Locke and Mill,” in J. P. Neverdeen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh, eds., The Decolonization of
Imagination: Culture, Knowledge, and Power (London: Zed Books, 1995); Tully, Strange Multiplicity:
Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Frederick G.
Whelan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1996); Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defense of English Colonialism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of
Empires in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995);
Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000); Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain
and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
5. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (New York: Harper, 1984).
6. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can
the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
Chapter One
Diderot’s Theory of Global (and Imperial)
Commerce: An Enlightenment Account of
“Globalization”[1]
Sankar Muthu
Much scholarly attention has been focused upon the European contexts of the
intellectual debates surrounding commerce, but the transcontinental
dimension of such debates, those writings that attend largely to the genuinely
global aspects of commerce, demand far more treatment than they have
received. Such writings constitute one of the early chapters of the history of
globalization debates. Strikingly, there is an increasing awareness of the
global reach of social, commercial, and political developments in eighteenth-
century political thought and a concern that traditional moral categories might
have to be significantly transformed for the purposes of attending to such
global concerns. Kant suggested precisely along these lines in 1795 that
“since the community of nations of the earth has now gone so far that a
violation of right on one place of the earth is felt in all, the idea of a
cosmopolitan right is no fantastic and exaggerated way of representing justice
[Recht]” (8: 360).
Among the most complex responses to the globalizing ventures of
European governments and imperial trading companies are the texts by
Enlightenment-era thinkers who both sought to defend global commerce and
to subject it to critical scrutiny. This effort was informed in part by the early
modern discourse about the right to travel, communicate, and engage in
partnership and commerce with others, perhaps the most notable example of
which is Francisco de Vitoria’s 1539 relectio on the activities of the Church
and the Castilian crown in the Americas.[3] As Vitoria himself implied: the
language of hospitality that pertained to those who crossed borders and found
themselves on foreign soil had a long history, in light of which those who
aimed to restrict the movements of those seeking contact, communication, or
trade with others were often criticized.[4] Before the long eighteenth century,
the right to commerce, communication, and its variants—such as Hugo
Grotius’s defence of the mare liberum (the free or open seas) and accordingly
of the aggressive activities of the (Dutch) United East India Company—were
most often used to legitimate European imperial exploits.[5] In this essay, I
examine how Denis Diderot transformed the ancient language of hospitality
into a global ethic of transnational exchange, while also subverting the
traditionally imperialist political implications of most early modern defenses
of a right to commerce. For a variety of political thinkers of the long
eighteenth century, the dilemma posed by their understanding of global
commerce concerned how it might be possible to formulate a moral
framework that could generate both a commitment to the flow of goods,
ideas, and communication across borders and an account of the deep
injustices and oppression that such global practices often engendered.
The right of commerce in a global, and rapidly globalizing, context—
which Kant believed were the conditions that made a theory of cosmopolitan
justice (ius cosmopoliticum, Weltbürgerrecht) a necessity—pertained not
simply to the sovereign representatives of a country or to any particular
corporate entity, but to humanity as a whole. On this view, the right of
commerce was thought to consist of the right to cross borders, seek contact
with others, exchange ideas and goods, and foster partnerships. In part, this
rested upon the view that those crossing borders were not simply diplomats,
sovereign representatives, and soldiers (who could thus be understood under
the traditional categories of ius gentium that regulated state-to-state
interactions), but also imperial trading companies that were often chartered
by governments (but were not formally sovereign entities themselves),
missionaries, natural historians and other scientists, navigators, private
groups of merchants, and other individuals. Thus, a number of eighteenth-
century thinkers aimed to legitimize the emergence of international civil
societies that, on a global scale, might in the future achieve some of the work
globally that newspapers, journals, independent academies, collaborative
scientific projects, coffeehouses, salons, and other forums of commerce and
communication appeared to perform within European civil societies. Yet
many of these thinkers were also concerned about the ways in which a right
to commerce could be used to justify the maintenance and the spread of
violent, unjust institutions and practices abroad.
The language of commerce in the eighteenth century itself denoted a wide
array of practices from communication or interaction to market-oriented trade
and industry. Thus, the Latin “commercium” and the English and French
“commerce” mask the multifaceted meanings historically associated with
such terms. In German, such shades of meaning can be made explicit, as with
Verkehr and Wechselwirkung, which are both generally translated into
English as commerce. Kant, for example, goes back and forth between these
terms, employing Verkehr often to refer to trade or market-based exchanges
and the more wide-ranging Wechselwirkung to describe the communicative
and interactive functions of commerce. Politically, such nuances allowed
Kant both to attack the injustices of imperialism as the horrid practices of
“the commercial states of our part of the world,” while also celebrating the
future potential of the “spirit of commerce” in fostering peace among nations
—a spirit also more narrowly described by Kant at one point as “the power of
money.”[6] Kant’s use of the Latin commercium itself as well as its German
offshoots is foreshadowed by Diderot’s varied understanding of the concept
of commerce in the Histoire des deux Indes. The contemporary tendency
either to celebrate or to attack “the Enlightenment” and its supposed
overarching project, which is said fundamentally to include a justification for
modern market-oriented commerce, hides from view the subtle range of
meanings of the concept of commerce that many eighteenth-century thinkers
deployed in the course of analyzing and assessing the rise of global
commerce in its multiple forms.
In what follows, I focus upon one of the most important and influential
Enlightenment treatises on global commerce: Abbé Raynal’s multivolume
project on the history of global ties in the modern world. The Histoire
philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens
dans les deux Indes [Philosophical and Political History of European
Settlements and Commerce in the Two Indies] was published under the name
of the Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, a Jesuit who was a friend of the
philosophes and presided over the production of this ten-volume work.[7]
The Histoire catalogued the history of Europe’s relations with the non-
European world from 1492 onward.[8] In addition to a narration of
discoveries, conquests, colonization, battles, and trade, the Histoire also
offered moral analyses of both European and non-European societies,
institutions, and practices. Many writers contributed anonymously to the
Histoire. We now know that Diderot contributed most of the radical anti-
imperial and anti-slavery passages and sections, all of which can be found
from the third edition (1780) onward.[9] Although the Histoire was banned in
France and placed on the Vatican’s Index, it was one of the most popular
“forbidden” publications of the period, as Robert Darnton has shown.[10]
Outside of France, its admiring readers included Edmund Burke, Adam
Smith, most likely Johann Gottfried Herder and Immanuel Kant, and, perhaps
most famously, the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture.
Diderot’s many contributions to Raynal’s Histoire call into question the
standard depiction of the “Enlightenment” as a philosophical epoch that
sought, among other things, simply to defend modern commercial interests
and their (arguably) peaceful and stabilizing effects. (II) While Diderot’s
positive commentary upon commerce is not insubstantial and while at times it
portrays commerce according to what conventional interpreters expect of a
philosophe, even his favorable assessments of commerce tend to be framed
by deep concerns about political injustice. I then turn toward Diderot’s more
directly critical commentary upon global commerce by analyzing his (III)
concerns about commercial ambition, greed, and materialism and the
psychological and material effects that globalizing forms of commerce—
whether carried out by private merchants, chartered trading companies, or
directly by states—have had both within Europe and abroad. I conclude my
interpretation of the Histoire by (IV) explaining why Diderot believed that
global commerce might play a crucial role in alleviating social and political
injustices that were, in his view, largely the result of global commerce. For
Diderot and Raynal, the paradox of what we might now call globalization
offers unprecedented, if underdeveloped, resources and opportunities to
counter the injustices that themselves often arise from emerging global
institutions and processes. Finally, (V) I conclude by noting how such
perspectives can offer the beginnings of an illuminating genealogy of
globalization debates.
In a passage from the opening chapter of the Histoire that comes closest to
what is so often taken to be “the Enlightenment view” on commerce, Diderot
surveys the developments of the modern age:
I have asked myself: who dug these canals? Who drained these plains? Who founded these towns?
Who assembled, clothed, and civilized these peoples? And then all the voices of enlightened men
[des hommes éclairés] among them have responded: it is commerce; it is commerce. (I,
introduction)
III. THE THIRST FOR GOLD: COMMERCE AND ITS LONG TRAIN OF
DESTRUCTION
The “Portuguese, Dutch , English, French, Danes, all the [European] nations”
continued precisely in this spirit, he adds, and “without remorse sought to
increase their fortune in the sweat, blood and despair of these unfortunate
humans. What a horrible system!” (XI, 24). After having noted the
experience of difference in such cross-cultural encounters, Diderot thus goes
on to imply that it was not simply a prejudiced view of difference, but the
combination of this with commercial desires that yielded the most propitious
conditions for mass cruelty.
The cohesion of Diderot’s writings on commerce becomes clear once we
begin to reflect further on the relationship between commerce and arguments
against its sometimes imperial character in the Histoire. To be sure,
commerce provides only one key to Diderot’s varied anti-imperialist
arguments—the others range from arguments that attack the role of the
Church and missionaries, arguments based upon the damage done to
European societies and the impossibility of fairly and efficiently governing
far-flung imperial realms, and claims that Europe’s half-barbarous societies
are hardly the model for any other country to adopt, to arguments about the
horrific devastation visited upon non-European peoples, and the error of
judging foreign practices and institutions, such as those of hunting and
pastoral peoples, simply by the standards of one’s own society.[11] Diderot’s
ambivalent judgment of commerce in the Histoire both shapes his discussion
of, and in turn is shaped by, the relationships that he theorizes among travel,
trade, profit, and empire.
It is within this broader context of commerce, hospitality, and empire that
Diderot denigrates monopolistic commerce, the basis upon which the Indies
trading companies and much imperial trade was conducted. Imperial
monopolies erode ancient norms of hospitality, in his view, since they lead
companies and states to secure exclusive commercial relationships by
occupying fortified trading posts or directly establishing colonies. Such
economic monopolies have produced nothing but devastation, he argues,
adding that the political monopoly of sovereign power within European states
has been similarly pernicious. Taken together, then, “[e]xclusive privileges
have ruined the Old and the New World” (XIX, 6). The profiteers who enjoy
monopolistic privileges, care only for their short-term gain and profit
precisely because of the corrupting guarantees afforded by monopolies. Such
are the social and political conditions under which the otherwise positive
tendency of commerce to soften narrow prejudices (as we saw earlier) instead
weakens the ties of solidarity and humanity. Thus, referring to the figure of
the monopolist who participates in global commerce, Diderot contends that
“the interest of the nation [at home or abroad] is nothing to him, since for a
small and momentary advantage, but a certain one, he has no scruples about
doing a great and permanent mischief . . . he will starve at once a whole
country, or leave it quite bare” (XIX, 6).
Yet, regardless of whether monopolies are the basis of an international
trade that exploits many areas of the non-European world, Diderot argues at
length in the Histoire that the general character of modern commerce takes a
heavy toll more specifically upon the political health of European countries.
As Britain increases its national revenues and as it becomes the most
commercial country in Europe, in his view, it becomes seized ever more
forcefully by the desire for wealth, which is now the “universal and ruling
passion” there. As a result, Diderot portrays the British Parliament, “the
senate of the empire,” as utterly venal; the nearly open bribing for votes is a
direct result, he contends, of its commercial wealth. Moving from the
domestic to the international realm of British power, he argues that even the
imperial administration on which England prides itself is sure to be weakened
as a result. “If the mercantile spirit [l’esprit mercantille] has been able to
diffuse in the mother-country the contagion of personal interest,” Diderot
asks, “how is it possible that it should not have infected the colonies of which
it is the foundation and support?” (XIV, 45). Financially, European states’
own economic basis is weakened by this commercial mania, for, as he
explains, governments have been tempted to accumulate enormous debts as a
result of the influx of gold and silver from the New World into their reserves.
This profligacy was the source of the great paradox, on Diderot’s view, that
“the most opulent nations” of Europe in his day—England, Holland, and
France—were also the greatest in debt (XIX, 11). Their wealth itself
engenders a brash confidence that leads them to undertake activities far
beyond what could be justified based upon the actual productivity of their
societies. Diderot asserts that such irresponsibility, itself generated in part by
the vast wealth from global enterprises, will continue to oppress further
generations and eventually all nations, given the interconnectedness of the
global economy. Just as with the escalation of debt, the false confidence
engendered by global commerce also induces political instability and
violence, as European states become increasingly hostile and arrogant toward
one another.
Given that curtailing commerce was nearly impossible, and might even prove
counterproductive in the long run, could commerce itself somehow be a
source of social and political reform? As we have seen, Diderot believes that
the tyrannical ambitions that accompany global trading practices show that
commerce can often be a source of enormous injustices. Thus, it might seem
that commerce as such would be incapable of bringing about more salutary
conditions. As J. G. A. Pocock has noted, “All the great Enlightened
histories, the Decline and Fall included, celebrate the establishment of
modern Europe; the Histoire des deux Indes is perhaps the first to present it
as self-endangered.”[12] Given Diderot’s view that politics fundamentally
shapes commerce, perhaps only a vast change in the political will of nations
to conduct their commercial enterprises differently could yield real results.
This would suggest that commerce is an evil that needs to be reformed before
it could ever become socially productive; yet, Diderot, as we have also seen,
often describes the benefits of commerce, not simply as an ideal, but in
practice. In the end, for Diderot, commerce is both a source and a target of
reform. Commerce itself must play a role in challenging injustice, in his
view, for it helps to foster small pockets of liberty, and it leads to the
interactions of diverse individuals and peoples and the communication of
ideas and practices. The improvements made as a result of commerce in one
sphere have the potential of furthering human welfare elsewhere, given the
interconnections that are fundamental to commerce itself. As Diderot writes:
[t]he connections of commerce are all very close [très-intimes]. One of its branches cannot
experience any opposition without the others being sensible of it. Commerce intertwines peoples,
fortunes, exchanges. It is one entire whole, the diverse parts of which attract, support, and balance
each other. It resembles the human body, all the parts of which are affected when one of them does
not fulfill its proper function. (XIX, 6)
While many of these parts fail to function, in his view, others manage to
produce and to sustain social reforms that promote human welfare, break
down prejudices, and encourage even broader developments.
Diderot’s call to restore the “happy fraternity that constituted the delight of
the first ages” presents some sense of his ideal of commerce: “Let all peoples,
in whatever country fate has placed them, under whatever government they
live, whatever religion they practise, communicate as freely with each other
as the inhabitants of one hamlet with those of a neighbouring one . . . that is
to say, without duties, without formalities, without predilections.” This vision
of an open commerce, broadly understood to signify the free trade not only of
goods, but of ideas and sentiments, already exists, in his opinion, in small and
fragmented ways throughout the globe. Diderot’s hope appears to be that
commerce might, in part, create and sustain the crucibles for future reform,
and perhaps even revolution. The islands of liberty sustained by commercial
interactions, as ideas and goods exchange and circulate, could ideally be used
over many generations to resist, to battle against, and ultimately to reform
other aspects of commerce that are oppressive, that enervate political
energies, and that deny liberty both to those in European nations and to those
abroad.
Ultimately, in this view, global commerce is a double-edged sword. For
Diderot, political reform depends crucially upon individuals becoming
sensible of their own freedom, in order to break free from the psychological
“chains” that limit their ability to assess critically their own conditions. He
suggests hopefully that “[w]e may even venture to assert that men are never
so truly sensible of their freedom as they are in commercial interaction” (V,
33). Rather than the material gains and luxuries that commerce yields, and the
productivity behind them, the genuine improvement to human welfare
enabled by commerce and communication lies instead in their potential to
change individuals’ sense of their own condition, a condition that in part is
corrupted and oppressed by commerce, but that could nevertheless be
reformed in part by the communicative and material interactions that global
commerce itself makes possible. These interrelated understandings of
commerce should seem familiar if we recall that the term “globalization”
today refers to a similarly broad set of practices and institutions. Diderot’s
disposition toward commerce—one that led him to draw out the diverse
strands of commercial practices and their varying social, economic, and
political consequences—makes possible the view that some such strands
could be set in opposition to others.
Diderot and Raynal morally condemn (and justify resistance against) the
unjust practitioners of global commerce. Still, as we have seen, they also seek
to promote global commercium—crossing borders, seeking contact, fostering
interaction and communication, exchanging goods and ideas—which, in their
view, can yield the conditions that might mitigate the evils wrought by
pernicious forms of transcontinental commerce. As nonexploitative
interactions across borders multiply, Diderot’s ultimate hope is that the
“general will of humanity” will finally become a realizable political goal
toward which future generations of increasingly interconnected peoples can
struggle.
It is worth considering how such Enlightenment perspectives highlight, and
at times call into question, the ways in which global commerce and its history
are often portrayed today. Among the many peculiarities of the current debate
among citizens, policymakers, and scholars about “globalization,” three
features are especially curious. First, the debate remains highly polarized,
with the salutary effects of global capitalism and liberal political regimes
offered on one side and the pernicious consequences of the free flow of
international capital (investments, technology, and labor, in addition to
information) arrayed on the other. Thus, the topic of globalization elicits not
only heated discussions, but often particularly dogmatic and two-dimensional
debates. Second, commentators tend to portray this stark divide as a choice
that only very recent political, economic, and technological developments
have made possible. On this conventional view, the world of nation-states has
broken down and is being replaced by an increasingly (if still incompletely)
unified international order; this has been brought about by a rapid
proliferation of transnational communication, travel, and commerce, which is
now, with the end of the Cold War (and supposedly for the first time) a truly
global phenomenon. Third, participants in such debates often refer to two sets
of ideas that are seen as integral to (or antithetical to) the supposed processes,
institutions, and political effects of globalization: (1) Enlightenment ideals or
values and (2) imperial power. Some thinkers assert that globalization is a
universalizing antidote to local prejudices and attachments that otherwise
could develop into Balkanizing passions and hatreds; on this view,
globalization is a process that carries forward what are taken to be the
humane and tolerant values of “the Enlightenment.”[13] In contrast, others
portray the process of globalization as an unjust attack, led by international
regimes such as the World Trade Organization and the International
Monetary Fund, upon local forms of cultural, associational, and democratic
life. On this view, the “Enlightenment project” not only failed to liberate
humanity from its chains, but its celebration of modern commerce instead
helped to form international regimes and an alliance of powerful (usually
“Western”) governments that constitute the latest version of “civilizing”
imperial rule[14] ; although the old colonial regimes were largely dismantled
from the late 1940s through the 1960s, some form of imperial rule has
returned with a vengeance, we are told, in the guise of global capital,
transnational corporations, and the international, regional, and domestic
regimes that support them.[15]
Political debates about globalization have a long and neglected history—
neglected in part because the development of global communications,
institutions, and commercial ventures; the attendant ethical questions over
eroding sovereignty; and the potential or actual impact on the environment
and human welfare are sometimes mistakenly seen today as unprecedented
developments.[16] Moreover, despite the numerous references to
Enlightenment values and “modernity” in the contemporary globalization
literature, there is little discussion about the fact that debates concerning
global commerce, communication, and their social and political effects were
launched by a number of Enlightenment thinkers—most notably (but not
only) as a way of theorizing the commercial ventures of imperial trading
companies and the globalizing institutions and practices of expanding
European empires. As I have argued, among the many incisive eighteenth-
century attempts to theorize the rise of such global economic and political
relations are Denis Diderot’s contributions about commerce in Abbé Raynal’s
Histoire des deux Indes.
Diderot’s contributions (in addition, it should be noted, to Raynal’s own
observations about commerce in the Histoire that I have not surveyed in this
chapter) allow us, first, to examine a thinker who is profoundly ambivalent
about global commerce; this itself offers a sharp and useful philosophical
contrast to the historically shortsighted perspective that informs many
contemporary contributions to debates about globalization. Second, a study of
some of the Enlightenment origins of globalization debates provides us with a
much needed intellectual genealogy of how different thinkers in other social
and political contexts have wrestled with the perceived trend toward global
institutions and processes. Diderot’s reflections about commerce and global
relations represent a productive intellectual disposition precisely because he
seeks both to understand the ways in which global commerce and
communication afford possibilities for social and political reform and to
identify (as well as analyze) the severe injustices that they have generated.
Third, by examining these writings, I aim to challenge the still common view
that “the Enlightenment,” as such, celebrated the rise of modern commerce
and the social and political effects that were thought to follow from it.[17]
Among other problems, this view overlooks the fact that a number of
prominent eighteenth-century thinkers viewed European empires as (among
other things) global commercial enterprises that were manifestly unjust and
politically disastrous.
Diderot’s and Raynal’s writings on global commerce have not been given
the attention they deserve by scholars in part because they do not easily fit
within the standard expectations that are usually derived from “the
Enlightenment” on the topic of commerce. A frequent claim about the core
value of Enlightenment political thought or “modernity” is that it laid the
ethical groundwork for what became modern capitalism by providing
vigorous defenses of the idea of commerce.[18] As I have indicated,
contemporary debates over globalization have offered yet another venue for
these well-worn arguments, with scholars either attacking or supporting the
commercial virtues and le doux commerce (gentle or peaceful commerce) that
“the Enlightenment” is said to have defended and celebrated. There are,
indeed, eighteenth-century writings that can be described plausibly as solely
defending the rise of modern commerce and the virtues that were sometimes
associated with it, as well as less emphasized writings of the same period that
hold it responsible for many of the injustices of modern life.[19]
Nevertheless, as with other elements of the standard depictions of “the
Enlightenment” or “the Enlightenment project,” the assumption that
eighteenth-century thinkers widely and un-ambivalently supported the rise of
modern commerce masks the rich complexity of many Enlightenment-era
political writings—including those by prominent and influential thinkers such
as Diderot and Raynal.
Moreover, such characterizations often fail to come to terms with the fact
that modern political thought about commerce was indelibly stamped by the
imperial experience. Albert Hirschman remarks that “the persistent use of the
term le doux commerce strikes us as a strange aberration for an age when the
slave trade was at its peak and when trade in general was still a hazardous,
adventurous, and often violent business.”[20] Yet this was not a peculiarity
that went unnoticed among the many eighteenth-century thinkers who
reflected deeply upon the formation of a global economy, for they understood
this development to be intimately linked to the practices and institutions of
imperial commerce, such as slavery. Diderot and Raynal are two such
thinkers, and their arguments about commerce reveal how much is lost when
a single Enlightenment narrative crowds out the nuances and flattens the
paradoxes of a remarkably diverse intellectual age. The combination of
Diderot’s celebrations of commerce and his fierce criticisms of it appear odd
only if we work on the assumption that well-known eighteenth-century
thinkers must fit a preconceived standard of what fundamentally constitutes
“the Enlightenment.” When such views are set aside, when we pluralize the
very idea of “Enlightenment” and view it as a number of strands that at times
reinforce and that other times stand in tension with one another, a significant
number of eighteenth-century writings emerge as profoundly ambivalent
reflections upon what is sometimes described today as globalization.
NOTES
1. Many thanks to Jacob Levy, Kirstie McClure, and to the late Iris Marion Young for helpful
comments and suggestions.
2. For instance, see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 106–14. It should be noted that such political developments and intellectual
projects do not amount, in Pocock’s view, to a description of “the” Enlightenment (or of “the
Enlightenment project”), a singular, nonpluralistic characterization of the political thought of the long
eighteenth century that he vehemently rejects. Cf. Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested:
Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 863–
71.
3. Francisco de Vitoria, “De Indis,” in Political Writings, ed. Jeremy Lawrance and Anthony Pagden
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See also Georg Cavallar, The Rights of Strangers
(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 107–12.
4. Francisco de Vitoria cites Virgil’s Aeneid accordingly: “What men, what monsters, what inhuman
race, / What laws, what barbarous customs of the place, / Shut up a desert shore to drowning men, /
And drive us to the cruel seas again!” (Aeneid, I. 539–40; Dryden’s translation as quoted in Vitoria,
278).
5. On Grotius’s De Indis (later known De iure praedae, of which the “Mare Liberum” was one
chapter), see Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79–
94; and David Armitage, “Introduction” to Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty
Fund, 2004), xi–xx.
6. Immanuel Kant, Kants gesammelte Schriften, herausgegeben von der Preussischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902—), vol. 8, p. 358; vol. 8, p. 368; ibid;
Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 329, 336–37.
7. The Histoire was first published in 1772 (with an imprint of 1770). It was published in extensively
revised and enlarged forms in 1774 and 1780. Numerous editions followed with further alterations. All
of Diderot’s contributions can be found from the 1780 edition onward. Anthony Strugnell and a team of
scholars that he commissioned are now at work on a modern critical edition of the Histoire which will
be published by the Voltaire Foundation. Since this edition has not yet been published, there is no
standard edition that is used to cite the Histoire; moreover, volume and page numbers differ from
edition to edition. Thus, I have cited Raynal’s Histoire by book and chapter (the Histoire is divided into
nineteen books, a division that is consistent across many editions). I have used the following editions:
[Abbé] Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du
commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (Genève: Jean-Leonard Pellet, 1780), ten volumes; and
[Abbé] Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade
of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans. J. O. Justamond (London: W. Strahan and T.
Cadell, 1783), eight volumes. A small selection of Diderot’s contributions to the Histoire is available in
a contemporary English translation. See Denis Diderot, Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and
Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 169–214. The passages from the
Histoire that I quote in this essay have all been checked against the 1780 Pellet edition.
8. The most important and substantial recent interpretation of Raynal’s Histoire is J. G. A. Pocock,
Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), vol. 4, chapters 13–17. Two
insightful recent studies—both dissertations—about Raynal’s Histoire are Anoush Terjanian, “Doux
commerce” and its Discontents: Slavery, Piracy, and Monopoly in Eighteenth-Century France
(dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2006) and Sunil Agnani, Enlightenment Universalism and
Colonial Knowledge: Denis Diderot and Edmund Burke, 1770–1800 (dissertation, Columbia
University, 2004). For fairly recent collections of scholarly essays on the Histoire that investigate both
the substance of the ideas in the text and the complicated historiography and textual attributions for the
various editions of the Histoire, see Lectures de Raynal: l’Histoire des deux Indes en Europe et en
Amérique au XVIIIe siècle, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink
and Manfred Tietz (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991), vol. 286; and L’Histoire des deux Indes:
réécriture et polygraphie, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink
and Anthony Strugnell (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), vol. 333. See also William R. Womack,
“Eighteenth-century Themes,” in Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes of Guillaume
Raynal, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 96, 129–265.
9. For a comprehensive analysis of Diderot’s manuscripts that links them to sections of Raynal’s
Histoire, see Michèle Duchet, Diderot et l’Histoire des deux Indes ou l’Écriture Fragmentaire (Paris:
Libraire A.-G. Nizet, 1978). I have used this study as my guide to locate all of Diderot’s contributions
to the Histoire.
10. Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1996), 22–82.
11. I have analyzed the range of Diderot’s anti-imperialist arguments, in the Histoire and elsewhere, in
Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), chapter 3. Cf. Srinivas
Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 289–300. See also Laurent
Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,”
Social History, vol. 31, no. 1 (February 2006), pp. 1–14.
12. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 4, p. 325. I should note that Adam Smith’s Wealth
of Nations—which in this respect was clearly influenced by Raynal and Diderot—may well also count
as such as a grim, yet still “enlightened,” historical narrative.
13. For an influential analysis of these arguments, see Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New
York: Times Books, 1995).
14. John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New York: New Press, 1998).
15. For a complex account along these lines—one that, it should be noted, simultaneously attempts to
complicate this view—see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2000).
16. An emerging scholarly literature is beginning to address the problems with such a view. See
Emma Rothschild, “Globalization and the Return of History,” Foreign Policy, no. 115 (Summer 1999),
106–16; David Armitage, “Is There a Prehistory of Globalization?” in Comparison and History:
Europe in Cross-National Perspective, ed. Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor (London: Routledge,
2004); Duncan S. A. Bell, “History and Globalization: Reflections on Temporality,” International
Affairs (2003), vol. 79, no. 4, pp. 801–14. Also, see the essays in Globalization and Global History, ed.
Barry K. Gills and William Thompson (London: Routledge, 2006).
17. For a recent discussion of this view and its shortcomings, see the introductory essay in Istvan
Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
18. The classic study of intellectual history along these lines remains Albert Hirschman, The Passions
and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1977). Cf. Ellen Meiksins Wood, who differentiates the English and French contexts
into “capitalist” and “bourgeois” societies that shaped differing Enlightenment ideologies of commerce.
E. M. Wood, “Capitalism or Enlightenment?” History of Political Thought, vol. 21, no. 3 (Autumn
2000), pp. 405–26. Cf. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso, 2003), chapters 5–6.
19. Among the most notable examples of the former is Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees;
for an example of the latter, see Andrew Fletcher’s Discourse Surrounding the Affairs of Scotland.
Mandeville famously provides a vigorous defense of modern commerce and its “publick benefits,”
while Fletcher describes at length the disastrous effects of modern commerce in European societies and
calls for the establishment of a reformed set of ancient institutions of political economy (most
notoriously, that of slavery). For a recent collection of eighteenth-century writings on such topics, see
Commerce, Culture & Liberty, ed. Henry C. Clark (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2003). Also, see
Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), chapters 1–5; and Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History
of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
20. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 62.
Chapter Two
Empire, Progress, and the “Savage Mind”
Jennifer Pitts[1]
I. INTRODUCTION
Even in the History of America, despite his often uncritical reliance on his
European sources, Robertson indicated the pitfalls of using travelers’ and
missionaries’ reports as evidence, observing that those who wrote such
reports, especially among the Spanish, were led by either economic interest
or religious zeal to exaggerate the characteristics of foreign peoples that best
served their own agenda to enslave or convert the people they encountered.
[36] Like Smith and Ferguson, Robertson noted that partiality in favor of
one’s own social practices is a general human vice, one that often leads
writers to describe as degenerate or irrational what are merely unfamiliar
practices, and one against which he believed the historian must constantly
struggle.
It is extremely difficult to procure satisfying and authentic information concerning nations while
they remain uncivilized. To discover their true character under this rude form, and to select the
features by which they are distinguished, requires an observer possessed of no less impartiality
than discernment. For, in every stage of society, the faculties, the sentiments and desires of men
are so accommodated to their own state, that they become standards of excellence to themselves,
they affix the idea of perfection and happiness to those attainments which resemble their own, and
wherever the objects and enjoyments to which they have been accustomed are wanting, confidently
pronounce a people to be barbarous and miserable. Hence the mutual contempt with which the
members of communities, unequal in their degrees of improvement, regard each other.[37]
And yet Robertson himself appears curiously blind to his own counsel
throughout much of his account of Amerindians. Bruce Lenman has
answered the question “what lies behind the sustained prejudice which
Robertson displayed in dealing with Amerindian and creole?” with the
observation that “Robertson was not trying to invent modern historical
anthropology and failing.” Rather, he writes, the History of America “can
only be understood in the light of the concept of the historian as moral
legislator.”[38] But even if Lenman is right to assert that Robertson’s own
conception of the “historian as moral legislator” led him to support Spanish
governance in South America as the likeliest avenue for Amerindian
progress, alternative understandings were available in Robertson’s day, both
of what constituted responsible anthropology, and of the moral and political
contributions historians could make in the context of European expansion.
Adam Smith and James Dunbar offer two such alternatives.[39]
The language of abstract rights is rare in Smith’s work, and he does not
specify what rights nations should be understood to have: whether rights not
to be interfered with, or perhaps simply not to be robbed and destroyed. It
would seem that the particular content of the rights of nations can only be
worked out in practice, like systems of morality more generally, and that
something close to parity of power is necessary for such rights to be fairly
specified and respected.
Dunbar offered his essays as a corrective to the false and pernicious belief in
their own moral superiority that Europeans had drawn from their fortuitous
commercial and political power.[81]
Mill’s argument for the political and legal exclusion rested on the assumption
by European states of the authority to judge what was in the best interests of
backward peoples, an authority stemming from just the sort of sure
knowledge about how to bring about progress that Smith’s more chastened
approach to societal development denied was possible.
Mill’s adherence to an implicit cognitive-development approach to
progress also underlies his famous qualification of his argument in On
Liberty with the proviso that the case for minimal interference in individuals’
lives by the state or by other people did not apply to children or young
persons, but
only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. . . . Those who are still in a state to require
being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against
external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of
society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way
of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming
them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that
will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable.[103]
VI. CONCLUSION
NOTES
1. This chapter was presented at the 2004 international meeting of the Conference for the Study of
Political Thought: “Colonialism and its Legacies.” I am grateful to conference participants and
especially to the late Iris Marion Young and Jacob Levy for helpful feedback.
2. I have treated Smith’s thought at greater length in A Turn to Empire (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005), chapter 2.
3. I have not used quotation marks around each use of terms characteristic of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century theories of progress, such as “backward,” “savage,” and “barbarous,” but it should
be emphasized that they are implied throughout. It should be noted that Scottish stadial, or four-stage,
theorists used the terms “savage” and “barbarian” not only as evaluative terms but also in a more purely
taxonomic sense (savage indicating hunting societies and barbarian pastoral societies).
4. “Review of Grote’s History of Greece,” Collected Works of John Stuart Mill [hereafter CW]
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963—), vol. 11: 313. Henry Maine, similarly, asserted the
uniquely progressive nature of European societies and their ancient progenitors and suggested an
explanation at the level of individual capacity and motivation (though his analysis in the rest of the
work operates more at the level of social interactions): “It is indisputable that much the greatest part of
mankind has never shown a particle of desire that its civil institution should be improved” from their
first moment of codification; and “progress seems to have been there arrested [in China], because the
civil laws are coextensive with all the ideas of which the race is capable” in Ancient Law (Washington,
DC: Beard Books, 2000 [1861]), 14. Walter Bagehot, in his self-consciously Darwinian account of
progress, attributed Europe’s advance to the “contest of races,” the “conflict of nations,” the
“competitive examination of constant war” and argued that “[t]his principle explains at once why the
‘protected’ regions of the world—the interior of continents like Africa, outlying islands like Australia
or New Zealand—are of necessity backward” in Physics and Politics (London: Kegan Paul, 1881
[1872]), 82–83.
5. See Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1976), chapter 4; Alan Swingewood, “Origins of Sociology: The Case of the Scottish Enlightenment,”
British Journal of Sociology 21.2, 1970; Spadafora notes that Hume, Ferguson, and Dunbar outlined
similar stages but did not envision progress in primarily economic terms: The Idea of Progress in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 271–72.
6. Ronald Meek has proposed that Smith was the first in Scotland to develop a four-stages theory and
that his account greatly influenced the other Scottish historians. While Dalrymple (in 1757) and Kames
(in 1758) published versions of such a theory earlier than Smith (who first used stadial arguments in
print in Wealth of Nations in 1776), Meek argues that they very likely based their own accounts on
Smith’s lectures (Meek, Ignoble Savage, 99–114). Meek emphasizes the similarities and chains of
influence between Smith’s theory and the others, rather than the differences I address here.
7. One of Smith’s students later reported that Smith believed (and others agreed) that Robertson had
“borrowd the first vol. of his hist[or]y of Cha[rles] 5”—that is, his “View of the Progress of Society in
Europe,” his most theoretical account of historical development. Ross notes that Robertson “could have
heard Smith lecture on law at Edinburgh” but was unlikely to have heard the Glasgow lectures. On
Smith’s apparent worries about the plagiarism of his ideas and his concern to establish the originality of
his theory of development, see Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 105–6,
and Meek, “Smith, Turgot, and the ‘Four Stages’ Theory,” History of Political Economy 3, no. 1
(1971), reprinted in Adam Smith: Critical Assessments IV, ed. John Cunningham Wood (London:
Croom Helm, 1983), 142–55, see specifically 147–49.
8. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elucidations Respecting the Common and Statute Law of Scotland
(Edinburgh: William Creech, 1777), 229; see Christopher J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish
Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 98. In the Sketches of the History of
Man (1774), Kames proposed a “sense of property” as an inherent human sense (along with congruity,
symmetry, dignity, and grace) and argued that just as these senses develop in individuals, the sense of
property progresses “from its infancy among savages to its maturity among polished nations”
(Edinburgh: William Creech, 1788) 116–17. As a polygenist who held that Amerindians probably
constituted a separate species, Kames had a radically different view of human difference from those of
most Scottish Enlightenment thinkers; belief in inherent biological differences among human groups
was far rarer among British thinkers in this period than it was to become in the nineteenth century; see
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 29–
35 and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century
British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
9. For the phrase “history of the human mind,” see Robertson: “In order to complete the history of the
human mind, and attain to a perfect knowledge of its nature and operations, we must contemplate man
in all those various situations wherein he has been placed”; The History of America (London: A.
Strahan, 1803), vol. 2: 50.
10. Berry, Social Theory, 94. Gladys Bryson wrote that the “historical method [of the eighteenth
century] is vitiated by a fundamental assumption . . . that the starting point for all humanistic study,
including history, is man’s nature, his psychology”; Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the
Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), 109; also 142–44.
11. Robertson first published the History of America in 1777, eight years after publishing his History
of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769). For discussions of Robertson’s views on empire and
non-European societies see Jeffrey Smitten, “Impartiality in Robertson’s History of America,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1985), 56–77; Mark Duckworth, “An Eighteenth-
Century Questionnaire: William Robertson on the Indians,” Eighteenth-Century Life 11 (1987), 36–49;
Karen O’Brien’s excellent chapters on Robertson in Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan
History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and the essays in
Stewart J. Brown, ed., William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997). Bruce Lenman’s essay in that volume is particularly critical of Robertson’s
account of Amerindians and his “ferociously Eurocentric cosmopolitanism”; “From Savage to Scot,”
201.
12. The 1759 review attributed to Robertson of Kames’s Historical Law-Tracts (also 1759), which
offers a brief account of the four stages of society, bears little trace of the cognitive-development model
but sounds, instead, much more like Smith’s approach in that it suggests development is a complex
social phenomenon; and while Robertson remarks (as Smith does) that “wants, the desires, and the
passions of men accustomed to such various forms of society” will differ greatly, he maintains that the
laws of different stages are reasonable and appropriate to the mode of subsistence, not (as he argues in
the History of America) that they result from cognitive limitations. See Robertson, Miscellaneous
Works and Commentaries, ed. Jeffrey Smitten (London: Routledge, 1996), 96. The review was
published anonymously in the Critical Review, vol. 7, April 1759; the editorial introduction to
Miscellaneous Works argues for the attribution to Robertson.
13. History of America 2: 88–89. Ferguson, in contrast, applied the phrase “infant state” to societies
and argued that the human species “has a progress as well as the individual,” but he did not suggest that
members of “rude” societies were themselves childlike or immature; An Essay on the History of Civil
Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 [1767]), 10, 74.
14. History of America 2: 85.
15. For a discussion of the influence of Locke’s epistemology on Robertson and others, see Berry,
Social Theory, 91–92.
16. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975
[1689]), I.ii.27. He added that “[t]heir Notions are few and narrow, borrowed only from those Objects,
they have had most to do with, and which have made upon their Senses the frequentest and strongest
Impressions.”
17. Robertson, History of America, 2:88, also see Berry, Social Theory, 92.
18. “There are several people in America whose limited understandings seem not to be capable of
forming an arrangement for futurity; neither their solicitude nor their foresight extend so far. They
follow blindly the impulse of the appetite they feel, but are entirely regardless of distant consequences,
and even of those removed in the least degree from immediate apprehension”; History of America, 2:
90.
19. He writes, for instance, that information regarding religious rites is flawed and presented with “so
little fidelity” because priests and missionaries have been best equipped to carry out this inquiry but are
also apt to “accommodate [whatever they contemplate] to their own system”; History of America, 2:
189. Also see 2: 53–54.
20. History of America, 2: 90–91. He adds: “If in concerns the most interesting, and seemingly the
most simple, the reason of man, while rude and destitute of culture, differs so little from the thoughtless
levity of children, or the improvident instinct of animals, its exertions in other directions cannot be very
considerable.” Robertson cites the Voyages of Jean-Baptiste Labat (1663–1738) and James Adair’s (ca.
1709–1783) History of the American Indians. Rousseau (though without attribution to Labat) had
written similarly in his Discourse on Inequality of the Carib who “sells his cotton bed in the morning
and comes weeping to buy it back in the evening” as evidence that the savage has “no idea of the
future”; The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Peter Gourevitch (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 143.
21. History of America, 2: 90.
22. “What, among polished nations, is called speculative reasoning or research, is altogether unknown
in the rude state of society, and never becomes the occupation or amusement of the human faculties,
until man be so far improved as to have secured, with certainty, the means of subsistence, as well as the
possession of leisure and tranquillity”; History of America, 2: 89; also see 94. Smith had made a similar
claim in his History of Astronomy (see Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J.
C. Bryce [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982], 48–49), an early essay that Smith himself later
characterized as a “fragment of an intended juvenile work” (in a 1773 letter to Hume); Ross, Adam
Smith, 101.
23. The savage has “as little inclination as capacity for useless speculation” (History of America, 2:
94). Also see Robertson’s treatment of religion in early societies: “when the faculties of the mind are so
limited, as not to have formed abstract or general ideas . . . it is preposterous to expect that man should
be capable of tracing with accuracy the relation between cause and effect, or to suppose that he should
rise from the contemplation of the one to the knowledge of the other, and form just conceptions of a
Deity, as the Creator and Governor of the universe” (History of America, 2: 192–93).
24. History of America, 2: 100.
25. History of America, 2: 56; also see 59–60. Robertson’s order of inquiry follows the approach
Kames had taken in the Sketches of the History of Man (1774), which began with the “Progress of men
independent of society” (book I) before addressing the “Progress of men in society” (Book II) and then
the “Progress of sciences” (book III). Compare Ferguson’s insistence that “[m]ankind are to be taken in
groups, as they have always subsisted. The history of the individual is but a detail of the sentiments and
thoughts he has entertained in the view of his species: and every experiment relative to this subject
should be made with entire societies, not with single men”; Essay on the History of Civil Society, 10.
26. History of America, 2: 97, 100.
27. History of America, 2: 226; The savage “pursues his own career, and indulges his own fancy,
without inquiring or regarding whether what he does be agreeable or offensive to others.”
28. History of America, 2: 224. Compare Smith’s account of the adjudication of disputes in a “nation
of hunters” as a social phenomenon: “The society consists of a few independent families, who live in
the same village and speak the same language, and have agreed among themselves to keep together for
mutual safety. But they have no authority over one another. The whole society interests itself in any
offence. If possible they make it up between the parties, if not they banish from their society, kill, or
deliver up to the resentment of the injured, him who has committed the crime”; LJ(B) 19; also see 27–
28.
29. Stewart Brown suggests that Robertson “was growing in cultural sensitivity and toleration”; the
India work, his last, was published in 1791, two years before his death; “Introduction” to Robertson
and the Expansion of Empire, 6.
30. Geoffrey Carnall proposes based on manuscript evidence that “the appendix may have been
written first, with the narrative as an afterthought”; Carnall, “Robertson and Contemporary Images of
India,” in Brown, ed., 211.
31. An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge the Ancients Had of India (London: 1804
[1792]), 201. Robertson credits the caste system with promoting both the abundance and high quality of
India’s manufactures and the “immutability in the manners of its inhabitants” (202).
32. Robertson remarks upon the complexity and sophistication of Indian jurisprudence (217), the
magnificence and relative elegance of Indian architecture (220–21), “their genius in fine arts” including
poetry and drama, which demonstrate their “polished manners and delicate sentiments” (231ff), and
their achievements in science, logic and metaphysics, ethics, and astronomy and mathematics (240ff).
As O’Brien writes, the account “does not escape the Eurocentrism of Robertson’s earlier works,” since
he measures each of these achievements against a European standard; O’Brien, Narratives of
Enlightenment, 165. While Robertson, a clergyman, is critical of Hindu religion, he presents it as
characteristic of the theology of any “enlightened nation,” in its mixture of ignorance and error: for “the
limited powers of the human mind [are unable] to form an adequate idea of the perfections and
operations of the Supreme Being.” He warns that Christians are “extremely apt to err” in the judgment
of religious opinions that “differ widely from our own”; Disquisition, 279, 269.
33. He argues, for instance, that because of the caste system, every Indian knows from birth “the
station allotted to him” and so accommodates himself “with ease and pleasure” to his destined function.
34. James Mill’s History of British India is, as Geoffrey Carnall has aptly noted, “a remorselessly
detailed demolition of everything that Robertson claimed in the Disquisition,” and Mill at several
moments cites Robertson’s arguments about rude nations in the History of America against his claims
for Indian civilization in the Disquisition—“Robertson sober, as it were, contrasted with Robertson
drunk”; Carnall, “Robertson and Contemporary Images of India,” 221. Martti Koskenniemi’s survey of
international lawyers’ views of non-European societies makes clear how widespread the stark
dichotomy of barbarous versus civilized became in the nineteenth century; Koskenniemi, Gentle
Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 103 ff.
35. Robertson, Disquisition, 285.
36. History of America, 2: 54–56. Bruce Lenman notes that Robertson was one of the few Scottish
historians to be well acquainted with the Spanish sources, most of them relying heavily on French
sources, especially Lafitau and Charlevoix; Lenman, “From Savage to Scot,” 198.
37. History of America, 2: 53–54. Jeffrey Smitten maintains that despite Robertson’s often denigrating
portrait of Amerindians, even Book IV of the History of America, like Book VII comparing the
Mexican and Peruvian empires and Robertson’s treatment of the Spanish, lived up to Robertson’s
“long-standing commitment to impartiality,” in that Robertson alludes to some (few) virtues of savage
life and resists “closure of final judgment”; Smitten, “Impartiality in Robertson,” 57–59. But
Robertson’s use of sources on Amerindians is perhaps more tendentious than Smitten’s article suggests;
Robertson draws on evidence from Charlevoix, for instance, to support a far more dismissive portrait
than Charlevoix’s own (and compare Smith’s use of Charlevoix in the Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed.
R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), LJ(A) i.47 and ii.96.
38. Lenman, “From Savage to Scot,” 205–7. Lenman adds: “there was only one way forward for
North American Indians. It was a path of unconditional assimilation conceived as stadial progression,
and if they did not take it the fault was theirs” (209).
39. Adam Ferguson, though far more admiring of the virtues and values of earlier stages of society,
and more critical of “civilized” mores, than others such as Robertson or Kames, also shared aspects of
the cognitive-development approach. We thus find a distinctive sort of ambivalence in Ferguson: more
than Smith or Dunbar he regarded social development as linked to developments at the level of the
individual mind, so that he argued, for instance, that native Americans, though “able masters in the
detail of their own affairs . . . study no science, and go in pursuit of no general principles. They even
seem incapable of attending to any distant consequences” beyond those they have directly experienced
(Essay, 88). But he also praised the “savage” for having “a penetration, a force of imagination and
elocution, an ardour of mind, an affection and courage, which the arts, the discipline, and the policy of
few nations would be able to improve” (76). Also, in contrast to so many of those working with
cognitive-development assumptions, Ferguson was attentive to the pitfalls of cross-cultural observation
and judgment, and he warned against the tendency to suppose ourselves the standard of “politeness and
civilization” and to assume that our very partial information about other societies (or our own past) can
enable us to fill out a reliable portrait of them.
40. For the view that Smith’s theory was, like others, a theory of cognitive development, see Berry,
Social Theory, 96–98; Nicholas Phillipson, similarly, claims that Smith’s “was a theory which showed
that people who lived in civilisations different from our own not only possessed different manners and
opinions but different minds and different selves”; Phillipson, “Providence and Progress,” in Brown,
ed., 59. J. G. A. Pocock has argued that Smith’s “narrative shows the mind as itself developing”;
Barbarism and Religion, II.315.
41. III.2, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, 49. Rousseau argued in the Second Discourse that
savages “did not even dream of vengeance except perhaps mechanically and on the spot like the dog
that bites the stone thrown at him”; Discourses, ed. Gourevitch, 154.
42. Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund,
1984), II.iii.1.1.
43. Note, however, that particular word choices in the Lectures on Jurisprudence do not have the
definitive character they might in published works.
44. LJ(A) i.36–44; after “applying” the method of the impartial spectator “to the case of hunters,”
Smith concludes: “In this age of society therefore property would extend no farther than possession”
(44).
45. LJ(A) i.47. Smith argues that the nomadism of hunting societies naturally leads them to recognize
property in only the things one has “about one’s person.”
46. LJ(A) i.47. The much briefer treatment at LJ(B) 150 sounds more like cognitive-development
accounts: “Among savages property begins and ends with possession, and they seem scarce to have any
idea of any thing as their own which is not about their bodies.” It is impossible to know how close the
language here came to Smith’s lecture, but the differences between this and the LJ(A) passage suggest
that to read it as a description of savages’ cognitive limitations may be misleading. It is worth noting
that in the LJ(B) passage, too, Smith suggests that members of hunting societies use a spectator method
to arrive at their notion of legitimate possession.
47. Among those conditions are that “the intention of the promiser [must] be expressed so clearly that
no impartial spectator can be in doubt about the content of the agreement” and that “the things that are
the subject of the agreement must also be considered of significant value” LJ(A) ii.62.
48. LJ(B) 175; also see LJ(A) ii.56 ff., Peter Stein, Legal Evolution: The Story of an Idea (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980), 39–40. Knud Haakonssen notes that this understanding of promises
“brings out very clearly a basic feature of Smith’s moral philosophy, namely, that it is about the
relations between persons”; The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume
and Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 112–14.
49. Smith notes as well that language in its early stages (indeed until very late in the development of
society) is too imprecise to engender such certainty on the part of the recipient of a promise that a
breach would be actionable. Smith’s point about language is not that savages cannot think abstractly,
but rather that they have not yet developed the terms in which to express commitment beyond a
reasonable doubt.
50. LJ(A) ii.62.
51. He offers as an example rituals of “stipulation” or “solemnities” such as the Armenian custom,
reported by Tacitus, in which parties to an agreement suck a bit of blood from one another’s thumbs;
Smith suggests that even such “horrid ceremonies,” rather than illustrating the “fear and terror” or
superstition of the people, make sense as a means of establishing certainty and thus obligation at a time
when language alone cannot do so (LJ[A] ii.70).
52. Mill, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” CW 21:118.
53. We should note that Smith uses the term “humanity” in two distinct ways: sometimes it seems to
serve as a category of general morality, as when he calls infanticide “so dreadful a violation of
humanity”; more often, however, the term has the less universal connotation of gentleness or
“sensibility”; see TMS V.2.15 and V.2.13.
54. TMS V.2.13. Smith’s faith in the uniformity and basic rectitude of human nature led him to
believe that however misguided particular practices might be, people of all societies were able and
generally likely to make decent moral decisions. He contrasts systems of natural philosophy, which
ordinary people may be unequipped to judge and which therefore may persist without “any sort of
resemblance to the truth,” with systems of moral philosophy, which must soon perish if too far from the
truth; see TMS VII.ii.4.14.
55. Compare Robertson’s more judgmental and character-based assessment of the supposed tendency
of savage societies to kill elderly members: “incapable of attending to the wants or weaknesses of
others, their impatience under an additional burden prompts them to extinguish that life which they find
it difficult to sustain”; History of America, 2: 220.
56. In producing opulence and leisure, commercial society allows greater concern for the welfare of
others than is possible in poorer and rougher societies; it promotes the establishment and continual
refinement of rules of social engagement; and it is most hospitable to the development of what Smith
called natural justice; see TMS V.2.9 and II.ii.1.5.
57. TMS V.2.7.
58. WN IV.vii.c.80.
59. Dunbar (1742–1798) was a regent at King’s College, Aberdeen from 1765 to 1794; Essays on the
history of mankind in rude and cultivated ages was published in a very slightly revised edition of 1781,
the edition cited here (in reprint: Christopher J. Berry, ed. [Bristol: Thoemmes, 1995]). For a brief
biography see Berry, “James Dunbar and the American War of Independence,” Aberdeen University
Review 45 (1974), 255–66.
60. Both Bryson and Meek dismiss Dunbar’s Essays in just a few sentences; Bryson, Man and Society,
80–81; Meek, Ignoble Savage, 190–91. Christopher Berry, the foremost expert on Dunbar’s thought,
mentions in passing Dunbar’s critique of Europeans’ treatment of New World peoples in his
introduction to the Essays; his unpublished dissertation emphasizes the distinctiveness of Dunbar’s
account of social stages, rooted in the development of language rather than of property.
61. Dunbar, partly because of his interest in the origin of language and his positing of a pre-linguistic
stage of human history, tended to emphasize the similarities among all currently known human
societies and their shared state of great advancement beyond the earliest stage. Thinkers who posited
hunting societies such as native Americans as the earliest stage tended, by contrast, to emphasize the
distance between hunting and commercial societies rather than their shared features of imagination and
culture. On Dunbar’s views about language, see Berry, “Dunbar and the Enlightenment Debate on
Language,” in Aberdeen and the Enlightenment (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 241–50.
62. “The springs of ingenuity are put into motion. . . . The acquisitions of industry, or invention,
confer a right which suggests the idea of property; and the distinctions of natural talents lay a
foundation for corresponding distinctions in society”; Essays, 31.
63. Essays, 154–55. Christopher Berry has criticized older readings of Dunbar as a primitivist: see his
“Introduction” to Dunbar’s Essays, page xiv. Berry himself notes the “primitivist tenor” of moments in
the Essays and emphasizes Dunbar’s “wistfulness” about a purity in both language and morals that
preceded the age of refinement but insists that Dunbar saw cultivated society as “in the last analysis
superior”; James Dunbar: A Study of His Thought and of His Contribution to and Place in the Scottish
Enlightenment, (PhD diss., London School of Economics, 1971), 199–203.
64. The question whether progress in arts and sciences entails moral progress is not central to his
enterprise as it is to Rousseau’s, but in a Rousseauian vein he writes, for instance, that while the
“inventions and improvements” thus introduced do “honour to our nature,” “it may be questioned,
whether the enlargement of our faculties, and all the advantages from arts, counterbalance the feuds and
animosities which they soon introduced into the world” (Essays, 32).
65. Dunbar was similarly alert to linguistic distortions when, arguing that the relation of metropole to
colony should be one of “perfect equality,” he wrote that “the terms which denote parental and filial
relation . . . are metaphors extremely liable to abuse. The one country is no more the mother than the
daughter”; see Berry, “American War,” 261, quoting Dunbar’s De Primordiis Civitatus oratio in qua
agitur de Bello Civili inter M. Britannium et Colonias nunc flagrante (London, Strahan: 1779).
66. Essays, 151–52.
67. Thus “the truest politeness of mind may be found among nations to whom these [vulgar and
commercial] arts are almost totally unknown”; Smith, for whom commercial society underpins polite
manners, would not go so far.
68. Dunbar and Tucker engaged in mutual recriminations over these claims. Dunbar added in a later
edition: “When the benevolence of this writer is exalted into charity, when the spirit of his religion
corrects the rancour of his philosophy, he will learn a little more reverence for the system to which he
belongs, and acknowledge, in the most untutored tribes, some glimmerings of humanity, and some
decisive indications of a moral nature” (see the Dublin edition of 1782: Essay V, note H, 135).
69. Dunbar, like Smith, did not regard individuals in early-stage societies as themselves mentally
immature; in a rare instance of such a comparison he wrote that the Tahitian Omiah was as
“circumscribed as a child in the number of his ideas,” noting that Omiah combined his limited ideas to
approximate unfamiliar concepts, calling a butler “king of the bottles.” But Dunbar also insisted that
Omiah was “in understanding and in years a man”; Essay II, note E, 110.
70. Dunbar seems to follow Smith in his discussion of the variability of standards and practices of
human beauty, treating, like Smith, ideas among different races, and bodily deformation including
Chinese foot-binding and European corsets. Though Dunbar does not mention Smith in this section,
elsewhere he praises Theory of Moral Sentiments and cites it at length; see, for instance, Essay II, notes
A and G (the latter citing Smith’s “Considerations concerning the first formation of language,” which
was first published as an appendix to the third edition (1767) of TMS; see Berry, “Smith’s
Considerations.”
71. Essays, 380.
72. Dunbar does remark that in Africa, “the art of disfiguring the human person, is almost the only art
which has made such progress among the rude inhabitants, as to mark their departure from a state of
nature” (384).
73. Dunbar, 390–91.
74. Essays, 384.
75. Dunbar suggests that moral comparisons of different stages of society—“running the parallel of
public manners in different periods of civil progress”—are pointless (391).
76. Essays, 161–62. Dunbar later observes that “cultivated and polished” nations often behave exactly
like aristocrats toward their “supposed inferiors”: “Both carry themselves with equal insolence, and
seem alike to forget or to deny the inherent and unalienable rights of the species” (439).
77. For an argument that the scope of the law of nations was too narrow from the eighteenth to the
nineteenth century, see C. H. Alexandrowicz, Introduction to the History of the Law of Nations in the
East Indies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); also see Pitts, “Boundaries of Victorian International
Law,” in Duncan Bell, ed. Victorian Visions of Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 67–88.
78. “[T]he diffusion of knowledge gradually tends to reduce mankind more nearly to a level in the
enterprizes of peace and war” (317). He adds that the “fall of Europe will mark, perhaps, at some future
aera, the enterprize of the species at large,” or, perhaps, that Europe will only lose its relative political
advantage while both Europe and the rest of the world gain in well-being in absolute terms.
79. On Raynal’s and Diderot’s ambivalence about global commerce, see Sankar Muthu’s essay in this
volume. Dunbar cites Raynal elsewhere in his essays.
80. Essays, 176.
81. Dunbar declines to “decide on [the] comparative perfections” of nations at different stages of
development: “The manners, the crimes of illiterate savage tribes, are apt enough to appear to us in
their full dimension and deformity; but the violations of natural law among civilized nations have a
solemn varnish of policy, which disguises the enormity of guilt”; Dunbar, 453.
82. I have discussed this broader shift in A Turn to Empire, where I treat the thought of James and J. S.
Mill at greater length.
83. Duncan Forbes too closely associated James Mill’s argument with that of all Scottish philosophical
history of earlier generations, arguing that Mill was “wholly in the tradition of the philosophical history
of the eighteenth century,” and that “Mill’s approach to India was unsympathetic not simply because he
was a disciple of Bentham, but because he brought with him from Scotland a conception of progress
which was lacking in Bentham’s thought”; Forbes, “James Mill and India,” 23–24. In contrast, Knud
Haakonssen has rightly distinguished Mill from the pluralist approaches of Smith and Millar and
observed that a key difference is Mill’s recourse to the action of individuals to explain historical
change, and his lack of any “theoretical conception of social and institutional change”; “James Mill and
Scottish Moral Philosophy.”
84. For Mill, all non-Europeans, from South Sea islanders to the peoples of the Chinese empire, were
essentially “rude” or “barbarous,” whatever might be said about their particular means of subsistence,
forms of government, or arts and practices. He wrote as if every aspect of these cultures that might
show them to be inferior to European civilization was telling (such as the supposed lack of taste in the
shapes of Chinese vases), whereas anything that might suggest refinement was either trivial or
misleading. To claims for the beauty of Chinese porcelain, he responded that their lack of refinement in
glass-making, so similar to porcelain, only proved their incapacity to innovate; to the idea that they had
invented the printing press, he replied, “what an abuse of terms! Because the Chinese cut out words on
blocks of wood, and sometimes, for particular purposes, stamp them on paper.” “Review of De
Guignes. Voyages à Peking, Manille, et l’Ile de France, faits dans l’intervalle des années 1784 à
1804.” Edinburgh Review 14 (July 1809): 407–29 at 425, 427.
85. H. H. Wilson, editor of several editions (with harshly critical footnotes) of the History, attributed
the “harsh and illiberal spirit” of civil servants in India to the influence of Mill’s work; see Majeed,
Ungoverned Imaginings, 129. Also see Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism; and Thomas, Philosophic
Radicals, 98–119, which astutely points out the “puritanism” of Mill’s interpretation of India, as well as
his reliance on missionary sources for “detailed accounts the grosser customs of a people he had placed
so low in his scale of civilization” (108). Uday Mehta has aptly noted that “Mill’s views regarding
India, its past and its present” were “pathetically foolish in their lack of nuance”; Liberalism and
Empire, 90. J. H. Burns offers a concise and often searing critique of James Mill’s method and
judgments; he concludes that “the almost blood-curdling arrogance of Mill’s cultural chauvinism” is
unredeemed by either felicity of language or “any clearly articulated method”; Burns, “The Light of
Reason,” 18.
86. James Mill’s unusual and extreme animus against everything Indian cannot, indeed, be attributed
to any single sociological commitment, but his adherence to the idea of cognitive development plays an
important role in his articulation of the causes and symptoms of Indian backwardness.
87. “Among children, and among rude people, little accustomed to take their decisions upon full and
mature consideration, nothing is more common than to repent of their bargains, and wish to revoke
them” (History I.161).
88. In his 1809 article about China, Mill allied himself with the work of Millar, and yet,
characteristically, he transformed a theory of multiple stages of historical development into a
dichotomous and judgmental gauge of progress. Mill writes, “Since the philosophical inquiry into the
condition of the weaker sex, in the different stages of society, published by Millar, it has been
universally considered as an infallible criterion of barbarous society, to find the women in a state of
great degradation”; he goes on to claim that the Chinese treatment of women demonstrates that China is
on a par with “savages.” “Review of de Guignes,” 428.
89. “Affairs of India,” 147–48. Similar examples abound in the History of British India, where Mill
describes the “suspicious tempers and narrow views of a rude period” (I.145) and “the ignorant and
depraved people, of whose depravity we have so many proofs” (V. 449). “The Hindus have, through all
the ages, remained in a state of society too near the simplicity and rudeness of the most ancient times,
to have stretched their ideas of property so far” (I.173). Also see I. 192–93, I. 232, II. 147.
90. “With no sanction of reason could anything better be expected than that which was in reality
produced; a disorderly compilation of loose, vague, stupid, or unintelligible quotations and maxims,
selected arbitrarily . . . attended with a commentary, which only adds to the mass of absurdity and
darkness: a farrago, by which nothing is defined, nothing established.” History V. 426.
91. History, II.105. Javed Majeed has aptly noted that Mill’s tone of definitiveness—his “pseudo-
deductive style of argument which stresses the certainty of conclusions derived from unassailable
premisses” owed as much to Mill’s puritanical spirit as to his utilitarianism (Majeed, Ungoverned
Imaginings, 186–87).
92. Works of Jeremy Bentham, John Bowring, ed., Edinburgh and London, 1843, I, 180–81. I have
discussed some of James and J. S. Mill’s differences from Bentham on the subjects of empire and
development, and the latter’s rather tendentious characterization of Bentham’s thought, in A Turn to
Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
93. The younger Mill wrote that Bentham “thought it an insolent piece of dogmatism in one person to
praise or condemn another in a matter of taste: as if men’s likings and dislikings, on things in
themselves indifferent, were not full of the most important inferences as to every point of their
character”; “Bentham,” CW X.113.
94. See Ball, “Introduction” to James Mill, Political Writings, xiv.
95. “Civilization” (1836), CW XVIII.120.
96. “Civilization,” CW CVIII.122.
97. “Civilization,” CW XVIII.122. The “ignorant labourer” in a “rude state of society” cooperates with
no one outside his family; such people learn the “practical lesson of submitting themselves to guidance”
in order to acquire “habits of discipline” (123–24).
98. “Civilization,” CW XVIII.122–23.
99. “Civilization,” CW XVIII.123.
100. Alexander Brady, for instance, remarks in his introduction to the volume of Mill’s essays on
politics and society that “whatever its deficiency” as anthropology, Mill’s definitions of civilized and
savage life “in no way hampered Mill in discussing that in which he was principally interested—certain
aspects of contemporary Britain on which he had strong opinions” (CW XVIII.xxv).
101. CW XXI.118. In “Civilization,” Mill argued similarly that the answers to the “great questions in
government . . . vary indefinitely, according to the degree and kind of civilization and cultivation
already attained by a people, and their peculiar aptitudes for receiving more” (CW X.106).
102. “Non-intervention,” CW XXI.119. Mill adds, “Nations which are still barbarous have not got
beyond the period during which it is likely to be for their benefit that they should be conquered and
held in subjection by foreigners.”
103. On Liberty, CW XVIII.224.
104. On Liberty, CW XVIII.224. Also see Considerations on Representative Government; CW XIX.
567. Uday Mehta has argued that liberal universalism, notably in Locke and Mill, distinguishes
“between anthropological capacities and the necessary conditions for their actualization”: while the
capacities are acknowledged to be universal, various peoples are politically disenfranchised as not
being in a position to realize those capacities; Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 47.
105. Martti Koskenniemi’s discussion of international lawyers’ views on empire shows how
commonly claims about backward peoples’ immaturity or lack of certain legal concepts were used in
the nineteenth century to justify their exclusion from the ordinary standards of international law. John
Westlake, for instance, argued in 1891 that sovereignty could not be attributed to African chiefs, nor
could they transfer sovereignty, because they lacked the concept; in 1894, he wrote that “[I]nternational
law has to treat natives as uncivilised.” Joseph Hornung wrote of “barbarians”: “They are children, of
course, but then, let us treat them as one treats children, through gentleness and persuasion.” Westlake,
“Le conflit Anglo-Portugais” (1891) and Chapters on the principles of international law (1894); Joseph
Hornung, “Civilisés et barbares” (Part 4, 1886), cited by Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer, 127 and 130;
see also chapter 2 throughout.
106. A similar case could be made for Adam Ferguson’s writings.
Chapter Three
Under Negotiation: Empowering Treaty
Constitutionalism
Vicki Hsueh[1]
A treaty is more than just a transient agreement to exchange a few furs for European trade goods . .
. through dialogic interaction, the sharing of sufferings, the clearing of barriers to communication,
the reciprocal exchanges of gifts and goodwill, and the mutualization of interests and resources,
different peoples could attain one mind, and link arms together.
—Robert Williams, Linking Arms Together
Negotiation is impure.
—Jacques Derrida, Negotiations
I. INTRODUCTION
Penn further noted in the law that “divers Persons as English Dutch Swedes
&c: have been wont to sell to ye Indians Rhum & brandy and Such like
distill’d Spiritts.” Alcohol, Penn concluded, had a deleterious effect on both
the “Indians” and the “colonists”: the “Indians are not able to govern
themselves in ye use thereof but doe commonly drink of it to such excess as
makes them sometimes to destroy one another & greiviously anoy and
disquiet ye People of this Province & Peradventures those of Neighbouring
Governmts.”[39]
In the guise of providing a resource—unencumbered title to land—to the
colonists, Penn thus strengthened both his internal and external power in the
colony. Internally, Penn’s restrictions on the resources used in treaty
negotiation—alcohol, guns, and even language, in the form of access to
translators and negotiators—dissuaded Pennsylvania colonists from engaging
in their own negotiations with local indigenes. Externally, Penn used his
ability to conduct treaties to service a variety of ends. First, treaties allowed
Penn to circumvent the new restrictions placed upon his proprietorial
authority by the Crown: they did not need to be reviewed by the Privy
Council for they did not have the status of colonial law. Second, treaties were
styled by Penn to pose both a moral and commercial challenge to other
colonial settlements, both English and European, who were described in print
as corrupting and greedy. Lastly, the peace Penn offered to the Lenape and
Susquehannocks was also in many ways peace in the form of protectionism,
where Lenape and Susquehannock alliances with Penn served as a buffer
against Iroquois tribes and other European settlers. Accordingly, treaty
negotiation, from the perspective of Penn and his representatives, both
intersected and attempted to change a number of other relations that were
deeply contested at the time: the authority of the British metropole over the
colonial peripheries; the regulation of commercial entities by Crown
institutions; the competitive relations between English settlements and other
European empires, such as the French, Dutch, and Spanish settlements; the
interactions between colonists and indigenes.[40] Treaties thus helped to
supplement and consolidate the limited—and often ambiguous—power that
Penn held as the proprietor of a colony that was itself mixed in multiple
ways.
In this way, Penn’s interests in monopolization and protectionism recall
Charles Tilly’s assessment of state-making as “organized crime,” in which
“the makers of state” look to “monopolize the means of violence within a
delimited territory.”[41] By offering pacification to local tribes, Penn was
able—without excessive arms or financial investment—to open up various
trading and diplomatic opportunities.[42] Indeed, while to an extent, Penn’s
power can be seen as conventionally realist in its preoccupation with
territorial control and relative diplomatic power, his pacific outlook also
added additional dimensions of moral and ethical complexity to familiar
realist interests. Entrepreneurial and diplomatic aims intermingled with—
indeed even amplified—moralizing messages, allow a proprietor with limited
political and economic resources to forestall conflict, create alliances, and
pursue territorial ambitions.
At the same time, Penn’s ability to monopolize was not absolute: he may
have attempted to use formal agreements between indigene and colonial elites
to order uncertainty, but the on-going tension on the ground reflected that any
treatied easement was often relative and limited. Contestation continued in
part because of the practical difficulty of including all parties affected by
negotiation—whether directly or indirectly. In a notable example, as the
Remonstrance for the Inhabitants of Philadelphia, 1684, demonstrated,
Pennsylvania colonists were, despite Penn’s treaties, still unhappy over the
lands they held.[43] While Penn may have sought to “pacifye” relations and
to claim privilege in contestations over disputed sections of land, treaties did
not fully resolve the thicket of conflicts on the ground. In addition, as I will
illustrate next, the course of treaty agreements were affected as much by the
different interests of negotiating groups as by the volatile environments in
which those groups sought to create security, alliance, and protection.
Many have argued that treaties between English and indigenous nations were
fatally flawed from the start because treaty participants possessed such
different—and, arguably, mutually exclusive—conceptions of land
possession and use.[61] The English tended to view land as a commodity to
be bought and sold: deeds were accordingly treated as conveying absolute
right to land, where gifts of rum, wampum, and goods were seen as payment
for land title. By contrast, indigenous conceptions of land emphasized land
usufruct: deeds were largely viewed as provisional agreements that needed to
be revisited and renewed over time, and any gifts were seen as part of on-
going protocols and customs of greeting and negotiation. “The Lenape notion
of the transfer of partial or usufruct rights in a land transaction,” Sugrue
indicates, “had no impact on the wording of deeds, all of which stipulated the
permanent and absolute renunciation of Indian rights to the land
conveyed.”[62] At least on first appraisal, the treatied deeds between Penn
and the Lenape and Susquehannocks seem to illustrate a clash of cultural and
political understanding, where indigenous conceptions of land and culture
were, at best, misunderstood or, at worst, deliberately manipulated to service
Penn’s interests. As I discuss in this section, certain forms of cross-cultural
understanding did seem to take place in treaty negotiation, but they were
often variable and indeterminate as guarantees of enduring respect or
harmony. Penn and his interpreters and go-betweens did seem to possess a
fairly thorough knowledge of Lenape and Susquehannock protocols and
values, but these understandings did not appear to compel any necessary
commitment or sense of responsibility to treaty participants over the long
term.
As I argued earlier, Penn made frequent and public indication of his
knowledge and validation of Lenape and Susquehannock cultures in
promotional materials, such as The Letter to the Free Society of Traders. In
addition, Penn and his administrators recognized that Lenape and
Susquehannocks viewed treaty agreements as open-ended and subject to on-
going review and renewal. Even though the deed agreements themselves
referred to the permanent transfer of land to the English, Penn and his
representatives nonetheless revisited and renewed “confirmatory” treaties
with Lenape and Susquehannocks from the 1680s until as late as 1718: Penn
was, for example, willing to make multiple payments to tribes until 1700
when financial difficulties beset the colony.[63] What these “confirmatory”
treaties suggest is that the open-ended nature of treaty negotiations could be
turned to multiple ends. Penn and his administrators were not wholly ignorant
of Lenape protocols and practices; instead, they used Lenape customs, such
as the renewal of treaties, when it was useful for diplomatic reasons.
However, these decisions could be changed and revisited, at times causing
conflict with, and even betrayal of, earlier agreements.
This element of indeterminacy can be seen in greater detail in the dialogic
aspects of treaty constitutionalism. Although treaty negotiations were affairs
of arbitration between elites, they were also reliant on interpreters and “go-
betweens” whose interests, knowledge, and capabilities reveal a core
ambiguity in intercultural dialogue and accommodation.[64] For example, the
Swedish colonist, Lars Parsson (Lasse) Cocke, fur trader and magistrate,
negotiated many of the early treaties (1682–1699) with the Lenape,
Susquehannocks, and members of the Iroquois confederacy; while James
Logan, an early secretary to Penn, negotiated treaties with the Lenape for
land and trade access.[65] Negotiation practices extended beyond simply
translating speeches and trading wampum: in arranging meetings, interpreting
manners and gestures, and providing incentives, negotiators needed to
possess a cross-cultural understanding of language, custom, and culture.
Yet, as James Merrell has noted, the cross-cultural work of translation,
reciprocity, and diplomacy was deeply imbued with power and contingency.
Negotiators, although fluent in cross-cultural practices, were often partisans
to one side or another. For instance, Penn’s secretary, James Logan, was
conversant in Iroquois protocols of condolence and Algonquian practices of
orientation, owned a copy of the Bible in Algonquian, and housed Lenape
representatives during treaty negotiations. Still, Logan, who had at times
referred to local tribes and nations as “children,” famously exhibited little
commitment to intercultural understanding beyond matters relating to trade
and land. Meanwhile, Cocke, who had been raised in the Delaware lower
counties prior to the Pennsylvania settlement, eagerly naturalized to Penn’s
colony and expanded his fur trade. Cocke and Logan were not unique in their
power-laden practices of cultural negotiation. As Merrell comments,
[t]he very preoccupation that gave the trader valuable negotiating tools—the traffic in peltry—
might also hinder him when called to serve. Intent on satisfying the demands of his Indian and
Philadelphia customer, with an eye always on “the sweet profits” to be made in trade, the fur
peddler, “can with eagerness go thro the greatest hardships and Difficaltyes for sake of Gaine.”[66]
V. CONCLUSION
My focus in this chapter has been primarily local and historical: through a
close reading of a specific period, I have looked to extend the accounts of
treaty constitutionalism offered by Tully, Young, and Williams, while adding
yet another case example to further expand the field of consideration. Our
understanding of treaty constitutionalism, I have suggested, can be deepened
by viewing it as set of practices that were shaped by, and duly shaped,
differential forms of power. In the cases that I have examined, no one group
possessed an authoritative conception of treaty negotiation and no single
participant or legislator wholly determined a treaty’s direction. At the same
time, while treaty negotiations created cross-cultural adjudication and
agreement, they did so in ways that, at times, created moments of exclusion,
fostered opportunism, and risked conflict and contention.
There are both historical and contemporary implications that might be
productively drawn from this analysis. From a historical perspective, the
treaties negotiated between Penn and the Lenape and Susquehannocks help to
challenge broad-brush accounts which tend to view English empire as a
monolith erected only by territorial conquest and cultural assimilation. Such
accounts, I would argue, can overlook the degree to which English colonial
order was also at times supported and supplemented by cross-cultural
agreements, understandings, and knowledges: far from imposing a “civilized”
order upon “primitive” inhabitants, the treaties examined here revealed
Penn’s reliance, for example, on Lenape and Susquehannocks to provide land
and alliances. Equally pertinent, historical examples of treaty negotiations
help to illuminate the wide variety of indigenous diplomatic, territorial, and
social interests and agendas in the past and allow us a degree of insight into
the many agreements and conflicts that historically shaped indigenous
communities. When viewed as practices of power, such understandings are
crucial to deepening our understanding of a complex and equivocal past.
On a conceptual level, the features of power that I have discussed here can
be used to extend normative accounts of treaty constitutionalism. In
particular, we might reconfigure our assessment to include not only the
possibilities for potent cross-cultural connection, but also the risks of
inequality, exclusion, and indeterminacy. Such elements, especially with
respect to contemporary cases, suggest the need for greater attentiveness to
the contexts and forms of power that characterize treaty negotiations, and our
efforts may need to be both wide-ranging and persistent.
More specifically, the historical contexts of treaty constitutionalism
suggest the need for awareness of and sensitivity to the possible unexpected
and conflicted outcomes of treaty negotiations. We might, as a consequence,
look to strengthen treaty constitutionalism by energizing our efforts to attend
to contemporary examples where group interests may not be fully expressed
by treaty negotiators or when, alternatively, treaty participants are radically
divergent not just in their respective interests but in their conceptions of
power.
Indeed, the differences between contemporary and past forms of treaty
constitutionalism warrant especially heightened consideration. Particularly
now, when the Crown/nation-state and indigenous nations are more often
than not situated in radical inequity with respect to power and privilege, what
may superficially appear as a balanced setting can be belied by institutional,
economic, and political forces of the Crown/nation-state.[72] As the theorist
Taiaiake Alfred has argued, indigenous interests can be co-opted by the
mechanisms of treaty making, where even tribal leaders find their interests
and ambitions acquiescent “to the state’s agenda.”[73] For example, in a
2002 case in British Columbia, Canada, native leaders sought to bar native
treaties from being brought to a public referendum that allowed more than 4
million B.C. residents to mail in their votes on native issues that ranged from
whether hunting and fishing on Crown land should be maintained for all B.C.
residents to whether aboriginal self-government should have the
characteristics of municipal government. Local chiefs of bands such as the
Hupacasath in Port Alberni protested that the referendum would diminish
aboriginal rights: while public input was in principle desirable, the practical
effect of the public’s influence made it impossible for native leaders to fully
discuss and deliberate highly contentious issues.[74] Moreover, the
challenges to treaty negotiation can reside within indigenous tribes as well:
internal struggles and external challenges can undermine indigenous
leadership and representation. In fact, at times, as Alfred argues, in such
situations, a stance of “contention” may be more appropriate for indigenous
nations—“a non-cooperative, non-participatory position vis-à-vis the state, its
actors, and its policies.”[75]
Deepening our understanding of treaty constitutionalism’s relationship to
power allows us to acknowledge the vulnerabilities as well as strengths that
can be opened in the acts of speaking, engaging, and negotiating across
cultural difference, providing hopefully yet more resources for responding to
the challenges of adjudication.
NOTES
1. My thanks and appreciation to Craig Borowiak, Michaele Ferguson, Jacob Levy, Steven Pincus,
Sarah Song, James Tully, and Iris Marion Young for their suggestions and comments on previous
versions of this essay. A version of this essay was originally published in Vicki Hsueh’s Hybrid
Constitutions, pp. 83–112, published in 2010 by Duke University Press. All Rights Reserved. Used by
permission of the publisher.
2. Recent works include: James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Iris Marion Young, “Hybrid Democracy: Iroquois
Federalism and the Postcolonial Project,” from Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,
eds. Duncan Ivison et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 237–58; also Young,
Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially chapter 7, “Self-
Determination and Global Democracy,” 236–75; Robert A. Williams Jr., Linking Arms Together:
American Indian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1600–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997); also Williams, “Linking Arms Together: Multicultural Constitutionalism in a North American
Indigenous Vision of Law and Peace,” California Law Review 82, no. 4 (1994), 981–1052.
3. Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 116–19.
4. Williams, “Linking Arms Together: Multicultural Constitutionalism in a North American
Indigenous Vision of Law and Peace,” California Law Review 82, no. 4 (1994), 1048–49.
5. Iris Marion Young, “Hybrid Democracy: Iroquois Federalism and the Postcolonial Project,” in
Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ed. Duncan Ivison et al. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 246.
6. Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 119.
7. Young, “Hybrid Democracy: Iroquois Federalism and the Postcolonial Project,” 239–40.
8. Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 83; Young, “Hybrid Democracy: Iroquois Federalism and the
Postcolonial Project,” 240, 246–47.
9. Young, “Hybrid Democracy: Iroquois Federalism and the Postcolonial Project,” 246.
10. Williams, “Linking Arms Together: Multicultural Constitutionalism in a North American
Indigenous Vision of Law and Peace,” 1048.
11. In this account, my conception of power draws upon the formulations offered by Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida, Tully, and Young. See citations below.
12. See Bruce G. Trigger, ed., Handbook of North American Indians (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution, 1978), vol. 15; Francis Jennings, “‘Pennsylvania Indians’ and the Iroquois,” in Beyond the
Covenant Chain, ed. D. Richter and J. Merrell (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 80–
84; Daniel K. Richter, “A Framework for Pennsylvania Indian History,” Pennsylvania History 57
(1990): 236–61; Thomas J. Sugrue, “The Peopling and Depeopling of Early Pennsylvania: Indians and
Colonists, 1680–1720,” PMHB, CXVI:1 (1992), 3–30.
13. I adopt a Skinnerian approach to clarify the different meanings of treaty constitutionalism and to
understand the specific contexts and conditions in which those forms were raised as relevant, while
bringing in the interpretative insights of contemporary historical and literary studies that regard
English-American colonial settlement in its diversity and differences. On the issue of historical
interpretation, see Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 29–67, 231–88. See also Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before
Liberalism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially 101–20; Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan,
1958), especially 122, 198–201, 203.
14. Young, “Hybrid Democracy: Iroquois Federalism and the Postcolonial Project,” 239–40, 246.
15. James Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1999), 28.
16. Sugrue, “The Peopling and Depeopling of Early Pennsylvania: Indians and Colonists, 1680–
1720,” PMHB, CXVI:1 (1992), 3. In addition, my account draws particularly on recent work which
emphasizes trans-Atlantic and cross-colonial dynamics. See Sally Schwartz, “A Mixed Multitude”: The
Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 1987);
Daniel K. Richter, “A Framework for Pennsylvania Indian History,” Pennsylvania History 57 (1990):
236–61; Andrew R. Murphy, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent
in Early Modern England and America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001),
247–94; Mary K. Geiter, “The Restoration Crisis and the Launching of Pennsylvania, 1679–81,”
English Historical Review, CXII (1997), 313–14.
17. Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania (London: printed and sold by Benjamin Clark,
1681), reprinted in The World of William Penn, edited by Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 59.
18. Ibid.
19. Gary B. Nash, “City Planning and Political Tension in the Seventeenth-Century: The Case of
Philadelphia,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112 (1968), 54–73; Hannah Roach,
“Planting of Philadelphia: A Seventeenth Century Real Estate Development,” PMHB, 92 (1968), 185–
89.
20. Letter from Thomas Holme to William Penn, 9 November 1683, The Papers of William Penn, ed.
Mary Maples Dunn, Richard S. Dunn, Richard Ryerson, and Scott M. Wilds; asst. ed. Jean R.
Soderlund (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981–6), II, 501. Hereafter cited as PWP.
21. For primary source reference on the early population, see Early Census of Philadelphia County
Inhabitants, 14 April 1683, William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania, 1680–1684: A
Documentary History (hereafter cited as WPFP), ed. Jean Soderlund (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 212–16. The editors of The Papers of William Penn have also compiled a
particularly helpful list of first purchasers in Pennsylvania during 1681–1685, which includes
biographical information. See First Purchasers of Pennsylvania, 1681–1685 in PWP, II, 630–64. Also,
while I do not discuss the issue of slavery here, the colony’s history of slavery adds yet another layer of
complication to its intercultural relations. See Gary B. Nash, “Slaves and Slaveholders in Colonial
Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd service, 30:2 (1973): 223–56; Herbert Aptheker, “The
Quakers and Negro Slavery,” Journal of Negro History 25:3 (July 1940): 331–62.
22. See Charter to Pennsylvania, 4 March 1681, WPFP, 42. For historical accounts of the Charter in
the period’s colonial policy, see Philip S. Haffenden, “The Crown and the Colonial Charters, 1675–
1688,” WMQ 15 (1958): 297–311.
23. Charter to Pennsylvania, 4 March 1681, WPFP, 42. See Soderlund’s introduction to WPFP, 7. As
historian Jean R. Soderlund flatly points out, Penn ultimately failed to achieve the powers of the
palatinate charter, and “therefore ended up with a patent that gave the proprietor considerably less
power than he desired.”
24. Christopher Tomlins, “Law’s Empire: Chartering English Colonies on the American mainland in
the seventeenth century,” in The Reach of Empire: Law, History, Colonialism, ed., Diane Kirkby and
Catherine Colebourne (New York and Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001), 36. See
also, C. L. Tomlins, “The Legal Cartography of Colonization, the Legal Polyphony of Settlement:
English Intrusions on the American Mainland in the Seventeenth Century,” Law and Social Inquiry 26
(2001), 315–72, especially 328–47; Kenneth MacMillan, “Common and Civil Law? Taking Possession
of the English Empire in America, 1575–1630,” Canadian Journal of History 38 (2003), 409–24; John
Juricek, “English Territorial Claims in North America under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts,” Terrae
Incognitae 7 (1975): 7–22.
25. As Penn wrote to the Committee of Trade, 14, in August, 1683, “I have exactly followed the
Bishop of London’s council by buying & not taking away the natives land, with whom I have Settled a
very Kind Correspondence.” PWP, 435. On the various indigenous tribes and nations in Pennsylvania,
see Bruce G. Trigger, ed., Handbook of North American Indians (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution, 1978), vol. 15, 366–67; Randall Miller, “Amerindian (Native American) Cultures in Pre-
and Early European Settlement Periods in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Ethnic Studies Newsletter
(1989), 1–4; Regula Trenkwalder Schönenberger, Lenape Women, Matriliny, and the Colonial
Encounter: Resistance and Erosion of Power (Bern and New York: P. Lang, 1991); Lorraine E.
Williams, “Indians and Europeans in the Delaware Valley, 1620–1655,” in New Sweden in America,
ed. Carol E. Hoffecker et al. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 112–20.
26. Letter from William Clarke, Commissioner, Dover River, 21 June 1683, PWP, 400–401. For
example, as Commissioner William Clarke wrote to Penn, on 21 June 1683:
Lord Baltimore did the Last thurd day Cause A proclaimacon to be read publiquely in sumersett
County Court; that all persons that would seat Land in Either the whor Kill or Jones Countys; That
he would procure them Rights at one hundred pounds of Tobacco per Right, and that they should
pay but one shilling for every hundred Acres of Land yearly rent, And if the Inhabitents of both
these Countys would Revolt from william Penn and owne him to be theire proprietary and Governr
that they should have the same termes; Reports ware also given out that the Lord Baltimor did
Intend shortly to Com with A Troop of horse to take possession of these Two Lower Countys;
which Caused greate fear to a Rise in the peoples mindes. (My emphasis)
27. Terry G. Jordan and Matti Kaups, The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological
Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1989), 5. For primary accounts, see “Report of
Governor John Printz [New Sweden],” 1647, Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and
Delaware, 1603–1707, ed. Albert Cook Myers (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), 117–29;
also, “Report of Governor Johan Rising [New Sweden],” 1655, ibid., 153–65.
28. See, for example, “Deed: Sickoneysincks to the Dutch for Swanendale,” 1 June 1629, in Early
American Indian Documents, Treaties, and Laws, 1607–1789: Pennsylvania and Delaware Treaties,
1629–1737, ed. Alden T. Vaughn and Donald H. Kent (Washington, DC: University Publications of
America, c. 1979), 5; Stellan Dahlgren and Hans Norman, The Rise and Fall of New Sweden
(Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1988), 92–116.
29. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Scandinavian Colonists Confront the New World,” in New Sweden in
America, ed. Carol E. Hoffecker et al. (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 89–111.
30. Ibid.
31. Marshall Becker, “Lenape Maize Sales to the Swedish Colonists: Cultural Stability during the
Early Colonial Period,” in New Sweden in America, ed. Carol E. Hoffecker et al. (Newark: University
of Delaware Press, 1995), 120–35; also Lorraine E. Williams, “Indians and Europeans in the Delaware
Valley, 1620–1655” in the same volume, 112–20.
32. Penn was granted Pennsylvania by Charles II in March 1681. Later, the three lower counties (now
referred to as Delaware) were added, with controversy, in August 1682. See, for example, Penn’s letter
to Robert Turner, Anthony Sharp, and Roger Roberts, PWP, 88. Even before arriving in Pennsylvania,
Penn’s administrators negotiated for land in the southeast of Bucks Country in 1682. Penn continued to
acquire deeds, first, along the Delaware River, then extending westward, by the fall of 1683, along the
Schuykill and Susquehanna rivers.
33. Letter to the Free Society of Traders, 1683, WPFP, 314.
34. Memoranda of Additional Instructions to William Markham and William Crispin and Jno Bezer,
28 October 1681, PWP, II, 129. My emphasis.
35. Remonstrance from the Inhabitants of Philadelphia, July 1684, PWP, II, 573.
36. Quotes in paragraph from Bill for Lasse Cock’s Services, 1682, ibid., II, 242–43.
37. Letter to the Free Society of Traders, 1683, WPFP, 314.
38. Quotes in paragraph from Bill for Lasse Cock’s Services, 1682, ibid., II, 242–43. For background,
see also Marshall Becker, “Lenape Land Sales, Treaties, and Wampum Belts,” PMHB, CVIII (1984);
James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1999), 1–10.
39. Paragraph quotes from William Penn’s Great Law Passed by his First Legislative Assembly of
Pennsylvania, December 5, 1682. MS, Division of Public Records, Harrisburg, PA.
40. Elizabeth Mancke, “Negotiating an Empire: Britain and its Overseas Population, c. 1550–1780,” in
Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and
Michael V. Kennedy (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 248–49. “Relations among states,”
Mancke explains, “between the metropole and colonial peripheries, and among rival commercial
interests were all negotiated over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, repeatedly and often
simultaneously . . . Authority in the colonies, therefore, did not trickle down from the center to the
peripheries but was negotiated between the regions.” My emphasis.
41. Charles Tilly, “War-Making and State-Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich
Rueschemeyer, Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 172.
42. Ibid., 170–72.
43. Remonstrance from the Inhabitants of Philadelphia, July 1684, PWP, II, 573.
44. Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American
Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 24–26. For a wider view of
the work relating to the recovery of native experience, see James Axtell, “The Ethnohistory of Early
America: A Review Essay,” WMQ 35 (1978), 110–14; also, Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest
of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Edward G. Gray,
New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999); David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Native
Texts (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991); Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians
and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Karen
Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2000); Colin Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early
America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Richard White, The Middle Ground (New
York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
45. Francis Jennings, “‘Pennsylvania Indians’ and the Iroquois” in Beyond the Covenant Chain: The
Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800, ed. Daniel K. Richter and James
H. Merrell (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, [1987] 2003), 75–92.
46. Richter, Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America,
1600–1800, ed. Daniel K. Richter and James H. Merrell (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, [1987] 2003), 6. Also, as Daniel Richter argues, despite the increase in ethnohistorical
and “middle ground” historical accounts of indigene-colonial relationships, Penn’s treaties with the
Lenni Lenape, Susquehannocks, and Iroquois continue to be susceptible to idealized, even sentimental,
interpretations. Daniel K. Richter, “A Framework for Pennsylvania Indian History,” Pennsylvania
History 57 (1990): 236–61. Francis Jennings also addresses both Penn’s enthusiasm, economic
concerns, and his interest in managing the welter of competing claims to land title in the area. See
Francis Jennings, “Brother Miquon: Good Lord!” in The World of William Penn, 195–210.
47. Richter, Beyond the Covenant Chain, 21.
48. Neal Salisbury, “Toward the Covenant Chain: Iroquois and Southern New England Algonquians,
1637–1684,” in Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North
America, 1600–1800, ed. Daniel K. Richter and James H. Merrell (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, [1987] 2003), 61–74.
49. Richter, Beyond the Covenant Chain, 21.
50. Sugrue, “The Peopling and Depeopling of Early Pennsylvania: Indians and Colonists, 1680–
1720,” PMHB, CXVI:1 (1992): 9–11.
51. Ibid.
52. Randall Miller, “Amerindian (Native American) Cultures in Pre- and Early European Settlement
Periods in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Ethnic Studies Newsletter (1989), 1–4; Regula Trenkwalder
Schönenberger, Lenape Women, Matriliny, and the Colonial Encounter: Resistance and Erosion of
Power (Bern and New York: P. Lang, 1991); Lorraine E. Williams, “Indians and Europeans in the
Delaware Valley, 1620–1655,” in New Sweden in America, ed. Carol E. Hoffecker et al. (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1995), 112–20.
53. Jennings, “‘Pennsylvania Indians’ and the Iroquois,” 81.
54. Richter, “A Framework for Pennsylvania Indian History,” 239.
55. Ibid., 245.
56. Jennings, “‘Pennsylvania Indians’ and the Iroquois,” 80–84.
57. Richter, “A Framework for Pennsylvania Indian History.”
58. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. and
trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 88.
59. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1990), 47. Also see especially chapter 2, “The Five Faces of Oppression,” 39–65.
60. James Tully, “The Agonic Freedom of Citizens,” Economy and Society 28 (1999): 167–68.
61. See, for example, William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of
New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).
62. Sugrue, “The Peopling and Depeopling of Early Pennsylvania: Indians and Colonists, 1680–
1720,” 22.
63. Jennings, “‘Pennsylvania Indians’ and the Iroquois,” in Beyond the Covenant Chain, ed. D.
Richter and J. Merrell (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 75–92, and Sugrue, “The
Peopling and Depeopling of Early Pennsylvania: Indians and Colonists, 1680–1720,” 3–30.
64. To be sure, treaty elites represented their constituents to varying degrees. For example, Penn, as I
have noted, often sought to exclude his colonists from intervening, while Lenape decisions were
typically communal. The Susquehannocks were organized along more hierarchical lines, but elites were
supposed to represent the band’s interests.
65. Marshall Becker, “Lenape Land Sales, Treaties, and Wampum Belts,” PMHB, CVIII (1984);
James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1999).
66. Merrell, Into the American Woods, 80.
67. Ibid., 56.
68. Ibid., 12.
69. Ibid., 13.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., 31.
72. Ibid., 70–80.
73. Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 76. Also, see Alfred, “Deconstructing the British Columbia Treaty Process,” in
Dispatches from the Cold Seas: Indigenous Views on Self-Government, Ecology, and Identity, ed. C.
Rattay and T. Mustonen (Tempere Polytechnic, 2001).
74. Jim Beatty, “Natives lose court bid to block B.C. referendum on treaties: Ballots will begin
arriving in the mail next week,” The Vancouver Sun, March 28, 2002, A3.
75. Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness, 76.
Chapter Four
Wasáse: Indigenous Resurgences
Taiaiake Alfred
It is time for our people to live again. This chapter begins a journey on the
path made for us by those who have found a way to live as Onkwehonwe,
original people. The journey is a living commitment to meaningful change in
our lives and to transforming society by re-creating our existences,
regenerating our cultures, and surging against the forces that keep us bound
to our colonial past. It is the path of struggle laid out by those who have come
before us; and now it is our turn, we who choose to turn away from the
legacies of colonialism and take on the challenge of creating a new reality for
ourselves and for our people.
The journey and this warrior’s path is a kind of Wasáse, a ceremony of
unity and strength and commitment to action. Wasáse is an ancient
Rotinoshonni war ritual, the Thunder Dance. The new warrior’s path, the
spirit of Wasáse, this Onkwehonwe attitude, this courageous way of being in
the world, all come together to form a new politics in which many identities
and strategies for making change are fused together in a movement to
challenge white society’s control over Onkwehonwe and our lands. Wasáse,
as I am speaking of it here, is symbolic of the social and cultural force alive
among Onkwehonwe dedicated to altering the balance of political and
economic power to re-create some social and physical space for freedom to
reemerge. Wasáse is an ethical and political vision and the real demonstration
of our resolve to survive as Onkwehonwe and to do what we must to force
the Settlers to acknowledge our existence and the integrity of our connection
to the land.
There are many differences among the peoples that are indigenous to this
land. Yet the challenge facing all Onkwehonwe is the same, and centers on
regaining freedom and becoming self-sufficient by confronting the
disconnection and fear at the core of our existences under colonial dominion.
We are separated from the sources of our goodness and power: each other,
our cultures, and our lands. These connections must be restored.
Governmental power is founded on fear. Fear is used to control and
manipulate us in many ways; so, the strategy must be to confront fear and
display the courage to act against and defeat the state’s power.
The first question that arises when this idea is applied in a practical way to
the situations facing Onkwehonwe in real life is this: How can we regenerate
ourselves culturally and achieve freedom and political independence when
the legacies of disconnection, dependency, and dispossession have such a
strong hold on us? Undeniably, we face a difficult situation. The political and
social institutions that govern us have been shaped and organized to serve
white power and they conform to the interests of the states founded on that
objective. These state-serving institutions are useless to the cause of our
survival, and if we are to free ourselves from the grip of colonialism we must
reconfigure our politics and replace all of the strategies, institutions, and
leaders in place today. The transformation will begin inside each one of us as
personal change, but decolonization will become a reality only when we
collectively commit to a movement based on an ethical and political vision,
and a conscious rejection of the colonial postures of weak submission,
victimry, and raging violence. It is a political vision and solution that will be
capable of altering power relations and rearranging the forces that shape our
lives. Politics is the force that channels social, cultural, economic powers and
makes them imminent in our lives. Abstaining from politics is like turning
your back on an animal when the beast is angry and intent on ripping your
guts out.
It is the kind of politics we practice that is the crucial distinction between
the possibility of a regenerative struggle and what we are doing now.
Conventional and acceptable approaches to making change are leading us
nowhere. Submission and cooperation, which define politics as practiced by
the current generation of Onkwehonwe politicians, are, I contend, morally,
culturally, and politically indefensible and should be dismissed scornfully by
any right-thinking person and certainly by any Onkwehonwe who still has
dignity. I pay little attention to the conventional aspects of the politics of pity,
such as self-government processes, land claims agreements, and aboriginal-
rights court cases, because building on what we have achieved up until now
in our efforts to decolonize society is insufficient and truly unacceptable as
the end-state of a challenge to colonialism. The job is far from finished. It is
impossible to predict what constraints and opportunities will emerge, but it is
clear that we have not pushed hard enough yet to sit satisfied with the state’s
enticements. Fundamentally different relationships between Onkwehonwe
and Settlers will emerge not from negotiations in state-sponsored and
government-regulated processes, but after successful Onkwehonwe
resurgences against white society’s entrenched privileges and the unreformed
structure of the colonial state.
As Onkwehonwe committed to the reclamation of our dignity and strength,
there are, theoretically, two viable approaches to engaging the colonial power
that is thoroughly embedded in the state and in societal structures: armed
resistance and nonviolent contention. Each has a heritage among our peoples
and is a potential formula for making change, for engaging with the adversary
without deference to emotional attachments to colonial symbols or to the
compromised logic of colonial approaches. They are both philosophically
defensible; but are they both equally valid approaches to making change,
given the realities of our situations and our goals? We need a confident
position on the question as to what is the right strategy. Both armed
resistance and nonviolent contention are unique disciplines that require
commitments that rule out overlapping allegiances between the two
approaches. They are diverging and distinctive ways of making change, and
the choice between the two paths is the most important decision the next
generation of Onkwehonwe will collectively make.
This is the political formula of the strategy of armed resistance: facing a
situation of untenable politics, Onkwehonwe could conceivably move toward
practicing a punishing kind of aggression, a raging resistance invoking hostile
and irredentist negative political visions seeking to engender and escalate the
conflict so as to eventually demoralize the Settler society and defeat the
colonial state. Contrast this with the strategic vision of nonviolent contention:
Onkwehonwe face the untenable politics and unacceptable conditions in their
communities and confront the situation with determination yet restrained
action, coherent and creative contention supplemented with a positive
political vision based on reestablishing respect for the original covenants and
ancient treaties that reflect the founding principles of the Onkwehonwe-
Settler relationship. This would be a movement sure to engender conflict, but
it would be conflict for a positive purpose and with the hope of re-creating
the conditions of coexistence. Rather than enter the arena of armed resistance,
we would choose to perform rites of resurgence.
These forms of resurgence have already begun. There are people in all
communities who understand that a true decolonization movement can
emerge only when we shift our politics from articulating grievances to
pursuing an organized and political battle for the cause of our freedom. These
new warriors understand the need to refuse any further disconnection from
their heritage, and the need to reconnect with the spiritual bases of their
existences as Onkwehonwe. Following their example and building on the
foundation of their struggles, the potential exists to initiate a more
coordinated and widespread action, and to reorganize communities to take
advantage of gains and opportunities as they occur in political, economic,
social, and cultural spheres and spaces created by the movement. There is a
solid theory of change in this concept of an Indigenous peoples’ movement.
The theory of change is the lived experience of the people we will encounter
in this work. Their lives are a dynamic of power generated by creative energy
flowing from their heritage through their courageous and unwavering
determination to re-create themselves and act together to meet the challenges
of their day.
A common and immediate concern for anyone defending the truth of their
heritage is the imperative to repel the thrust of the modern state’s assault
against our peoples. The Settlers continue to erase our existences from the
cultural, social, and political landscape of our homelands. Onkwehonwe are
awakening to the need to move from the materialist orientation of our politics
and social reality toward a restored spiritual foundation, channeling that
spiritual strength and the unity it creates into a power that can affect political
and economic relations. A true revolution is spiritual at its core; every single
of the world’s materialist revolutions have failed to produce conditions of life
that are markedly different from those which it opposed. Whatever the
specific means or rationale, violent, legalist, and economic revolutions have
never been successful in producing peaceful coexistence between peoples; in
fact, they always reproduce the exact set of power relations they seek to
change, and rearrange only the outward face of power.
Another problem of Indigenous politics is that there is no consistency of
means and ends in the way we are struggling to empower ourselves.
Approaches to making change that advocate reforming the colonial legal
system or state policy, and those that seek empowerment through the
accumulation of financial resources, may seem to hold promise, but they are
opposed to basic and shared Onkwehonwe values in either the means they
would use to advance the struggle or in the ends they would achieve.
Legalist, economic, and for that matter violent insurgent approaches, are all
simply mimicking foreign logics, each in a different way. How you fight
determines who you will become when the battle is over, and there is always
means-ends consistency at the end of the game. For Onkwehonwe, the
implication of a legalist approach is entrenchment in the state system as
citizens with rights defined by the constitution of the colonial state, which is
the defeat of the idea of an independent Onkwehonwe existence. The
implication of the economic development approach is integration into the
consumer culture of mainstream capitalist society, which is the defeat of the
possibility of ways of life associated with Onkwehonwe cultures. And, of
course, violence begets violence. The implication of an approach to making
change using armed force to attack institutions and the structure of power is
an ensuing culture of violence that is in its very existence the negation of the
ideal of peaceful coexistence at the heart of Onkwehonwe philosophies.
Despite the visible and public victories in court cases and casino profits,
neither of these strategies generates the transformative experience that re-
creates people like the spiritual-cultural resurgences. The truly revolutionary
goal is to transform disconnection and fear into connection and to transcend
the colonial culture and institutions. Onkwehonwe have been successful on
personal and collective levels by rejecting extremism on both ends of the
spectrum between the reformist urgings of tame legalists and unfocused rage
or armed insurgents.
Consider the futility of our present politics, and the perversity of what I
will call “aboriginalism,” the ideology and identity of assimilation, where
Onkwehonwe are manipulated by colonial myths into a submissive position
and are told that by emulating white people they can gain acceptance and
possibly even fulfillment within the mainstream society. Many Onkwehonwe
today embrace the label of “aboriginal,” but this identity is a legal and social
construction of the state, and it is disciplined by racialized violence and
economic oppression to serve an agenda of silent surrender. The acceptance
of being aboriginal is as powerful an assault on Onkwehonwe existences as
any force of arms brought upon us by the Settler society. The integrationist
and unchallenging aboriginal vision is designed to lead us to oblivion, as
individual successes in assimilating to the mainstream are celebrated, and our
survival is redefined strictly in the terms of capitalist dogma and practical-
minded individualist consumerism and complacency.
Within the frame of politics and social life, Onkwehonwe who accept the
label and identity of an aboriginal are bound up in a logic that is becoming
increasingly evident even to them as one of outright assimilation—the
abandonment of any meaningful notion of being Indigenous.
Outright assaults and insidious undermining have brought us to the
situation we face today, where the destruction of our peoples is nearly
complete. Yet resurgence and regeneration constitute a way to power-surge
against the empire with integrity. The new warriors who are working to
ensure the survival of their people are not distracted by the effort to pass off
as “action” analyses of the self-evident fact of the defeat of our nations. They
don’t imagine that our cause needs further justification, in law or the public
mind. They know that assertion and action are the urgencies; all the rest is a
smokescreen clouding this clear vision.
The experience of resurgence and regeneration in Onkwehonwe
communities thus far proves that change cannot be made from within the
colonial structure. Institutions and ideas that are the creation of the colonial
relationship are not capable of ensuring our survival—this has been amply
proven as well by the absolute failure of institutional and legalist strategies to
protect our lands and our rights, as well as in their failure to motivate younger
generations of Onkwehonwe to action. In the face of the strong, renewed
push by the state for the legal and political assimilation of our peoples, and a
rising tide of consumerist materialism making its way into our communities,
the last remaining remnants of distinctive Onkwehonwe values and culture
are being wiped out. The situation is urgent and calls for even more intensive
and profound resurgences on even more levels, certainly not moderation.
Many people are paralyzed by fear or idled by complacency and will sit
passively and watch the destruction consume our people. But my words are
for those of us who prefer a dangerous dignity to safe self-preservation.
People have always faced these challenges. None of what I am saying is
new, either to people’s experience in the world or to political philosophy.
What is reemerging in our communities is a renewed respect for Indigenous
knowledge and Onkwehonwe ways of thinking. I hope to document and
glorify this renewal, in which Onkwehonwe are linked in spirit and strategy
with other Indigenous peoples confronting empire throughout the world.
When we look into the heart of our own communities, we can relate to the
struggles of peoples in Africa, or Asia, and appreciate the North African
scholar Albert Memmi’s thoughts on how, in the language of his day,
colonized peoples respond to oppression:
One can be reconciled to every situation, and the colonized can wait a long time to live. But,
regardless of how soon or how violently the colonized rejects his situation, he will one day begin
to overthrow his unliveable existence with the whole force of his oppressed personality.[1]
The question facing us is this one: For us today, here in this land, how will
the overthrow of our unlivable existence come about?
Memmi was prescient in his observations on the reaction of people
laboring under colonial oppression. Eventually, our people too will move to
revolt against being defined by the Settlers as “aboriginal” and against the
dispossession of our lands and heritage, and we will track our oppression to
its source, which is the basic structure of the colonial state and society.
Memmi also wrote, “revolt is the only way out of the colonial situation, and
the colonized realizes it sooner or later. His condition is absolute and cries for
an absolute solution; a break and not a compromise.” Settlers and tamed
aboriginals in purportedly stable and peaceful countries like Canada,
Australia, the United States, and New Zealand may reject those words, but
only because the imperial evil is so well disguised and deeply denied in these
countries; the burden of persistent colonialism has become mundane and
internalized to Onkwehonwe life only, and its effects subsumed within our
cultures and psychologies. Especially in the smug placidity of middle- and
upper-class North America, the implications of Memmi’s utterance are surely
frightening. What and why do we have to break? Break up, break apart, break
me . . . ? It is all a question of one’s experience and mentality, of course. All
of the world’s big problems are in reality very small and local problems.
They are brought into force as realities only in the choices made every day
and in many ways by people who are enticed by certain incentives and
disciplined by their fears. So, confronting huge forces like colonialism is a
personal and, in some ways, a mundane process. This is not to say it is easy,
but looking at it this way does give proper focus to the effort of decolonizing.
The colonizers stand on guard for their ill-gotten privileges using highly
advanced techniques, mainly cooptation, division, and when required,
physical repression. The weak people in the power equation help the
colonizers too, with their self-doubts, laziness, and unfortunate insistence on
their own disorganization!
Challenging all of this means even redefining the terminology of our
existence. Take the word, “colonization,” which is actually a way of seeing
and explaining what has happened to us. We cannot allow that word to be the
story of our lives, because it is a narrative that in its use privileges the
colonizer’s power and inherently limits our freedom, logically and mentally
imposing a perpetual colonized-victim way of life and view on the world.
Onkwehonwe are not faced with the same adversary their ancestors
confronted, but with a colonization that has recently morphed into a kind of
post-modern imperialism that is more difficult to target than the previous and
more obvious impositions of force and control over the structures of
government within their communities. Memmi’s “break” must itself be
redefined.
The challenge is to reframe revolt. Classically, the phases of revolt are
thought of along a continuum moving from the self-assertion of an
independent identity, to seeking moderate reforms of the system, to
protesting and openly rejecting authority, and then to revolutionary action to
destroy the state and replace it with another order of power. Thinking along
these lines, it is ironic that our own politicians find themselves being
unwitting conservatives. Twenty years ago they were positioned at the cutting
edge of change—Red Power, political and cultural revivalism, court
challenges for rights, land claims, etc. But now those same people are in
positions of leadership, and on the whole they are resisting attempts to move
the challenge to the next stage. Our politicians find themselves cooperating
with their (former) enemies and adversaries to preserve the nonthreatening,
very limited resolutions they have worked with the colonial powers to create
and define as end objectives. They have accommodated themselves to
colonialism, not defeated it. And they have forgotten that the ancestral
movement always sought total freedom from domination and a complete
revolt against empire, not halfway compromises and weak surrenders to
watered-down injustices.
I have heard it said, prophetically, in my own community that “the people
will rise up again when the chiefs’ heads are rolling on the ground.” While it
is clear that guerrilla and terrorist strategies are futile—certainly so from
within the center of industrial capitalist countries—the spirit of the ancestors
who went to war against the invaders is compelling and honorable. I refuse to
pass moral judgment against those oppressed people who act against imperial
power using arms to advance their cause; their acts of resistance are only the
moral equivalents to the heinous and legalized capitalist crimes that are
destroying people’s lives and the land. And where people meet state violence
with arms to defend themselves and their lands in necessary acts of self-
preservation, they are of course justified in doing so. But, because I hold a
strong commitment to struggles for freedom, I do not believe that armed
struggle is the right path for our people to take. Violent revolt is simply not
an intelligent and realistic approach to confronting the injustice we face, and
will not allow us to succeed in transforming the society from what it is to a
state of peaceful coexistence. Anyway, I sense that even if my own strategic
disagreement with, or some other people’s moral judgments against, armed
action did not solidify against a group’s advocacy and use of violence,
rejection and approbation by communities would surely come in the wake of
the indirect effects of armed revolt on the mass of Onkwehonwe, who would
without a doubt be further abused and violated by repressive counterviolence
the state would use in retaliation.
Using violence to advance our objectives would lead to frustration and
failure for political and military reasons, but it would also falter for deeper
spiritual and cultural reasons. I find it very difficult to see any value in asking
our future generations to form their identities on and live lives of aggression;
would this not validate and maintain the enemy colonizer as an omnipresent
and superior reality of our existence for generations to come? This is not the
legacy we want to leave for our children. To remain true to a struggle
conceived within Onkwehonwe values, our Wasáse—our warrior’s dance—
the end goal must be formulated as a spiritual revolution, a culturally rooted
social movement that transforms the whole of society, and as political action
that seeks to remake the entire landscape of power and relationship to reflect
truly a liberated post-imperial vision.
Wasáse is spiritual revolution and contention. It is not a path of violence.
And yet, this commitment to nonviolence is not pacifism, either. This is an
important point to make clear: I believe there is a need for morally grounded
defiance and nonviolent agitation combined with the development of a
collective capacity for self-defense, so as to generate within the Settler
society a reason and incentive to negotiate constructively in the interest of
achieving a respectful coexistence. The rest of this book will try to explain
this concept (an effort the more academically inclined reader may be
permitted to read as my theorizing the liberation of Indigenous peoples).
My goal is to discover a real and deep notion of peace in the hope of
moving us away from valuing simplistic notions of peace such as certainty
and stability; for these are conceptions that point only to the value of order.
Some readers may find themselves confused by the seeming contradictions in
my logic and question “peace” as the orienting goal of this warrior-spirited
work, and wonder if perhaps a concept like “justice” may be more to the
point and truer to the spirit of a book that takes a war dance as its emblem.
But justice as a liberatory concept and as a would-be goal is limited by its
necessary gaze to the politics, economics, and social relations of the past.
However noble and necessary justice is to our struggles, its gaze will always
be backward. By itself, the concept of justice is not capable of encompassing
the broader transformations needed to ensure coexistence. Justice is one
element of a good relationship; justice is concerned with fairness and right
and calculating moral balances, but it cannot be the end goal of a struggle,
which must be conceived as a movement from injustice and conflict through
and beyond the achievement of justice to the completion of the relationship
and the achievement of peace.
The old slogan, “No justice, no peace,” is a truism. We must move from
injustice, through struggle, to a mutual respect founded on the achievement of
justice, and then onward toward peace. Step by step. Lacking struggle,
omitting respect and justice, there can and will be no peace. Or happiness. Or
freedom. These are the real goals of a truly human and fully realized
philosophy of change.
Peace is hopeful, visionary, and forward-looking. It is not just the lack of
violent conflict or rioting in the streets. That simple stability is what we call
order, and order serves the powerful in an imperial situation. If peace
continues to be strictly defined as the maintenance of order and the rule of
law, we will be defeated in our struggle to survive as Onkwehonwe.
Reconceptualized for our struggle, peace is being Onkwehonwe, breaking
with the disfiguring and meaningless norms of our present reality, and re-
creating ourselves in a holistic sense. This conception of peace requires a
rejection of the state’s multifaceted oppression of our peoples simultaneously
with and through the assertion of regenerated Onkwehonwe identities.
Personal and collective transformation is not instrumental to the surging
against state power, it is the very means of our struggle.
Memmi, who was so powerful in his exposure of colonial mentalities at
play during the Algerian resistance against French colonialism, spoke of the
fundamental need to cure white people, through revolution, of the “disease of
the European” they have collectively inherited from their colonial forefathers.
I believe his prescription of spiritual transformation channeled into a political
action and social movement is the right medicine.
Following an awakening among the people and cultural redefinition, after
social agitation, after engaging in a politics of contention, after creative
confrontation, we will be free to determine our own existences. Wasáse,
struggle in all of its forms, truly defines an authentic existence. This is the
clearest statement on what I seek to cause with the ideas I am putting forward
in this book. This is why I speak of warriors. To be Onkwehonwe, to be fully
human, is to be living the ethic of courage and to be involved in a struggle for
personal transformation and freedom from the dominance of imperial ideas
and powers—especially facing the challenges in our lives today. Any other
path or posture is surrender or complicity. And though I am speaking
nonviolently of a creative reinterpretation of what it is to be a warrior, I am
doing so in full reverence and honor of the essence of the ancient warrior
spirit, because a warrior makes a stand facing danger, with courage and
integrity. The warrior spirit is the strong medicine we need to cure the
European disease. But, drawing on the old spirit, we need to create something
new for ourselves and think through the reality of the present to design an
appropriate strategy, use fresh tactics, and acquire new skills.
The new warriors make their own way in the world: they move forward
heeding the teachings of the ancestors and carrying a creed that has been
taken from the past and re-made into a powerful way of being in their new
world. In our actions, we show our respect for the heritage of our people by
regenerating the spirit of our ancestors. We glorify the continuing existence
of our peoples, and we act on the knowledge that our survival as
Onkwehonwe depends on living the rites of resurgence. Fighting these battles
in this kind of war, our nations will be re-created. The new warriors are
committed in the first instance to self-transformation and self-defense against
the insidious forms of control that the state and capitalism uses to shape lives
according to their needs—to fear, to obey, to consume.
When lies rule, warriors create new truths for the people to believe.
Warriors battle against the political manipulation of their innate fears and
repel the state’s attempts to embed complacency inside of them. They
counterattack with a lived ethic of courage, and seek to cause the
reawakening of a culture of freedom.
Survival is bending and swaying but not breaking, adapting and
accommodating without compromising what is core to one’s being. Those
who are emboldened by challenges and who sacrifice for the truth achieve
freedom. Those who fail to find balance, who reject change, or who abandon
their heritage altogether abandon themselves. They perish. The people who
live on are those who have learned the lesson of survival: cherish your unique
identity, protect your freedom, and defend your homeland.
Even from within a conservative viewpoint on politics, if self-government
or self-determination are the goals, and if communities are seeking to restore
a limited degree of autonomy for their people in relation to the state, it must
be recognized that the cultural basis of our existence as Onkwehonwe has
been nearly destroyed, and that the cultural foundation of our nations must be
restored or re-imagined if there is going to be a successful assertion of
political or economic rights. In other words, there certainly exists the moral
right and the legal right for governance outside of assimilative or co-optive
forms, but there is no capacity in our communities and there is no cultural
basis on which to generate an effective movement against the further erosion
of Onkwehonwe political authority. This has placed our continuing existence
as peoples, or as nations and distinct cultures, in imminent danger of
extinction.
I am not overstating the danger to make a point, or, as it may be suspected,
for rhetorical purposes. Think of the pattern of societal decline described by
Hannah Arendt: political authority falls after the loss of tradition and the
weakening of religious beliefs. Spirituality breaks, there is a loss of
traditional cultures and languages, and this is followed by political
subjugation.[2] This pattern reduces the story of the 500-year conquest of
Anówarakowa Kawennote, Great Turtle Island, to its essence. Imperialism
has not been a totalizing, unknowable and irresistible force of destruction, but
a fluid dynamic made of politics, economics, psychology, and culture. It
remains so.
What is the path to meaningful change in our lives? The most common
answers to that question come in the form of big political or economic
solutions to problems conceived of as historical, or past, injustices: self-
government, land claims, economic development, and the legal recognition of
our rights as nations. I recognize, of course, that these are crucial goals. In the
long-term, it will be absolutely necessary to redefine and reconstruct the
governmental and economic relationship between Onkwehonwe and Settlers.
Yet to the extent that self-government, land claims, and economic
development agreements have been successfully negotiated and
implemented, there is no evidence that they have done anything to make but a
very small minority of our people happier and healthier.
In most cases, these agreements create new bureaucracies and put in place
new levels and forms of government based on the colonial model, or new
capitalist relationships with nonindigenous business partners. These new
arrangements benefit a few people, mainly elected officials, entrepreneurs,
lawyers, consultants, and, to a much lesser extent, the people who staff the
various structures. Self-government, land claims, and economic development
are abundantly positive for this fortunate minority. This is not to begrudge the
fact that some of us have gained the education and skills needed to secure
jobs or create businesses—these are the rewards of honest people who have
worked hard to create strength for themselves. But in the midst of all of the
apparent progress, there is a nagging sense among so many people that
something is wrong even with these supposed solutions. There is a dawning
awareness among those of us who think outside of ourselves, those who care
about the not-so-fortunate and all-too-easily-ignored 90 percent of our
people, those who get no benefit at all from the new political and economic
orders being created by the collusion of interests that govern our communities
today. It is the sinking feeling that political power and money, the things
we’ve worked so hard to achieve, are still not going to be enough to liberate
us from our present reality.
I am saying that the real reason most Onkwehonwe endure unhappy and
unhealthy lives has nothing to do with governmental powers or money. The
lack of these things only contributes to making a bad situation worse. The
root of the problem is that we are living through a spiritual crisis, a time of
darkness that descended on our people when we became disconnected from
our lands and from our traditional ways of life. We are divided among
ourselves and confused in our own minds about who we are and what kind of
life we should be living. We depend on others to feed us and to teach us how
to look, feel, live. We still turn to white men for the answers to our problems;
worse yet, we have started to trust them. There are no more leaders and
hardly a place left to go where you can just be native. We are the prophetic
Seventh Generation: if we do not find a way out of the crises, we will be
consumed by the darkness and whether it is through self-destruction or
assimilation, we will not survive for another generation.
Large-scale statist solutions like self-government and land claims are not
so much lies as they are irrelevant to the root problem. For a long time now,
we have been on a quest for governmental power and money; somewhere
along the journey from the past to the future, we forgot that our goal was to
reconnect with our lands and to preserve our harmonious cultures and
respectful ways of life. It is these things that are the true guarantee of peace,
health, strength, and happiness, of survival. Before we can ever start
rebuilding ourselves and achieve meaningful change in the areas of law and
government, of economies and development, we must start to remember one
important thing: our communities are made up of people. Our concern about
legal rights and empowering models of national self-government has led to
the neglect of the fundamental building blocks of our peoples: the women
and men, the youth and the elders.
Some people believe in the promise of what they call “traditional
government” as the ultimate solution to our problems, as if just getting rid of
the imposed corrupt band or tribal governments and resurrecting old laws and
structures would solve everything. I used to believe that myself. But there is a
problem with this way of thinking too. The traditional governments and laws
we hold out as the pure good alternatives to the imposed colonial systems
were developed at a time when people were different than we are now; they
were people who were confidently rooted in their culture, bodily and
spiritually strong, and capable of surviving independently in their natural
environments. We should ask ourselves if it makes any sense to try to bring
back these forms of government and social organization without first
regenerating our people so that we can support traditional government
models. Regretfully, the levels of participation in social and political life,
physical fitness, and cultural skills these models require are far beyond our
weakened and dispirited people right now.
We will begin to make meaningful change in the lives of our communities
when we start to focus on making real change in the lives of our people as
individuals. It may sound clichéd, but it is still true that the first part of self-
determination is the self. In our minds and in our souls, we need to reject the
colonists’ control and authority; their definition of who we are and what our
rights are; their definition of what is worthwhile and how one should live;
their hypocritical and pacifying moralities. We need to rebel against what
they want us to become and start remembering the qualities of our ancestors,
and acting on those remembrances. This is the kind of spiritual revolution
that will ensure our survival.
What are the first steps in this revolution of the spirit?
For a start, let’s think about the most basic question: what does it mean to
be Onkwehonwe? Many times, I have listened to one of the wisest people I
know, Leroy Little Bear, speak on one of the real differences between
Onkwehonwe and European languages. European languages, he explains,
center on nouns and are concerned with naming things, ascribing traits, and
making judgments. Onkwehonwe languages are structured on verbs; they
communicate through descriptions of movement and activity. Take my own
name, for example. Taiaiake, in English, is a proper noun that labels me for
identification. In Kanienkeha, it literally means, “he is crossing over from the
other side.” Struggling against and negotiating with the descendants of
Europeans occupying our homelands for all these years, we have become
very skilled, in the European way, at judging and naming everything, even
ourselves: beliefs, rights, authorities, jurisdictions, land use areas, categories
of membership in our communities, and so on, as if it were enough to speak
these things to make them into a reality. In fighting for our future, we have
been misled into thinking that “Indigenous,” or “First Nations,” “Carrier,”
“Cree” or “Mohawk” (even if we use Kanien’kehaka, or Innu, or
Wet’suwet’en), is something that is attached to us inherently, and not a
description of what we actually do with our lives.
The European way is to see the world organized in a system of names and
titles that formalize their being. Onkwehonwe recall relationships and
responsibilities through languages that symbolize doing. Apply this linguistic
insight to our recent efforts to gain recognition and respect, and you start to
get a sense of why we have fallen off the good path. We have mistaken the
mere renaming of our situation for an actual reconnection with our lands and
cultures. Living as Onkwehonwe means much more than applying a label to
ourselves and saying that we are indigenous to the land. It means looking at
the personal and political choices we make every day and applying an
Indigenous logic to those daily acts of creation. It means knowing and
respecting Kanien’kehaka, Innu, and Wet’suwet’en teachings; thinking and
behaving in a way that is consistent with the values passed down to us by our
ancestors. My people speak of the coming generations as “faces who are yet
to emerge from the Earth.” We have a sacred responsibility to rise up and
fight so that our people may live again as Onkwehonwe.
What is the way to restore meaning and dignity to our lives? This is
another way of framing the question that guides us as we trace the path of
truth and struggle from where we stand today. Too many of our peoples are
disoriented, dissatisfied, fearful, and disconnected from each other and from
the natural world. Onkwehonwe deserve a different state of being where there
are real opportunities for us to finally realize justice and peace in our lives,
and where there is hope of creating a society in which it is possible to live a
life of integrity and happiness.
The thoughts and vision I am offering through these words are rooted in
the cultural heritage of Anówarakowa. And proudly so! They are not
compromises between Indigenous and nonindigenous perspectives; nor are
they attempts to negotiate a reconciliation of Onkwehonwe and European
cultures and values. These words are an attempt to bring forward an
indigenously rooted voice of contention, unconstrained and uncompromised
by colonial mentalities. A total commitment to the challenge of regenerating
our indigeneity, to rootedness in Indigenous cultures, to a fundamental
commitment to the centrality of our truths—this work is an effort to work
through the philosophical, spiritual, and practical implications of holding
such commitments.
These commitments require the reader to challenge critically all of his or
her artificial and emotional attachments to the oppressive colonial myths and
symbols that we have come to know as our culture. I know that this is asking
people to wander into dangerous territory; disentangling from these
attachments can also feel like being banished, in a way. But stepping into our
fear is crucial, because leaving the comfort zone of accepted truth is vital to
creating the emotional and mental state that allows one to really learn. It is a
new approach to decolonization. Less intense, or less threatening, ideas about
how to make change have proven ineffective from our perspective. I believe
it is because they are bound up in and unable to break free from the limiting
logic of the colonial myths that they claim to oppose. The myths’ symbols
and embedded beliefs force aboriginal thinking to remain in colonial mental,
political, and legal frameworks, rendering these forms of writing and thinking
less radical and powerless against imperialism. The reflections, meditations,
teachings, and dialogues that form the core of this book are indigenous and
organic: they emerge from inside Onkwehonwe experiences and reflect the
ideas, concepts and languages that have developed over millennia in the
spaces we live, among our peoples. I want to bring the heritage and truth of
Anówarakowa to a new generation and to engage passionately with
Indigenous truths to generate powerful dynamics of thought, and action, and
change. I did not write this book about change, I wrote it from within change.
I wrote it with the plain intent of instigating further contention. My hope is
that people who read these words will take from them a different way of
defining the problem at the core of our present existence, one that brings a
radically principled and challenging set of ideas to bear on how to remake the
relationship between Onkwehonwe and Settler.
A big part of the social and political resurgence will be the regeneration of
Onkwehonwe existences free from colonial attitudes and behaviors.
Regeneration means we will reference ourselves differently, both from the
ways we did traditionally and under colonial dominion. We will self-
consciously re-create our cultural practices and reform our political identities
by drawing on tradition in a thoughtful process of reconstruction and a
committed reorganization of our lives in a personal and collective sense. This
will result in a new conception of what it is to live as Onkwehonwe. This
book is my contribution to the larger effort to catalyze and galvanize the
movements that have already begun among so many of our people. Restoring
these connections is the force that will confront and defeat the defiant evil of
imperialism in this land. We need to work together to cleanse our minds, our
hearts, and our bodies of the colonial stain and reconnect our lives to the
sources of our strength as Onkwehonwe. We need to find new and creative
ways to express that heritage. I wrote this work as an Onkwehonwe believing
in the fundamental commonalty of Indigenous values; yet I wrote it from
within my own experience. I aim to speak most directly to other
Onkwehonwe who share my commitments and who are traveling the same
pathway. These words are offered in the spirit of the ancient Wasáse, which
was so eloquently captured by my friend Kahente when I asked her to tell me
how she understood the meaning of the ritual:
There is a spiritual base that connects us all, and it is stimulated through ceremony. The songs and
dances that we perform are like medicine, Ononkwa, invoking the power of the original
instructions that lie within. In it, we dance, sing, and share our words of pain, joy, strength and
commitment. The essence of the ancestors’ message reveals itself not only in these songs,
speeches, and dances but also in the faces and bodies of all who are assembled. This visual
manifestation shows us that we are not alone and that our survival depends on being part of the
larger group and in this group working together. We are reminded to stay on the path laid out
before us. This way it strengthens our resolve to keep going and to help each other along the way.
It is a time to show each other how to step along that winding route in unison and harmony with
one another. To know who your friends and allies are in such struggle is what is most important
and is what keeps you going.
If nonindigenous readers are capable of listening, they will learn from these
shared words, and they will discover that while we are envisioning a new
relationship between Onkwehonwe and the land, we are at the same time
offering a decolonized alternative to the Settler society by inviting them to
share our vision of respect and peaceful coexistence.
The nonindigenous will be shown a new path and offered the chance to
join in a renewed relationship between the peoples and places of this land,
which we occupy together. I want to provoke. To cause reflection. To
motivate people to creatively confront the social and spiritual forces that are
preventing us from overcoming the divisive and painful legacies of our
shared history as imperial subjects. The guiding question I asked earlier can
be stated in another way: What is the meaning of self-determination? We
have just now started on the journey together to find the full meaning of the
answer to this question, but even so, I believe we all know that achieving
freedom means overcoming the delusions, greeds, and hatreds that lie at the
center of colonial culture. This work is an expression of that common
yearning for freedom, drawing on the inarticulate and unsettled energy that
still resides inside each of us.
Onkwehonwe have always fought for survival against imperialism and its
drive to annihilate our existence. Our fight is no different from previous
generations’—it is a struggle to defend the lands, the communities, and the
languages that are our heritage and our future. But the new imperialism that
we experience has a special character. The close danger of a technological
empire and co-optation is the insidious effort of the Settler society to erase us
from the cultural and political landscape of the countries they have invaded
and now claim as their own. Survival demands that we act on the love we
have for this land and our people. This is the counter-imperative to empire.
Our power is a courageous love. Our fight is to recognize, to expose, and to
ultimately overcome the corrupt, colonized identities and irrational fears that
have been bred into us. It is worth repeating that survival will require not
only political or cultural resurgence against state power, but positive
movement to overcome the defining features of imperialism on a personal
and collective level. These resurgences, multiplicities of thought and action,
must be founded on Onkwehonwe philosophies and lead us to reconnect with
respectful and natural ways of being in the world.
I understand that not everyone realizes or accepts that Onkwehonwe are on
the verge of extinction. There are many people, the majority in fact in any
community, who still refuse to acknowledge and accept the fact of our
perilous condition. The Aboriginal Self-Termination movement is much
stronger than any coordinated Onkwehonwe movement against imperialism
and white dominion today. Most of our people are assimilated into the racist
propagandas designed to rob them of their dignity and their lands, and have
normalized the destruction of their nations. That conclusion may seem harsh,
but it is truth. The edge of extinction does not afford the luxury of mincing
words.
You may be wondering how it is that I fail to appreciate the efforts to
reform and reconcile social relations that are currently under way in the more
progressive colonial countries. But I do appreciate the nature of these reforms
and reconciliations with colonialism too well. Fifteen years of working in
Onkwehonwe communities and organizations has taught me that continued
cooperation with state power structures is morally unacceptable. Everyone
involved in the Indian Industry knows that we are negotiating with our
oppressor from a position of weakness. Organizations purport to speak for
people who turn around and vehemently deny the legitimacy and authority of
those very organizations and their so-called leaders. And the communities are
disintegrating socially and culturally at a terrifying speed as alienation, social
ills, and disease outpace efforts to stabilize our societies. In this environment,
negotiation is futile. It is counter-productive to our survival. It is senseless to
advocate for an accord with imperialism while there is a steady and intense
ongoing attack by the Settler society on everything meaningful to us: our
cultures, our communities, and our deep attachments to land. The framework
of current reformist or reconciling negotiations are about handing us the
scraps of history: self-government and jurisdictional authorities for state-
created Indian governments within the larger colonial system, and subjection
of Onkwehonwe to the blunt force of capitalism by integrating them as wage
slaves into the mainstream resource-exploitation economy. These surface
reforms are being offered because they are useless to our survival as
Onkwehonwe. This is not a coincidence, nor is it a result of our goals being
obsolete. Self-government and economic development are being offered
precisely because they are useless to us in the struggle to survive as peoples,
and they are therefore no threat to the Settlers and, specifically, the interests
of the people who control the Settler state. This is assimilation’s end-game.
Today, self-government and economic development signify the defeat of our
peoples’ struggles just as surely as, to our grandparents, residential schools,
land dispossession, and police beatings signified the supposed supremacy of
white power and the subjugation and humiliation of the first and real peoples
of this land.
What it comes down to in confronting our imperial reality is that some of
us want to reform colonial law and policy, to dull that monster’s teeth so that
we can’t be ripped apart so easily. Some of us believe in reconciliation,
forgetting that the monster has a genocidal appetite, a taste for our blood, and
would sooner tear us apart than lick our hand. I think that the only thing that
has changed since our ancestors first declared war on the invaders is that
some of us have lost our heart. Against history and against those who would
submit to it, I am with the warriors who want to beat the beast into bloody
submission, and teach it to behave.
The time to change direction is now. Signs of defeat have been showing on
the faces of our people for too long. Young people, those who have not yet
learned to accommodate the fact that they are expected to quietly accept their
lesser status, are especially hard hit by defeatism and alienation. Youth in our
communities and in urban centers are suffering. Suicide, alcohol and drug
abuse, cultural confusion, sexual violence, obesity: they suffer these scourges
worse than anyone else. It is not because they lack money or jobs in the
mainstream society (we shouldn’t forget that our people have always been
“poor” as consumers in comparison to white people). It is because their
identities, their cultures, and their rights are under attack by a racist
government. The wounds suffered by young Onkwehonwe people in battle
are given little succor by their own elders, and they find only scorn or
condescension in the larger world. These young people are fighting raging
battles for their own survival every day, and when they become convinced
that to fight is futile and the battle likely to be lost, they retreat. Yet they have
pride and rather than submit to the enemy, they sacrifice themselves,
sometimes using mercifully quick and sometimes using painfully slow
methods.
Some people may find it shocking or absurd for me to suggest that an
Onkwehonwe community is a kind of war zone. But anyone who has actually
lived on a reserve will agree with this tragic analogy on some level. Make no
mistake about it, Brothers and Sisters: the war is on. There is no postcolonial
situation; the invaders our ancestors fought against are still here, for they
have not yet rooted themselves and been transformed into real people of this
homeland. Onkwehonwe must find a way to triumph over notions of history
that relegate our existence to the past by preserving ourselves in this hostile
and disintegrating environment. To do so, we must regenerate ourselves
through action because living the white man’s vision of an Indian or an
aboriginal will just not do for us.
We are each facing modernity’s attempt to conquer our souls. The conquest
is happening as weak, cowardly, stupid, petty, and greedy ways worm
themselves into our lives and take the place of the beauty and sharing and
harmony that defined life in our communities for previous generations.
Territorial losses and political disempowerment are secondary conquests
compared to that first, spiritual, cause of discontent. The challenge is to find a
way to regenerate ourselves and take back our dignity. Then, meaningful
change will be possible, and it will be a new existence, one of possibility,
where Onkwehonwe will have the ability to make the kinds of choices we
need to make concerning the quality of our lives, and begin to recover a truly
human way of life.
NOTES
*A version of this essay was first published as “First Words,” pp. 19–38, in Taiaiake Alfred’s Wasáse:
Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom, published in 2010 by University of Toronto Press–
Higher Education. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
1. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press,
1991).
2. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963).
Chapter Five
The “World-System”: Europe As “Center”
and Its “Periphery” beyond Eurocentrism
Enrique Dussel
What calls attention here is that the Spirit of Europe (the German spirit) is the
absolute Truth that determines or realizes itself through itself without owing
anything to anyone. This thesis, which I will call the “Eurocentric paradigm”
(in opposition to the “world paradigm”), is the one that has imposed itself not
only in Europe and the United States, but also in the entire intellectual world
of the world periphery. As we have said, the “pseudo-scientific” division of
history into Antiquity (as antecedent), the Medieval Age (preparatory epoch),
and the Modern Age (Europe) is an ideological and deforming organization
of history. Philosophy and ethics need to break with this reductive horizon in
order to open themselves to the “world,” the “planetary” sphere. This
problem is already an ethical one with respect to other cultures.
Chronology has its geopolitics. Modern subjectivity develops spatially,
according to the “Eurocentric paradigm” from the Italy of the Renaissance to
the Germany of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, toward the France of
the French Revolution.[6] This paradigm concerns central Europe.
The second paradigm is from a planetary horizon, and it conceptualizes
Modernity as the culture of the center of the “world-system,”[7] of the first
“world-system”—through the incorporation of Amerindia[8] and as a result
of the management of said “centrality.” In other words, European Modernity
is not an independent, autopoietic, self-referential system, but, instead, it is
“part” of a “world-system”: its center. Modernity, then, is planetary. It begins
with the simultaneous constitution of Spain with reference to its “periphery”
(the first of all, properly speaking, Amerindia: the Caribbean, Mexico, and
Peru). Simultaneously, Europe, as a diachrony that has its premodern
antecedents (the Renaissance Italian cities and Portugal), will go on to
constitute itself as “center,” as superhegemonic power that passes itself from
Spain to Holland, to England, to France, and so on—over a growing
“periphery”: Amerindia, Brazil, and slave-supplying coasts of Africa; Poland
in the sixteenth century[9]; consolidation of Latin Amerindia, North America,
the Caribbean, Eastern Europe in the seventeenth century[10]; the Ottoman
Empire, Russia, some Indian regions, sub-Asia, and the first penetration to
continental Africa until the first half of the nineteenth century.[11]
Modernity, then, would be for this planetary paradigm a phenomenon proper
to the “system” or “center-periphery.” Modernity is not a phenomenon of
Europe as an independent system, but of Europe as “center.” This simple
hypothesis absolutely changes the concept of Modernity, its origin,
development, and contemporary crisis; thus, it also changes the concept of
the belated Modernity or post-Modernity.
Furthermore, we sustain a thesis that qualifies the prior: the centrality of
Europe in the “world-system” is not the sole fruit of an internal superiority
accumulated during the European Middle Age over and against other
cultures.
Instead, it is also the effect of the simple fact of the discovery, conquest,
colonization, and integration (subsumption) of Amerindia (fundamentally).
This simple fact will give Europe the determining comparative advantage
over the Ottoman-Muslim world, India, or China. Modernity is a fruit of this
happening, not its cause. Subsequently, the management of the centrality of
the “world-system” will allow Europe to transform itself in something like
the “reflexive consciousness” (Modern Philosophy) of world history, and the
many values, discoveries, inventions, technology, political institutions, and so
on that are attributed to itself as its exclusive production are in reality the
effect of the displacement of the ancient center of the third stage of the
interregional system toward Europe—that is, following the diachronic way of
the Renaissance to Portugal as antecedent, toward Spain, and later toward
Flanders, England, and so on. Even capitalism is fruit, and not cause, of this
juncture of European planetarization and centralization within the “world-
system.” The human experience of forty-five-hundred years of political,
economic, technological, cultural relations of the “interregional system,” will
now be hegemonized by Europe, which had never been “center,” and that
during its best times only got to be a “periphery.” The slipping takes place
from central Asia toward the Eastern and Italian Mediterranean, more
precisely toward Genoa and toward the Atlantic. With Portugal as an
antecedent, it begins properly in Spain and in the face of the impossibility of
China’s even attempting to arrive through the Orient (the Pacific) to Europe
and thus to integrate Amerindia as its periphery. Let us look at the premises
of the argument.
Let us consider the deployment of world history’s departing from the rupture,
due to the Ottoman-Muslim presence, of the third stage of the interregional
system, which in its classic epoch had Baghdad as its center (from AD 762 to
1258), and the transformation of the “interregional system” into the first
“world-system,” whose “center” would situate itself up to today in the North
of the Atlantic. This change of “center” of the system will have its prehistory
from the eighth through the fifteenth century AD, but before the collapse of
the third stage of the interregional system, with the new fourth stage of the
“world-system” originating properly with 1492. This change of “center” of
the system will have its prehistory from the eighth through the fifteenth
century AD, before the collapse of the third stage of the interregional system,
but with the new fourth stage of the “world-system,” it originates properly
with 1492. Everything that had taken place in Europe was still a moment of
another stage of the interregional system, yet the question remains: Which
state originated the deployment of the “world-system”? Our answer is that it
could annex Amerindia, from which it will go on to accumulate a prior
nonexisting superiority toward the end of the fifteenth century as a
springboard, or “comparative advantage.”
But, why not China? The reason is very simple, and we would like to
define it from the outset. For China,[12] it was impossible to discover
Amerindia (a nontechnological impossibility, that is to say, empirically
factual, but historical or geopolitical in origin), for it had no interest in
attempting to arrive at Europe because the “center” of the interregional
system (in its third stage) was in the East, either in Central Asia or in India.
To go toward completely “peripheral” Europe could not be an objective of
Chinese foreign commerce.
In fact, Cheng Ho, between 1405 and 1433, was able to make seven
successful voyages to the “center” of the system; in fact, he arrived at Sri
Lanka, India, and even Eastern Africa.[13] In 1479, Wang Chin attempted the
same, but the archives of his predecessor were denied to him. China closed
upon itself and did not attempt to do what precisely at that very same moment
Portugal was undertaking. Its internal politics—perhaps the rivalry of the
mandarins against the new power of the merchant eunuchs[14]—prevented
its entry into foreign commerce. Had China undertaken it, however, it would
have had to depart toward the West in order to reach the “center” of the
system. The Chinese went toward the East, and they arrived at Alaska.
It appears that they even arrived as far as California and even still more to
the South. But when they did not find anything that would be of interest to its
merchants, and as they went farther away from the “center” of the
“interregional system,” they most probably abandoned the enterprise
altogether. China was not Spain for geopolitical reasons.
However, to refute the old “evidence,” which has been reinforced since
Weber, we still need to ask ourselves: Was China culturally inferior to
Europe in the fifteenth century? According to those who have studied the
question,[15] China was not inferior, whether technologically,[16] politically,
[17] or commercially, not even because of its humanism.[18] There is a
certain mirage in this question. The histories of Western science and
technology do not take strictly into account that the European “jump” (the
technological boom) begins to take place in the sixteenth century, but that it
is only in the seventeenth century that it shows its multiplying effects. The
formulation of the modern technological paradigm (eighteenth century) is
confused with the origin of Modernity, without leaving time for the crisis of
the Medieval model. No notice is taken that the scientific revolution—in
Kuhn’s phrase—departs from a Modernity that has already begun,
antecedently, as fruit of a “modern paradigm.”[19] It is for that reason that in
the fifteenth century (if we do not consider the posterior European
inventions) Europe did not have any superiority over China. Needham even
allows himself to be bewitched by this mirage, when he writes: “The fact is
that the spontaneous autochthonous development of Chinese society did not
produce any drastic change paralleling the Renaissance and the scientific
revolution of the West.”[20]
To place the Renaissance and the scientific revolution[21] as being one and
the same event (one from the fourteenth century and the other from the
seventeenth century) demonstrates the distortion of which we have spoken.
The Renaissance is still a European event of a peripheral culture of the third
stage of the interregional system. The “scientific revolution” is a fruit of the
formulation of the modern paradigm, which needed more than a century of
Modernity to attain its maturity. Pierre Chaunu writes: “Towards the end of
the XVth century, to the extent to which historical literature allows us to
understand it, the far East as an entity comparable to the Mediterranean . . .
does not result under any inferior aspect, at least superficially, to the far West
of the Euro-Asiatic continent.”[22]
Let us repeat: Why not China? Because China found itself in the farthest
East of the “interregional system,” and because it looked to the “center”: to
India in the West.
So why not Portugal? For the same reason. That is, because it found itself
in the farthest point of the West of the same “interregional system,” and
because it also looked, and always did so, toward the “center”: toward the
India of the East. Colón’s proposal (i.e., the attempt to reach the “center”
through the West) to the king of Portugal was as insane as it was for Colón to
pretend to discover a new continent, since he only and always attempted, yet
could not conceive another hypothesis, to reach the “center” of the third stage
of the interregional system.[23]
As we have seen, the Italian Renaissance cities are the farthest points of the
West (peripheral) of the interregional system that articulated a new
continental Europe with the Mediterranean after the Crusades failed in 1291.
The Crusades ought to be considered as a frustrated attempt to connect with
the “center” of the system, a link that the Turks ruptured. The Italian cities,
especially Genoa (which rivaled Venice, which had a presence in the Eastern
Mediterranean), attempted to open the Western Mediterranean to the Atlantic
to reach once again the “center” of the system through the south of Africa.
The Genoese placed all their experience in navigation and the economic
power of their wealth at the service of opening for themselves this path. It
was the Genoese who occupied the Canaries in 1312,[24] and it was they
who invested in Portugal to help them develop their navigational power.
Once the Crusades had failed, they could not counter the expansion of
Russia through the steppes, which advanced through the frozen woods of the
North to reach the Pacific and Alaska in the seventeenth century[25];
therefore, the Atlantic would be the only European door to the “center” of the
system. Portugal, the first European nation already unified in the eleventh
century, transformed the re-conquest[26] against the Muslims into the
beginning of a process of Atlantic mercantile expansion. In 1419, the
Portuguese discovered the Madeiras Islands; in 1431, the Azores; in 1482,
Zaire; and in 1498, Vasco de Gama reached India, the “center” of the
interregional system. In 1415, Portugal occupied the African-Muslim Ceuta;
in 1448, EI-Ksar-es-Seghir; in 1471, Arzila. But all of this is the continuation
of the interregional system whose connection was the Italian cities:
In the twelfth century when the Genoese and the Pisans first appeared in Catalonia, in the
thirteenth century when they first reach Portugal, this is part of the efforts of the Italians to draw
the Iberian peoples into the international trade of the time. . . . As of 1317, according to Virginia
Raus, “the city and the part of Lisbon would be the great centre of Genoese trade.”[27]
The rest is well known. The Spanish colony in Flanders was to replace Spain
as a hegemonic power in the “center” of the recently established “world-
system”—that is, it liberates itself from Spain in 1610. Seville, the first
modern port (in relations with Amberes), after more than a century of
splendor, will cede its place to Amsterdam[44] (the city where Descartes
would later write Le Discors de la Methode in 1636 and where Spinoza
would live)[45]; it will cede naval, fishing, and crafts power, where the
agricultural export flows; it will cede the great expertise in all the branches of
production; it will cede to a city that will, among many aspects, bankrupt
Venice.[46] After more than a century, Modernity already showed in this city
a metropolis with its definitive physiognomy: its port; the channels, which as
commercial ways reached to the houses of the bourgeoisie; the merchants
who used their fourth and fifth floors as cellars, from which boats were
directly loaded with cranes; and another thousand details of a capitalist
metropolis.[47] From 1689 on, England would challenge and eventually end
up imposing itself over Holland’s hegemony, which England would always
have to share with France, at least until 1763.[48]
Amerindia, meanwhile, constitutes the fundamental structure of the first
modernity. From 1492 to 1500, about fifty thousand square kilometers are
colonized in the Caribbean and on terra firma: from Venezuela to Panama.
[49] In 1515, this number would reach three hundred thousand square
kilometers with about three million dominated Amerindians. By 1550, more
than two million square kilometers, which is an area greater than the whole of
the European “center,” and up to more than twenty-five million (a low figure)
indigenous people[50] are also colonized, many of whom were integrated to a
system of work that produced value (in Marx’s strict sense) for the Europe of
the “center”—that is, in the “encomienda,” “mita,” haciendas, and so on. We
would have to add, from 1520 onward, the plantation slaves of African
provenance, about fourteen million until the final stage of slavery in the
nineteenth century, in places including Brazil, Cuba, and the United States.
This enormous space and population will give to Europe, “center” of the
“world-system,” the definitive comparative advantage with respect to the
Muslim, Indian, and Chinese worlds. It is for this reason that in the sixteenth
century: “The periphery (eastern Europe and Hispanic America) used forced
labor (slavery and coerced cash-crop labor [of the Amerindian]). The core, as
we shall see, increasingly used free labor.”[51]
For the goals of this philosophical work, it is of interest to indicate solely
that with the birth of the “world-system,” the “peripheral social
formations”[52] were also born: “The form of peripheral formation will
depend, finally, at the same time on the nature of the accumulated pre-
capitalist formations and the forms of external aggression.”[53] These will
be, at the end of the twentieth century, the Latin American peripheral
formations,[54] those of the African bantu, the Muslim world, India, the
Asian Southeast,[55] and China, to which one must also add part of Eastern
Europe before the fall of existing socialism.
II. MODERNITY AS “MANAGEMENT” OF PLANETARY
“CENTRALITY” AND ITS CONTEMPORARY CRISIS
We have thus arrived at the central thesis of this chapter. If Modernity were,
and this is our hypothesis, fruit of the “management” of the “centrality” of
the first “world-system,” we would now have to reflect on what this scenario
implies.
First, one must be conscious that there are at least, in its origin, two
Modernities. In the first place, Hispanic, humanist, Renaissance Modernity is
still linked to the old interregional system of Mediterranean and Muslim
Christianity.[56] In this, the “management” of the new system will be
conceived out of the older paradigm of the old interregional system. That is,
Spain “managed” “centrality” as domination through the hegemony of an
integral culture, a language, a religion (and thus, the evangelization process
that Amerindia would suffer); it also dominated via military occupation,
bureaucratic-political organization, economic expropriation, demographic
presence (with hundreds of thousands of Spaniards or Portuguese who would
forevermore inhabit Amerindia), ecological transformation (through the
modification of the fauna and flora), and so on. This is the matter of the
“Empire-World” project, which, as Wallerstein notes, failed with Carlos V.
[57]
In the second place, the Modernity of Anglo-Germanic Europe began with
the Amsterdam of Flanders, and it frequently passes as the only Modernity—
that is, according to the interpretation of Sombart, Weber, Habermas, or even
the postmoderns, who will produce a “reductionist fallacy” that occludes the
meaning of Modernity and, thus, the sense of its contemporary crisis. To be
able to “manage” the immense “world-system”—which suddenly opens itself
to small Holland[58] which, from being a Spanish colony, now places itself
as the “center” of the “world-system”—this second Modernity must
accomplish or increase its efficacy through simplification. It is necessary to
carry out an abstraction that favors the quantum to the detriment of qualitas;
that leaves out many valid variables, such as cultural, anthropological,
ethical, political, and religious (aspects that are valuable even for the
European of the sixteenth century); and that will not allow an adequate
“factual,”[59] or technologically possible, “management” of the “world-
system.”[60] This simplification of complexity[61] encompasses the totality
of the “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt); of the relationship with nature, the new
technological and ecological position that is no longer teleological; of
subjectivity itself, the new self-understanding of subjectivity; of community,
the new intersubjective and political relation; thus, as synthesis, a new
economic attitude would establish itself (practico-productive).
The first Hispanic Renaissance and humanist Modernity produced a
theoretical, or philosophical, reflection of the highest importance, and it has
gone unnoticed in the so-called modern philosophy, which is only the
philosophy of the “second Modernity.” The theoretical-philosophical thought
of the sixteenth century has contemporary relevance because it is the first,
and only, that lived and expressed the original experience during the period
of the constitution of the first “world-system.” Thus, out of the theoretical
“resources” that were available (i.e., the scholastic-Muslim-Christian and
Renaissance philosophy), the central philosophical and ethical question that
obtained was the following: “What right has the European to occupy,
dominate, and ‘manage’ the recently discovered, militarily conquered, and
currently being-colonized cultures?” From the seventeenth century on, the
“second Modernity” did not have to question the conscience (Gewissen) with
these questions that had already been answered, in fact: From Amsterdam,
London, or Paris, in the seventeenth century and through the eighteenth
century and onward, “Eurocentrism” (a superideology that would establish
the valid legitimacy, without falsification, of the domination of the “world-
system”) would no longer be questioned until the end of the twentieth
century. At that time, it will be then questioned by liberation philosophy as
well as other movements.
In another work we have touched on the question.[62] Today we will only
remind ourselves of the theme in general. Bartolome de las Casas
demonstrates in his numerous works, using an extraordinary bibliographical
apparatus, grounding rationally and carefully his arguments that the
constitution of the “world-system” as European expansion in Amerindia
(anticipation of the expansion in Africa and Asia) does not have any right;
that it is an unjust violence, and it cannot have any ethical validity:
The common ways mainly employed by the Spaniards who call themselves Christian and who
have gone there to extirpate those pitiful nations and wipe them off the earth is by unjustly waging
cruel and bloody wars. Then, when they have slain all those who fought for their lives or to escape
the tortures they would have to endure, that is to say, when they have slain all the native rulers and
young men (since the Spaniards usually spare only the women and children, who are subjected to
the hardest and bitterest servitude ever suffered by man or beast), they enslave any survivors. . . .
Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have
an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time
and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits. It should be kept in mind that their
insatiable greed and ambition, the greatest ever seen in the world, is the cause of their villainies.
[63]
The body is a mere machine; res extensa, entirely foreign to the soul.[70]
Kant himself writes:
The human soul should be seen as being linked in the present life to two worlds at the same time:
of these worlds, inasmuch as it forms with the body a personal unity, it feels but only the material
world; on the contrary, as a member of world of the spirit [mind] (als ein Glied der Geisterwelt)
[without body] it receives and propagates the pure influences of immaterial natures.[71]
Given that nature is for Modernity only a medium of production, it runs out
its fate of being consumed and destroyed; in addition, it accumulates
geometrically upon the Earth its debris, until it jeopardizes the reproduction
or survival of life itself. Life is the absolute condition of capital; its
destruction destroys capital. We have now arrived at this state of affairs. The
“system of 500 years” (Modernity or Capitalism) confronts its first absolute
limit: the death of life in its totality through the indiscriminate use of an anti-
ecological technology constituted progressively through the sole criterion of
the quantitative “management” of the “world-system” in Modernity: the
increase in the rate of profit. But capital cannot limit itself. There thus comes
about the utmost danger for humanity.
The second limit of Modernity is the destruction of humanity itself.
“Living labor” is the other essential mediation of capital as such; the human
subject is the only one that can “create” new value (i.e., surplus value, profit).
Capital that defeats all barriers requires incrementally more absolute time of
work: When it cannot supersede this limit, then it augments productivity
through technology; but said increase decreases the importance of human
labor. It is thus that there is superfluous humanity (i.e., displaced humanity).
The unemployed do not earn a salary or any money, but money is the only
mediation in the market through which one can acquire commodities to
satisfy needs. In any event, work that is not employable by capital therefore
increases (i.e., there is an increase in unemployment). It is thus the proportion
of needing subjects who are not solvent, clients, consumers, or buyers—as
much in the periphery as in the center.[87] It is poverty, poverty as the
absolute limit of capital. Today we know how misery grows in the entire
planet. It is a matter of a “law of Modernity”:
Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the
torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole.[88]
*A version of this essay was first published in Latin America and Postmodernity: A Contemporary
Reader, ed. Pedro Lange-Churión and Eduardo Mendicta (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001). All
rights reserved. Printed with permission.
1. As a “substance” that is invented in Europe and that subsequently “expands” throughout the entire
world. This is a metaphysical-substantialist and “diffusionist” thesis. It contains a “reductionist
fallacy.”
2. The English translation does not translate the expression Weber uses, “Auf dem Boden,” which
means “within its regional horizon.” We want to establish that when we say in Europe, what we really
mean is the development in Modernity of Europe as the “center” of a “global system,” and not as an
independent system, as if it were “only-from-within itself” and as the fruit of a solely internal
development, as Eurocentrism pretends.
3. This “we” is precisely the Eurocentric Europeans.
4. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 13 (emphasis added). Later on Weber asks: “Why did not the scientific,
the artistic, the political, or the economic development there [China, and India] enter upon that path of
rationalization which is peculiar to the Occident?” (Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 25). In order to argue
this, Weber juxtaposes the Babylonians, who did not mathematize astronomy, with the Greeks, who did
(but Weber does not know that the Greeks learned it from the Egyptians). He also argues that science
emerged in the West, and not in India or China; but he forgets to mention the Muslim world, from
which the Latin West learned Aristotelian “experiential,” empirical exactitude (such as the Oxford
Franciscians or Marcilios de Padua, etc.). Every Hellenistic, or Eurocentric argument, such as Weber’s,
can be falsified if we take 1492 as the ultimate date of comparison between the supposed superiority of
the West and other cultures.
5. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956),
341.
6. Following Hegel (The Philosophy of History), Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der
Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 27.
7. The “world-system,” or the planetary system of the fourth stage of the same interregional system of
the Asiatic-African-Mediterranean continent, but now (correcting Frank’s conceptualization) factially
“planetary.” See A. G. Frank. “A Theoretical Introduction to 5,000 Years of World System History,”
Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 13, no. 2 (1990), 155–248. On the “world-system” problematic, see
Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989); Rober Brenner, “Das Weltsystem. Theoretische und Historische
Perspektiven,” in Perspektiven des Weltsystems (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1983); Marshall Hodgson,
The Venture of Islam, vols. 1–3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Paul Kennedy, The Rise
and Fall of the Great Power (New York: Random House, 1987); George Modelski, Long Cycles in
World Politics (London: Macmillan Press, 1987); L. S. Stavarianos, The World to 1500: A Global
History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970); William Thompson, Global War: Historical-
Structural Approaches to World Politics (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989); Charles
Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,
1984); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984) and The Modern World-System, vol. 1 (1974) to vol. 3 (1989) (New York: Academic
Press, 1974).
8. On this point, as I already mentioned, I am not in agreement with Frank on calling the prior
moments of the system “world-system”; I call them “interregional systems.”
9. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1, chap. 6.
10. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 2, chaps. 4–5.
11. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 3, chap. 3.
12. See Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962); Morris
Rosabi, China among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, 10th–14th Centuries (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982). For a description of the situation of the world in 1400, see Eric
Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 24 ff.
13. I have been to Masamba, and I saw in the museum of this city, which is a port of Kenya, Chinese
porcelain, as well as luxurious watches and other objects of similar origin.
14. There are other reasons for this nonexternal expansion: the existence of “space” in the neighboring
territories of the empire, which took all its power in order to “conquer the south” through the
cultivation of rice and its defense against the barbarian “North.” See Wallerstein, The Modern World-
System, vol. 1, 80 ff., which has many good arguments against Weber’s Eurocentrism.
15. For example, Joseph Needham, “Commentary on Lynn White What Accelerated Technological
Change in the Western Middle Ages?” in Scientific Change, ed. A. C. Crombie (New York: Basic
Books, 1963), 117–53; and “The Chinese Contribution to the Development of the Mariner’s Compass”
and “The Chinese Contributions to Vessel Control” in Scientia 96, no. 98 (1961), abril, 123–28; mayo,
163–68. See all of these with respect to the control of ships, which the Chinese had already dominated
since the first century AD. The Chinese use of the compass, paper, gunpowder, and other discoveries is
well known.
16. Perhaps the only disadvantages were the Portuguese caravel (invented in 1441), used to navigate
the Atlantic (it was not needed in the Indian Ocean), and the cannon. This last one, although
spectacular, never had any real effect in Asia outside naval wars until the nineteenth century.
17. The first bureaucracy (as the Weberian high stage of political rationalization) is the stilted
mandarin structure of political exercise. The mandarin are not nobles, nor warriors, nor aristocratic or
commercial plutocracy; they are strictly a bureaucratic elite whose exams are exclusively based in the
dominion of culture and the laws of the Chinese empire.
18. William de Bary indicates that the individualism of Wang Yang-ming, in the fifteenth century,
which expressed the ideology of the bureaucratic class, was as advanced as that of the Renaissance. Th.
de William Bary, Self and Society in Ming Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).
19. Through many examples, Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962) situates the modern scientific revolution—that is, the fruit of the
expression of the new paradigm—practically with Newton (seventeenth century). He does not study
with care the impact that events such as the discovery of America, the roundness of the earth
(empirically proved since 1520), and so on, could have had on the science and the “scientific
community” of the sixteenth century, after the structuration of the first “world-system.”
20. Needham, “Commentary on Lynn White,” 139.
21. Pierre Chaunu, Seville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650), vol. 1 (1955) to vol. 8 (1959) (Paris: Sevpen,
1955), vol. 8, part 1, 50.
22. A. R. Hall places the scientific revolution beginning with the 1500s. See A. R. Hall, The Scientific
Revolution (London: Longman, 1983).
23. Factically, Colón will be the first Modern, but not existentially since his interpretation of the
world remained always that of a Renaissance Genoese: a member of a peripheral Italy of the third
“interregional system.” See Paolo Emilio Taviani, Cristoforo Colombo: La genesi della scoperta
(Novara, Italy: Instituto Geografico de Agostini, 1982); Edmundo O’Gorman, La invencion de América
(Mexico: FCE, 1957).
24. I. Zunzunegi, “Los origenes de las misiones en las Islas Canarias,” Revista Española de Teologia,
1 (1941), 364–70.
25. Russia was not yet integrated as “periphery” in the third stage of the interregional system, nor was
it in the modern “world-system,” until the eighteenth century with Peter the Great and the founding of
St. Petersburg on the Baltic.
26. Portugal, already in 1095, has the rank of empire. In Algarve, 1249, the re-conquest concludes
with this empire. Enrique the Navigator (1394–1460), as patron, gathers the sciences of cartography
and astronomy, and the techniques of navigation and construction of ships, which originated in the
Muslim world (since he had contact with the Morrocans) and the Italian Renaissance (via Genoa).
27. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1, 49–50.
28. See K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the
Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
29. My argument would seem to be the same as Blaut’s (The Debate on Colonialism, Eurocentrism
and History, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992), 28 ff., but in fact, it is different. It is not that
Spain was “geographically” closer to Amerindia. No. It is not a question of distances. It is that and
much more. It matters that Spain had to go through Amerindia, not only because it was closer which in
fact took place, especially with respect to Asiatic cultures—although this was not the case with the
Turkish Muslim empire that had arrived at Morroco—but because this was the demanded path to the
“center” of the “system,” a question that is not dealt with by Blaut. Furthermore, it is just the same
difference from that of Andre Gunder Frank (Blaut, The Debate on Colonialism, 65–80), because for
him, the year 1492 marks only a secondary internal change of the same “world-system.” However, if it
is understood that the “interregional system,” in its stage prior to 1492, is the “same” system but not yet
as a “world” system, then 1492 assumes a greater importance than Frank grants it. Even if the system is
the same, there exists a qualitative jump, which, under other aspects, is the original capitalism proper,
to which Frank denies importance because of his prior denial of relevance to concepts such as “value”
and “surplus value”; therefore, he attributes “capital” to the “wealth” (i.e., use-value, with a virtual
possibility of transforming itself into exchange-value, but not capital) accumulated in the first through
third stages of the interregional system. This is a grave theoretical question.
30. Enrique Dussel, 1492: El encubrimiento del Otro. Haria el origen del mito de la modernida
(Madrid: Nueva Utopia, 1993).
31. See Dussel, 1492: El encubrimiento del Otro, appendix 4, where the map of the fourth Asiatic
peninsula is reproduced (after the Arabian, Indian, and Malacan), certainly product of Genoese
navigations, where South America is a peninsula attached to the south of China. This explains why the
Genoese Colón would hold the opinion that Asia would not be so far from Europe (i.e., South America
equals the fourth peninsula of China).
32. This is what I called, philosophically, the “invention” of Amerindia seen as India, in all of its
details. Colón, existentially, neither “discovered” nor reached Amerindia. He “invented” something that
was nonexistent: India in the place of Amerindia, which prevented him from “discovering” what he had
before his own eyes. See Dussel, 1492: El encubrimiento del Otro, chapter 2.
33. This is the meaning of the title of chapter 2 of my already cited work: “From the Invention to the
Discovery of America.”
34. See Samir Amin, L’accumulation à l’echelle Mondiale (Paris: Anthropos, 1970). However, this
work does not develop the “world-system” hypothesis. It would appear as though the colonial world
were a rear or subsequent and outside space to European medieval capitalism, which is transformed
“in” Europe as modern. My hypothesis is more radical: the fact of the discovery of Amerindia, of its
integration as “periphery,” is a simultaneous and co-constitutive fact of the restructuration of Europe
from within as “center” of the only new “world-system”—that is, only now and not before, capitalism
(first mercantile and later industrial).
35. We have spoken of “Amerindia” and not of America, because it is a question, during the entire
sixteenth century, of a continent inhabited by “Indians.” It is wrongly called because of the mirage that
the “interregional system” of the third stage still produced in the still being born “world-system.” They
were called Indians because of India, “center” of the interregional system that was beginning to fade.
Anglo-Saxon North America will be born slowly in the seventeenth century, but it will be an event
“internal” to a growing Modernity in Amerindia. This is the originating “periphery” of Modernity,
constitutive of its first definition. It is the “other face” of the very same phenomenon of Modernity.
36. Unified by the marriage of the Catholic king and queen in 1474, followed immediately by the
Inquisition (first ideological apparatus of the State for the creation of consensus), with a bureaucracy,
whose functioning is attested to in the archives of the Indies (Sevilla), where everything was declared,
contracted, certified, and archived; with a grammar of the Spanish language (the first of national
languages in Europe) written by Nebrija, in whose prologue he warns the Catholic kings of the
importance for the empire of having only one language; Cisneros’s edition of the Complutensian
polyglot Bible (in seven languages), which was superior to Erasmus’s because of its scientific care, the
number of its languages, and the quality of the imprint, begun in 1502 and published in 1522; with
military power that allows it to reclaim Granada in 1492; with the economic wealth of the Jews,
Andalucian Muslims, Christians of the re-conquest, and the Catalans with their colonies in the
Mediterranean, and the Genoese; with the artisans from the antique caliphate of Cordoba . . . and so on.
Spain is far from being in the fifteenth century the semiperipheral country that it would become in the
second part of the seventeenth century—the only picture of Spain which the Europe of the center
remembers, as Hegel and Habermas do, for example.
37. The struggle between France and the Spain of Carlos V, which exhausted both monarchies and
resulted in the economic collapse of 1557, was played out above all in Italy. Carlos V possessed about
three-fourths of the Peninsula. In this way, Spain transferred through Italy to its own soil the links with
the “system.” This was one of the reasons for all the wars with France: the wealth and centuries of
experience were essential for whoever intended to exercise new hegemony in the “system,” especially
if it were to be the first “planetary” hegemony.
38. This event produced an unprecedented increase in prices in Europe, which was convergent with an
inflation of 1,000 percent during the sixteenth century. Externally, this would liquidate the wealth
accumulated in the Turkish-Muslim world, and even transform India and China internally. Furthermore,
the arrival of Amerindian gold produced a complete continental hecatomb of Bantu Africa because of
the collapse of the kingdoms of the sub-Saharan savannah (Ghana, Togo, Dahomey, Nigeria, etc.),
which exported gold to the Mediterranean. In order to survive, these kingdoms increased the selling of
slaves to the new European powers of the Atlantic, with American slavery produced. See Pierre
Bertaux, Africa: Desde la prehistoria hasta los Estados actuales, especially “La trata de esclavos,” pp.
133–41 (México, DF: Siglo Veintiuno, 1972); V. M. Godinho, “Creation et dynamisme economique du
monde atlantique (1420–1670),” Annales ESC 5, no. 1 (enero-marzo, 1950), 10–30; Pierre Chaunu,
Seville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650), vol. 1 (1955) to vol. 8 (1959) (Paris: Sevpen, 1955, vol. 8, chapter
1, 57); F. Braudel, “Monnaies et civilisation: de l’or du Soudan à I’argent d’Amerique.” Annales 1, no.
1, pp. 9–22. The whole ancient third “interregional system” is absorbed slowly by the modern “world-
system.”
39. All of the subsequent hegemonic power would remain until the present on their shores: Spain,
Holland, England (and France partly) until 1945; and the United States in the present. Thanks to Japan,
China, and California, the Pacific appears for the first time as a counterweight. This is perhaps a
novelty of the twenty-first century.
40. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1, 45.
41. This is the entrance to the mine.
42. This text has for the last thirty years warned me against the phenomenon of the fetishism of gold,
“money,” and “capital.” See Dussel, “General,” in Historia General de la Iglesia en America Latina,
vol. 1, 1–724 (Salamanca, Spain: Sigueme, 1983).
43. Archivo General de Indias (Sevilla), Charcas 313.
44. Wallerstein, “From Seville to Amsterdam: The Failure of Empire,” in The Modern World-System,
vol. 1, 165 ff.
45. It should be remembered that Spinoza (Espinosa), who lived in Amsterdam (1632–1677),
descended from an Ashkenazi family from the Muslim world of Granada, was expelled from Spain, and
then was exiled in the Spanish colony of Flanders.
46. See Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1, 214.
47. See Wallerstein, “Dutch Hegemony in the World-Economy,” chapter 2 in The Modern World-
System, vol. 2. Wallerstein writes: “It follows that there is probably only a short moment in time when a
given core power can manifest simultaneously productive, commercial and financial superiority over all
other core powers. This momentary summit is what we call hegemony. In the case of Holland, or the
United Providences, that moment was probably between 1625–1675” (The Modern World-System, 39).
Not only Descartes, but also Spinoza, as we already indicated, is in the philosophical presence of
Amsterdam, world “center” of the system—and why not? The self-consciousness of humanity in its
“center” is not the same as a mere European self-consciousness.
48. See Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 2, chapter 6. After this date, British hegemony
will be uninterrupted, except in the Napoleonic period, until 1945, when it is lost to the United States.
49. See Pierre Chaunu, Conquete et exploitation des nouveaux mondes (XVIe. siecle) (Paris: PUF,
1969), 119–76.
50. Europe had approximately fifty-six million inhabitants in 1500, and eighty-two million in 1600.
See Cardoso, Histaria econ6mica de America Latina, ed. Ciro F. S. Cardoso-Hector Brignoli, vols. 1
and 2 (Barcelona: Critica, 1979), vol. 1, 114.
51. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1, 103.
52. See S. Amin, El desarrollo desigual. Ensayo sobre las formaciones sociales del capitalismo
periferico (Barcelona: Fontanella, 1974), 309 ff.
53. Amin, El desarrollo desigual, 312.
54. The colonial process ends for the most part at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
55. The colonial process of these formations ends, for the most part, after the so-called World War II
(1945), given that the North American superpower requires neither military occupation, nor political-
bureaucratic domination (proper only to the old European powers, such as France and England), but
rather the management of the dominion of economic-financial dependence in its transnational stage.
56. “Muslim” means here the most “cultured” and civilized of the fifteenth century.
57. I think that, exactly, to manage the new “world-system” according to old practices had to fail
because it operated with a variable that made it unmanageable. Modernity had begun, but it had not
given itself the new way to “manage” the system.
58. Later on, it will also have to “manage” the system of the English island. Both nations had very
exiguous territories, with little population in the beginning, without any other capacity than their
creative “bourgeois attitude” before its existence. Because of their weakness, they had to perform a
great reform of “management” of the planetary metropolitan enterprise.
59. The technical “factibility” will become a criterion of truth, of possibility, of existence; Vico’s
“verum et factum conventuntur.”
60. Spain, and also Portugal with Brazil, undertook as a state (World-Empire; with military,
bureacratic, and ecclesiastical resources) the conquest, evangelization, and colonization of Amerindia.
Holland, instead, founded the Dutch East India Company (1602), and later that of “West India.” These
“companies” (as well as the subsequent British and Danish) are capitalist “enterprises,” secularized and
private, which function according the “rationalization” of mercantilism (and later of industrial
capitalism). This indicates the different rational “management” of the Iberian companies and the
different management of the “second Modernity” (“world-system” not managed by a “world-empire”).
61. In every system, complexity is accompanied by a process of “selection” of elements that allow, in
the face of the increase in such complexity, for the conservation of the “unity” of the system with
respect to its surroundings. This necessity of selection-simplification is always a “risk.” See Niklas
Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 47 ff.
62. See Dussel, “Critique of the Myth of Modernity,” chapter 5 in 1492: El encubrimiento del Otro.
During the sixteenth century, there were three theoretical positions before the fact of the constitution of
the “world-system”: (1) that of Gines de Sepulveda, the modern renaissance and humanist scholar, who
rereads Aristotle and demonstrates the natural slavery of the Amerindian, and thus concludes on the
legitimacy of the conquest; (2) that of the Franciscans, such as Mendieta, who attempts a utopian
Amerindian Christinaity (a “republic of Indians” under the hegemony of Catholic religion), proper to
the third Christian-Muslim interregional system; and (3) Bartolome de las Casas’s position (Obras
escogidas de Fray Bartolome de Ins Casas, vol. 1 [1957] to vol. 5 [1958] [Madrid: Biblioteca de
Autores Espanoles, 1957]), the beginning of a critical “counter-discourse” on the interior of
Modernity, which in his work of 1536, a century before Le Discours de la Methode, he entitles De
unico modo (“The Only Way”) and shows that “argumentation” is the rational means through which to
attract the Amerindian to the new civilization. Habermas, as we will see later on, speaks of “counter-
discourse” and suggests that said counter-discourse is only two centuries old (beginning with Kant).
Liberation Philosophy suggests, instead, that this counter-discourse begins in the sixteenth century (in
1511, in Santo Domingo with Anton de Montesinos!), decidedly with Bartolome de las Casas in 1514
(see Dussel, “General,” vol. 1, chapter 1, 17–27).
63. Bartolome de las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, trans. Herma Briffault
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 31. I have placed this text at the
beginning of volume 1 of my work Para una etica dc la liberación latinoamericana (Dussel, Para una
destrucción de la historin de la eticn [Mendoza, Argentina: Ser y Tiempo, 1973]), since it synthesizes
the general hypothesis of the ethics of liberation.
64. Frequently, in the contemporary histories of philosophy and, of course, of ethics, a “jump” is made
from the Greeks (from Plato and Aristotle) to Descartes (1596–1650), who takes up residence in
Amsterdam in 1629 and writes La Discours de La Methode, as we indicated earlier (Oeuvres et Lettres
de Descartes, La Pleiade Series [Paris: Gallimard, 1953]). In other words, there is a jump from Greece
to Amsterdam. In the interim, twenty-one centuries have gone by without any other content of
importance. Studies are begun with Bacon (1561–1626), Kepler (1571–1630), Galileo (1571–1630),
and Newton (1643–1727). Campanella writes Civitas Solis in 1602. Everything would seem to be
situated at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the moment I have called the second moment of
Modernity.
65. See Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus (Leipzig, Germany: Duncker, 1902) and Der
Bourgeois (Mtinchen: Duncker, 1920).
66. See Ernst Troeltsch, Die Soziallehre der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppe 1 (Tubingen, Germany:
Mohr, 1923).
67. See Habermas, Der philosophische, vols. 1–2. Habermas insists on the Weberian discovery of
“rationalization,” but he forgets to ask after its cause. I believe that my hypothesis goes deeper and
farther back: Weberian rationalization (accepted by Habermas, Apel, Lyotard, etc.) is the apparently
necessary mediation of a deforming simplification (by instrumental reason) of practical reality, in order
to transform it into something “manageable,” governable, given the complexity of the immense “world-
system.” It is not only the internal “manageability” of Europe, but also, and above all, planetary
(center-periphery) “management.” Habermas’s attempt to sublimate instrumental reason into
communicative reason is not sufficient because the moments of his diagnosis on the origin itself of the
process of rationalization are not sufficient.
68. The postmoderns, as Eurocentrists, concur, more or less, with the Weberian diagnosis of
Modernity. Rather, they underscore certain rationalizing aspects or mediums (means of communication,
etc.) of Modernity, some of which they reject wrathfully as metaphysical dogmatisms, but others they
accept as inevitable phenomena and frequently as positive transformations.
69. René Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” vol. 1, part IV, in The Philosophical Works of
Descartes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 127.
70. See Dussel, El dualismo en la antropologia de la Cristiandad (Buenos Aires: Editorial Guadalupe,
1974) (at the end) and Metodo para una Filosofia de la Liberación (Salamanca, Spain: Sigueme, 1974),
chapter 2, part 4. Contemporary theories of the functions of the brain put in question definitively this
dualistic mechanism.
71. Immanuel Kant, Träume eines Geistersehers (1766), A36; in Kant, Kant Werke, vols. 1–10
(Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), vol. 2, 940.
72. Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books,
1957), 237–38.
73. See Dussel, Par la destruccion.
74. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton et al. (Chicago: Henry Regnery
Company, 1967), 73.
75. See Martin Bernal, Black Athena, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization,
vol. l (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), chapter 5, 224ss.
76. Amerindia and Europe have a premodern history, just as Africa and Asia do. Only the hybrid
world, the syncretic culture, the Latin American mestiza race that was born in the fifteenth century (the
child of Malinche and Hernan Cortes can be considered as its symbol; see Octavio Paz, El Laberinto de
la soledad [Mexico: Cuadernos Americanos, 1950]) has five hundred years.
77. See, among others: Jean-Francois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979);
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979);
Jacques Derrida, De La Grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), and L’Ecriture et la Difference (Paris:
Seuil, 1967); Odo Marquard, Abschied vom Prinzipiellen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981); Gianni Vattimo, La
fine della Modernità (Milan: Garzanti, 1985); Wolfgang Welsch, Unseres postmoderne Moderne
(Berlin: Akademie v., 1993).
78. This Spanish word (desarrollismo), which does not exist in other languages, points to the “fallacy”
that pretends the same “development” (the word Entwicklung has a strictly Hegelian philosophical
origin) for the “center” as for the “periphery,” not taking note that the “periphery” is not backward (see
Hinkelammert, Dialectica del desarrollo desigual and Critica a la razon utopica). In other words, it is
not a temporal prius that awaits a development similar to that of Europe or the United States (like the
child /adult) but that instead it is the asymmetrical position of the dominated, the simultaneous position
of the exploited (like the free lord/slave). The “immature” (child) could follow the path of the “mature”
(adult) and get to “develop” herself, while the “exploited” (slave) no matter how much she works will
never be “free” (lord), because her own dominated subjectivity includes her “relationship” with the
dominator. The “modernizers” of the “periphery” are developmentalists because they do not realize that
the “relationship” of planetary domination has to be overcome as prerequisite for “national
development.” Globalization has not extinguished, not by the least, the “national” question.
79. See Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, vols. 1 and 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981),
t.l, I, 2, from sec. [B] to sec. [D], and especially the debate with P. Winch and A. MacIntyre.
80. We will see that Levinas, “father of French postmodernism” (from Derrida on), neither is
postmodern, nor negates reason. Instead, he is a critic of the totalization of reason (instrumental,
strategic, cynical, ontological, etc.). Liberation Philosophy, since the end of the 1960s, studied Levinas
because of his radical critique of domination. In the preface to my work, Philosophy of Liberation
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), I indicated that the philosophy of liberation is a “postmodern”
philosophy, one that departed from the “second Heidegger,” but also from the critique of “totalized
reason” carried out by Marcuse and Levinas. It would seem as though we were “postmoderns” avant la
lettre. In fact, however, we were critics of ontology and Modernity from (desde) the periphery, which
meant (and which still means) something entirely different, as we intend to explain.
81. Up to now, the postmoderns remain Eurocentric. The dialogue with “different” cultures is, for
now, an unfulfilled promise. They think that mass culture, the media (television, movies, etc.) will
affect peripheral urban cultures to the extent that they will annihilate their “differences,” in such a way
that what Vattimo sees in Torino, or Lyotard in Paris, will be shortly the same in New Delhi and
Nairobi; they do not take the time to analyze the hard irreducibility of the hybrid cultural horizon that
receives those information impacts. Such a horizon is not absolutely an exteriority, but it is one that will
not be during centuries a univocal interiority to the globalized system.
82. See Fredrick Jameson’s work, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1991), on the “cultural logic of late capitalism as postmodernism.”
83. Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues (Boston: South End Press, 1993).
84. In Stalinist real socialism, the criterion was the “increase in the rate of production”—measured, in
any event, by an approximate market value of commodities. It is a question of the same time of
fetishism. See Hinkelammert, “Marco categorial del pensamiento sovietico,” chapter 4, in Critiea a la
razon utópica (San Jose de Costa Rica: CEI, 1984), 123 ff.
85. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 410.
86. Marx, Grundrisse, 410.
87. Pure necessity without money is no market; it is only misery, growing and unavoidable misery.
88. Marx, Das Kapital, vol. 1 (1867), 799. Here we must remember once more that the Human
Development Report, Development Programme, United Nations (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992) already demonstrated in an incontrovertible manner that the richer 20 percent of the planet
consumes today (as never before in global history) 82.7 percent of goods (incomes) of the planet, while
the remaining 80 percent of humanity only consumes l7.3 percent of said goods. Such concentration is
the product of the “world-system” we have been delineating.
89. Hebert Marcuse, “Liberation from the Affluent Society” in To Free a Generation: The Dialectics
of Liberation, ed. David Cooper (New York: Collier Books, 1967), 181.
Chapter Six
The Singularity of Peripheral Social
Inequality
Jessé Souza
NOTES
1. The fact that a country like Brazil has been the country with largest economic growth in the world
from the 1930s to the 1980s, without the rates of inequality, marginalization, and under-citizenship
being radically altered, should be a more than evident indication of the mistake of this presumption.
This, nevertheless, did not take place and does not take place today.
2. About this theme see the classic work of Robert Bellah, The Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-
Industrial Japan (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1985), and the collection of Shmuel Eisenstadt, The
Protestant Ethic and Modernization: A Comparative View (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
3. Max Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen, Hinduismus und Buddhismus (Tübingen,
Germany: J. C. B. Mohr, 1998), 251.
4. I do not admire critical theories, such as the Habermasian, which admit this type of construction in
its interior, perceives social conflicts, preferentially, only at the “front” between system and “lifeworld”
and no longer within the systemic realities. See the criticism of Joahannes Berger, “Die
Versprachlichung des Sakralen und die Entsprachlichung der Ökonomie” in Hans Joas and Axel
Honneth, eds., Kommunikatives Handelns: Beiträge zu Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen
handelns (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986).
5. The same occurs with the merely descriptive notion of “charisma.” Since there is no presumption of
unarticulated “collective meanings” which are responsible for leading, articulating, and providing their
own direction, the connection of the leader with his followers becomes “mysterious” and comes to
depend on the supposition of the existence, by part of the masses, on extra-quotidian or magical
attributes of the personality of the leader.
6. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard Press,
1989).
7. Taylor (1989), 159–76.
8. Taylor (1989), 289–90.
9. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism by Amy Gutmann et al.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
10. This aspect was developed in a polemical and stimulating manner, serving as the background for a
grammar of contemporary political struggles, based on the poles of distribution and recognition in
Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus (New York: Routledge, 1997). For the problematic aspects between
the individual and collective dimensions of the theme of recognition, see Seyla Benhabib, Kulturelle
Vielfalt und Demokratische Gleichheit (Frankfurt: Fisher, 1999), 39–46.
11. Weber (1998), 1–97.
12. For a criticism of Taylor’s and Fraser’s positions, see Axel Honneth, “Recognition or
Distribution?” pp. 52–53 in Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 18, issues 2 and 3, 2001.
13. Charles Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun,
Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
14. Taylor (1993), 59.
15. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1984).
16. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 42–51.
17. Bourdieu (1984), 244.
18. Axel Honneth, Die zerrissene Welt des Sozialen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), 178–79.
19. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, 15.
20. Uwe Bittlingmayer, “Transformation der Notwendigkeit: prekarisierte habitusformen als Kehrseite
der ‘Wissensgesellschaft,’” pp. 225–54 in Theorie als Kampf? Zur politischen Soziologie Pierre
Bourdieus, ed. Rolf Eickelpasch et al. (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2002).
21. Reinhard Kreckel, Politische Soziologie der sozialen Ungleichheit (Frankfurt: Campus, 1992).
22. Kreckel, Politische Soziologie der sozialen Ungleichheit, 98.
23. Kreckel, Politische Soziologie der sozialen Ungleichheit, 100.
24. Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition?” in Justice Interruptus (New York:
Routledge, 1997).
25. Bittlingmayer, “Transformation der Notwendigkeit,” 233.
26. Florestan, A integração do negro na sociedade de classes (São Paulo: ed. Ática, 1978), 94.
27. Axel Honneth, in his interesting criticism of Bourdieu, tends to completely reject the concept of
habitus, given the instrumental and utilitarian component that it inhabits. By doing so, however,
Honneth runs the risk of “throwing out the baby with the bath water,” when it appears to me to be
important precisely to reconnect the concept of habitus with a moral instance that illuminates the
individual and collective dimensions, in addition to the instrumental given that is non-renounceable, the
theme of moral learning. See Honneth, “Die zerissene Welt der symbolischen Formen: zum
kultursoziologischen Werke Pierre Bourdieus,” in Die zerissene Welt des Sozialen (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1990), 171.
28. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 35.
29. Bourdieu, Distinction, 11.
30. Bourdieu, Distinction, 384.
31. Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
32. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1976).
33. In the version, for example, of Roberto DaMatta, Carnavais, malandros e heróis (Rio de Janeiro:
Zahar, 1978).
34. About this issue see my book, A modernização Seletiva: Uma Reinterpretação do Dilema
Brasileiro (Brasília, DF: Editora UnB, 2000), especially 183–204.
35. Jurgen Habermas, Die Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975).
36. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
37. It also explains the fact that the insurrectional potential of the lower class from the entire
nineteenth century until today is reduced to local and passing rebellions, riots, and pre-political
violence in which the conscious articulation of its objectives never occurs.
Chapter Seven
After Colonialism: The Impossibility of
Self-Determination
Pratap Bhanu Mehta
I. INTRODUCTION
NOTES
1. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 41.
2. Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 15–
19.
3. Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest (London: MacMillan, 1910), xiii.
4. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86ff.
5. For this issue see the work of The Subaltern Studies Collective.
6. The term social imaginary is from Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004).
7. I owe this reference to Don Herzog.
8. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, chapter 10. For a worry that the need to keep up
appearances disfigured the colonial masters see George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant. “For it is the
condition of his rule that shall spend his life in trying to impress the natives and so in every crisis he has
got to do what the natives expect of him. He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot
the elephant.”
9. “The attainment of independence for me is the search for truth.”
10. Radhakamal Mukherjee, Democracy of the East (London: P. S. King, 1923).
11. Bhikhu C. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory
(Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000), 204.
12. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in An Age of Diversity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
13. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 55.
14. Partha Chaterjee, “Secularism and Toleration,” in A Possible India (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1999).
15. I argue this claim more fully in “Cosmopolitanism and the Circle of Reason,” Political Theory,
vol. 28, no. 5 (October 2000), 619–39.
16. Anthony Appiah, Color Conscious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
17. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in David Hume: A Dissertation on the Passions:
The Natural History of Religion, Tom Beauchamp, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 [1757]).
18. Philip Allot, The Health of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 115.
19. Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post Orientalist Histories of the Third World,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 1990.
20. One of the most powerful examples remains Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
21. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 84.
Chapter Eight
Indian Conceptualization of Colonial Rule
Bhikhu Parekh
This chapter explores three possible ways India might have perceived the
nature and significance of British colonial rule. First, since India had long
been subject to internal and external conquests, Indian leaders might have
thought that British rule was basically like those that had preceded it (or that
it represented a novelty unique unto itself). Secondly, I assess how Indians
responded to British rule and thirdly, how they explained it: why in their
view, they had fallen prey to yet another foreign conquest, especially at the
hands of a trading company based thousands of miles away with no apparent
plan to conquer the country. These questions will be addressed in turn,
beginning with the initial Indian responses to British rule followed by an
analysis of its more institutionalized phase—from the early decades of the
nineteenth century onward.
But before attempting to describe Indian conceptions of British rule it is
necessary to recognize the varying perceptions that might have existed.
Different classes, communities, and regions give different answers to
questions regarding the imposition: those expressed by elites were not always
shared by millions of ordinary Indians, and responses might have also been
sculpted by contexts that changed over time. Peasant leaders sometimes rose
against colonial economic oppression, though not always against colonial
rule, and articulated their thoughts in a language that was unique to them.
India thus spoke in several overlapping as well as conflicting voices. But
rather than discussing the perceptions of all Indians or attempting to
homogenize or impose an unjust arbitrary pattern on them, this paper
concentrates on the elite discourse—with specific focus on dominant trends
—to avoid getting caught in its multi-strandedness. The reason for such
oversimplification is not to avoid the meticulousness of accounting for minor
details but is rather an attempt to best fully understand how British
colonialism might have impacted India on the whole.
British conquest of India was slow, stealthy, and not premeditated in its
origins. Spearheaded by a commercial company rather than a foreign
government and coming to India in pursuit of commercial interests on the
express promise of good behavior, the East India Company took full
advantage of the erosion of Mughal authority, particularly on the Empire’s
periphery. As local potentates usurped power and created political and
economic instability, the Company used its considerable military and
economic power to destabilize, pressurize, or overthrow them; played off one
against the other; formed shifting alliances; and provoked popular revolts
which it then used to justify intervention and annexation. The Mughal
Emperor’s denunciation of the Company officials as “naughty and
disobedient” subjects who had “usurped different parts of the Royal
dominion” by “treachery and deceit” (and with a policy of “divide and grab”)
was widely shared, but had no impact; within a few decades, the Company
had extended its control over almost the whole of India, and claimed to
inherit the Emperor’s authority.
It eventually became clear that British colonialism was a kind of conquest
and rule that the Indians had never experienced before. The earlier
conquerors either plundered the country and returned with their loot, or
settled down as rulers. The British were different—not in their plunder,
which was common to earlier conquerors—nor because they were foreigners
of a different race, who refused to settle down as this behavior was also true
of many conquerors before; for the Indian leaders, British rule was different
because their “home” existed elsewhere and was a place to which they
frequently returned for holidays or jobs. It was also where their families were
based and children were educated; where they gave their loyalties and
affections, brought their loots, and from where they ruled India. The British
had turned India into an “appendage” of another country and they ruled it
according to their interests. For the first time in its history, Indian leaders
argued, India had come under “foreign” or “alien rule,” understood not as
rule by foreigners but rule from a foreign land. This conceptualization of
British rule became common in the 1760s and persisted until its end.
Indian leaders argued that since the British rule was “alien,” it had two
important consequences—or led to two disturbing practices. First, British rule
was inherently exploitative and detrimental to India economically. The rulers
took their wealth abroad that they had acquired either through plunder or
through collection of revenue. Indian money was neither spent nor circulated
throughout India and British money never entered into the country. The
economic relation between Britain and India was therefore wholly one-sided;
Indian interests were subordinated to those of the British. As Sayid Ghulam
Husain Khan explained at the time, the British practice of “scraping together
as much money in this country as they can and carrying it in immense sums
to the kingdom of England” had “undermined and ruined” India. Since the
British rulers never thought of India as their home, they shared no common
interests with its people and had no incentive to “promote their good.” But,
this behavior was somewhat expected; almost all Indian leaders argued that
under colonial leadership, it was inevitable that rulers would pursue British
interests irrespective of the damage it did to India—and they recognized that
if some good was done to India, it was inadvertent, incidental, or meant to
promote the far greater good of Britain.
Secondly, Indian leaders argued that since their new rulers took Britain as
their constant point of reference and the source of their political and cultural
identity, the British saw themselves as a “different people.” They set
themselves apart from their subjects, lived separately, had only limited and
superficial social contacts with them, and never identified themselves with
India or Indian people. As many eighteenth-century Indian leaders explained,
the British treated Indians with “disdain” and “aversion,” “undervalued,” and
“distrusted” them, and never employed them in positions of power and
influence. They subjected even the Indians of noble lineage to a “variety of
affronts and indignities,” and “esteemed themselves better than all others put
together.” Even a pro-British Indian such as Ram Mohun Roy observed in a
Petition to the British government:
The better classes of the natives of India are placed under the sway of the Honourable East India
Company in a state of political degradation which is absolutely without a parallel in their former
history. For even under the Mohomedan conquerors, such of your petitioners as are Hindoos, were
not only capable of filling but actually did fill numerous employments of trust, dignity and
emolument, from which under the existing system of the Honourable Company’s government, they
are absolutely shut out.
Roy and others were concerned not so much with getting jobs for themselves
as with the way in which the whole “Hindustnee race” was disfranchised. For
them racism was inherent in alien rule, and constituted its permanent and
ineliminable limitation.
According to the conceptualization of Indian leaders, the British rule was
alien in three respects (which separated it from all of the others that had
preceded it): it was a rule by and from another country; was primarily self-
interested and hence exploitative; and was manned by foreigners who
enjoyed their monopoly on economic and political power. It furthermore was
a rule that rested on a racist contempt for its subjects. Indians did not mind
the British settling in India as others had done before; indeed, some Indians
invited British settlers in the hope that they would bring new methods of
cultivation and help to develop India. Some of them also did not mind if the
British rulers filled the political vacuum left by the disintegration of the
Mughal Empire and established a measure of economic and political stability.
But they were all highly critical of the form of alien rule that was ultimately
manifested. Many Indian leaders (and a large number of ordinary Indians)
felt deeply alienated from the British power that had engulfed their country,
and either wanted this new power radically restructured or driven out. As a
Frenchman living as a Muslim among the Mughal noblemen in Bengal put it,
the British had “alienated all hearts.” Even the British officers conceded that
“there was not a native but proved disaffected to the English . . . so that no
intelligence could be had from any of them, or if any at all, it was always a
suggested one.”
The British rulers therefore faced a problem: their rule was necessarily
alien, and hence open to the kinds of criticism made by Indian leaders. This
dilemma meant they either had to end their colonial rule in India—which they
had no intention of doing—or find ways of legitimizing it and winning the
hearts and minds of their subjects. The more perceptive among the British
knew (just as many Indian leaders did) that their rule was inevitably
impermanent and fragile; it could never shed its alien character and would
therefore have to end one day, and no government policies would ever be
able to fully overcome or compensate for the elements of subordination,
exploitation, and racism that were inherent in it, nor would they be able to
appease the constant small and large grievances that had arisen among the
Indian people—for that would require British rule to become less “alien.”
Against this widely shared assumption of impermanence, the British knew
that in order to consolidate their rule in the short term, they needed to restrain
the East India Company’s excesses, offer the country compensatory benefits,
moderate their racism, pay some attention to Indian interests, create new
classes of well-disposed Indians, and so on. To their credit, some of the
British politicians knew that achieving these measures would also benefit
Britain’s own political life, which was increasingly becoming corrupted by
the habits, practices, and attitudes acquired by the Company’s officials in
India. The rise of liberalism and evangelicalism in Britain generated the idea
of a civilizing mission, which further reinforced the idea that British colonial
rule needed to be restructured.
From around the 1780s onward, successive British governments took a
series of measures to curb the Company’s power—imposing a tighter control
on its activities, introducing new systems of justice, recruiting Indian officials
at lower levels, sending more public-spirited governors, amending the policy
of territorial annexation, establishing indirect rule through native princes,
instituting new forms of land settlement, establishing English language
schools and colleges, and so on. As these several reforms took effect, and
were followed by others, the colonial rule underwent important changes;
although alien, it began to become indigenized and started to take on an
Indian character. It became less rapacious, adventurist, exclusive, and racist.
It also created large classes of Indians, mainly Hindus, who availed
themselves to its economic, educational, and administrative opportunities,
took to industry and commerce, found jobs in the civil service, acted as
intermediaries between the rulers and their subjects, and were people who
became inspired by a new vision of the world that was brought to India by
new currents of European thought via British rule.
When social classes that had previously exercised considerable power and
influence were marginalized, impoverished, and rendered politically
invisible, the middle classes became their visible replacements. As new
leaders, they enjoyed an ambivalent relationship with the colonial rulers and
their own countrymen: while acting as members of both groups they also
managed to maintain a separation from the two—claiming to speak for both
and while also disowning some aspects of their own ways of thought and life.
This sensitivity to colonial rulers on the one hand and to fellow countrymen
on the other, however, allowed them to form a relatively distinct autonomous
and culturally bilingual social group with a unique identity that bred concerns
of its own. Most of the Indian leaders who negotiated the relations between
the colonial rulers and their subjects, reflected on the nature and impact of the
raj, and later led the independence movement that came from the ranks of the
new middle classes. They could play such an important role because they
only partially conformed to Macaulay’s ideal of a class that was “Indian in
blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in
intellect.” Macaulay’s Indians would have been culturally unilingual, and
could not by definition act as intercultural interpreters. The new middle
classes became both Indian and English in their ethics and culture—a dual
heritage that enabled them to resolve inevitable tensions in their own unique
ways—making them indispensable to both their countrymen and their rulers.
The Indian leaders’ responses to the new phase of colonial rule were in
some respects similar to and in others quite different from that of their
predecessors. Their ranks included both Muslims and Hindus—the latter in
an overwhelming majority. Some Muslim leaders welcomed the colonial rule
on the grounds that it represented new opportunities for Muslim regeneration,
a break with the feudal past, and a possible stimulus to modernizing the
Muslim society. Many however remained as indifferent or hostile to the new
phase of colonial rule as they were to the earlier one. When Delhi passed
under British occupation, Shah Abdul Aziz, a leading Muslim divine of
Delhi, issued a fatwa, insisting that since “Christians were in complete
control” India was a dar-ul-harb, and that Muslims had a duty to oppose the
colonial government. Following him, several religious leaders too declared
that it was wrong to learn English, promote better relations with the British,
and to serve them as clerks, servants, and soldiers. For decades, large masses
of Muslims remained more or less detached from the newly emerging Indian
society; turning themselves inward instead of embracing the transformation
that was occurring.
Although Hindu attitudes to the colonial rule were a mixture of welcome,
indifference, and hostility, a large body of Hindu leaders thought that a
moderated British presence was good. They all obviously disliked the harm
that was done to India; it had come to their attention that the colonial rule had
deindustrialized India, distorted its economic development, subordinated
Indian interests to those of Britain, and was in general, exploitative. They
were also convinced that British rule was racist, sometimes blatantly and at
other times subtly, and was demeaning to Indian people, history, and religion.
Some Hindus went so far as to argue that the colonial presence undermined
their cultural identity, “denationalized” them, and sought to turn their youth
into “carbon copies” of the English.
In spite of these criticisms, many Hindu leaders argued that the colonial
rule had improved India on several levels. For one, it gave India internal and
external security, an impartial system of justice, and the rule of law. It also
created security of property and released entrepreneurial energy. India was
given global visibility and an uninhibited access to distant parts of the British
Empire; the colonial rule brought modernity to India—especially the
scientific spirit of inquiry and the ideas of individual liberty and equality—
and led Indians to look critically at their institutions and practices. In so
doing, colonial rule “revitalized,” “awakened,” and “regenerated” the Indian
people, and gave them the confidence and opportunity to convey their
civilizational message to the rest of the world. Both by their example and as a
reaction to their rule, the British also aroused a new feeling of nationalism
among Indians—causing them to think of themselves as Indians for the first
time and alerting them to the need to overcome caste, religious, regional,
ethnic, and other divisions. The rise of national consciousness therefore went
hand in hand with the development of civic and public life and the civil
society; in addition to the virtues of cooperation, concerted action, self-
discipline, and mutual respect that went with them. In short, Hindu leaders
thought that the colonial rule had breathed new life into their “dead” society,
and marked nothing less than their “rebirth” in a form suited to the new
“yuga.”
In the view of Hindu leaders: political subjection, economic exploitation,
and racial humiliation were great harms to society, but inertia, lifelessness,
ignorance, blind conformity, lack of intellectual curiosity and self-criticism,
and severe social inequalities were also great evils. While colonial rule
brought some of these tribulations to India, it also successfully removed
others—causing such balance to be seen as a positive force by Hindu leaders.
Furthermore, they did not believe that India could have removed these evils
by its own efforts; they felt that if India was capable of concocting its own
remedies for its political, social, and economic ills, it would have done so
already. They also felt that the removal of India’s problems prior to British
colonization could have only been achieved by the gradual exposure to
Europe that colonial rule had introduced. Hindu leaders argued that India
needed the shock of humiliation to become aware of its evils and the sense of
urgency (instilled by Britain’s European example and exploitation) that was
required to deal with them; many of the virtues involved in successfully
transforming a nation could have only been acquired by sitting at the feet of
those who were already in possession of them—observing the British in
action and following the required discipline under their guidance. Colonial
rule was therefore both tapasya (a penance) and a process of education and
growth, both siksha and diksha; a nation, like a spiritual aspirant, needs a
guru. The British were “wise teachers” (Bankim), “good gurus” (Ram Mohun
Roy), and Indians should learn to be their “apt pupils” (Ghokhale and
Ranade). Despite the degradation that is sometimes associated with deeply
depending on others for guidance, Hindu leaders saw nothing wrong with
seeking the help of others in matters where the other party might be more
skillful—to think otherwise undermines the entire prospect of education.
Extending the Hindu theories of punarjanma and moksha to the life of the
nation, Hindu leaders argued that moksha (meaning in this case, liberation
from the cycle of foreign conquests and emergence into a state of full
freedom and self-determination) could not be attained in one life. A nation
had to go through several lives, each building on the qualities or sankaras
acquired in the preceding ones. As Ranade put it, every invasion in its history
had “disciplined” India and “developed its character.” The British rule was a
necessary stage in India’s evolution as it worked to develop the valuable
intellectual, civic, and political qualities that it had not yet acquired on its
own. If India could take full advantage of Britain’s example and undergo the
necessary “political training,” it was bound to emerge a greater and stronger
country. National independence was thought of as a “worthwhile” but not an
“absolute goal,” and one that should be reserved until the country was ready
for it (Gokhale and Motilal Nehru). As the sanyasins in Bankim’s
Anandamath were instructed by the mysterious voice, Hindu leaders still had
much to learn from the British and should therefore refrain from attempting
to overthrow its rule.
This moderately positive attitude to the British rule, however, was not
confined to the Hindu and Muslim middle classes. It was also shared by some
of the influential leaders of the lower castes, especially the dalits, such as Joti
Rao Phule, Ramaswamy Naicker, Narayana Guru, and even Ambedkar. They
argued that they had long been oppressed, even “enslaved” by the Brahmins,
and that they were, in some respects, treated better under the British who did
not practice untouchability and did not mind social and religious contacts
with the dalits. The lower classes also appreciated the modern ideas of human
dignity and equality that Britain brought forth to India; ideas used by the
dalits to overthrow the Brahmanic “tyranny.” Once the British introduced
representative institutions, Hindu leaders were forced to cultivate the dalits
and suitably restructure the Hindu society to acknowledge support in
numbers rather than according to caste. For many dalit leaders, British rule
opened up the possibility of their social and political emancipation and was
therefore welcomed. Some even thought of it as a “divine gift” and a “just”
punishment for the karma that the Brahmins must have accumulated during
their reign of exploiting other castes.
In light of this discussion of Hindu leaders’ assessments of colonial rule, it
is easy to see why they thought they had been easily conquered by a trading
company. It was common at the time to blame the superior British military
power for its strength in capacity and organized action. Most Hindu leaders
rejected both ideas. The British, more importantly, conquered India, not as
much by their military power, as by creating internal divisions and rifts
among the Indians and playing them off against each other (Vivekananda, B.
C. Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai, and others). Blaming Britain’s superior capacity on
its ability to organize efficiently would have also been futile; nothing
prevented the Indians from organizing or acting in unity to save themselves—
to trust each other, and subordinate their individual interests and egos to the
larger cause of self-defense against colonial dominance (Bankin, Gokhale,
Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and many others).
What Hindu leaders perceived to be the reason for British colonial rule was
contingent on each person’s own character or sanskaras and social structure.
What were perceived to be the character and structural flaws of each
demographic varied according to different leaders, but there was a broad
agreement that there were inherent problems embedded in the caste system,
egoism, false pride, social inequalities, lack of political and organizational
skills, hedonism, misguided otherworldliness, lack of concern for the poor
and oppressed, and so on. As Gandhi put it, the British had not taken India;
Indians had given it to them, and the apparent British strength was largely an
obverse of Indian weakness. Tagore put the same point more eloquently
when he said that the English presence was an “external incident, mere
maya,” behind which lay “the truth about ourselves.” The maya had no power
of its own; it both reflected and reproduced India’s own weakness. In
Tagore’s view, one foreign rule would be followed by another, and if all
foreign rule ended, it would be followed by the rule of India’s “own”
foreigners. According to Tagore, this cycle could only be broken if Indians
developed their intellectual and moral powers. He explains, “We must win
our country not from some foreigner but from our own inertia, our own
indifference” (these views were echoed alike by Bankim, Gokhale, Ranade,
Tilak, Naoroji, the two Nehrus, and many others).
Hindu leaders were convinced that once they developed the appropriate
intellectual and moral qualities and the consciousness of nationhood or of
being a “single people” (ekprajâ), national independence would be easily
won, and once gained—never lost. India would demand freedom as the very
necessity of its nature: its citizens would not be able to be themselves and
express their distinct identity in the absence of nationalism and independence.
Indians would furthermore gain appreciation for freedom, and would gain the
capacity to safeguard themselves from having to submit to the rule of an
outsider in the future. Tilak put it well when he observed, “I said that it was
our ‘right’ to have Home Rule, but that is a historical and a European way of
putting it. I go further and say that it is our ‘dharma.’” To him as to others,
dharma meant one’s true nature, one’s characteristic mode of self-expression
and self-activity.
A large body of Hindu leaders therefore either welcomed colonial rule or
accepted it as a regrettable historical necessity advancing a distinctly Hindu
metaphysic of colonialism that was suspiciously similar to the British
justification of colonial rule. Hindu motives were mixed: some were
employed by the Raj and had an interest in flattering their masters. Nearly all
of them were British-educated, shared British values, and had heavily vested
interests in the colonial culture—both emotionally and politically. Some of
them had deep doubts about their own (and their countrymen’s) capacity to
rule themselves. As Nehru once said, as in a prison, under a colonial rule,
people tended to exaggerate their weaknesses, undervalue their strengths, and
develop low self-esteem. While all this is true, it would be wrong to dismiss
Hindu colonial supporters as collaborators or ideologically brainwashed
colonial victims. Many of them were genuinely patriotic and resented
colonial subjection, but felt convinced that with all its degradations, the
British rule had shaken them out of their inertia, released regenerative forces,
and helped them build up valuable civic and political institutions. They might
have been wrong, but their sincerity is not something that should be called
into question.
The Hindu tendencies to build on colonial institutions rather than break
with them, to marginalize the traditional India as of little real value, to
criticize themselves and accept responsibility for their problems and failures
rather than blame the colonial rule, to receive new thoughts and not to turn
inward, to resort to a dubious metaphysic to make sense of their world, etc.
are just a few examples of how the Hindu conceptualization of colonial rule
was ultimately translated into a new form of Indian nationalism. But, why
Hindu leaders had such unbridled support for Britain’s rule is a complex
historical question that goes beyond the scope of this paper. What is
important to note is that the Hindu way of thinking (which was also shared by
many other Indian leaders as already mentioned) was a powerful strand in
nationalist thought and greatly affected how the leaders of independent India
would go about reforming Indian culture and society in the future.
Chapter Nine
Resistance to Colonialism: The Latin
American Legacy of José Martí[1]
Ofelia Schutte
Given the fact that Martí had already articulated his view that a “second
independence” was needed for the nineteenth-century Hispanic American
republics, based on his detection of what I would call a “colonial
intentionality” on the part of the U.S. expansionist political and economic
interests to use the Latin American countries primarily to suit their own
benefit at the latter’s expense, the text “Nuestra América” can be looked at as
a rhetorical strategy to rally the unified sentiment of his Latin American
readers against U.S. hegemony in the region. It is in embracing the vision of
“Nuestra América” (“Our America”) as different from the America to our
North that Martí hoped to rally a movement of resistance to the U.S.
economic and political hegemony taking place—or, as in the cases of Cuba
and Puerto Rico, imminently positioned to take place—after the demise of
Spanish colonialism.
Martí begins “Nuestra América” with a call to a battle of ideas based on the
“weapons of judgment,” which he claims are much more valuable than the
actual tactics of war. This confirms the view I proposed earlier regarding his
desire for a united front that would bear diplomatic weight against U.S.
hegemony in the region. Characterizing a village mentality as one that fails to
be concerned about the relationship between the local and the global (I am
rephrasing him using current terms) and, in that context, failing to see that
“giants in seven-league boots” can step on them, Martí calls for the
awakening of any remaining village mentality in America ([1891] 2002,
288).
The obstacles Martí faced for people to rally behind his vision of “nuestra
América” rested not only in ignorance and apathy with regard to the need for
political change, but in important structural problems that were a part of Latin
American history. Martí’s essay addresses both the external menace and the
internal outlooks that must be changed to resist it. Among the latter, two of
the most important were (1) overcoming the hierarchical and authoritarian
mentality inherited from the colonial period and (2) embracing the multiracial
composition of the continent which he called “nuestra América mestiza”
([1891] OC 6:19).[12] I argue that without invoking the terms “colonialism”
and “racism” in this essay, Martí was fighting a combination of both.[13] He
also constantly battled the Ibero-American upper- and middle-class
prejudices against working and humble people, reporting that their gaze was
focused on imitating European fashionable trends: “These sons of carpenters
who are ashamed that their father was a carpenter! These men born in
America who are ashamed of the mother that raised them because she wears
an Indian apron” ([1891] 2002, 289). He does not argue that whoever is born
in America, or is of indigenous, black, or mestizo origin, or comes from a
certain class, is in a cognitively privileged position to understand his or her
political situation. In fact, he is fully aware that the masses, just as with the
middle class, can only make progress if their consciousnesses are awakened
and take on an anti-colonialist stance.
Martí bases the process of liberation from colonialism on the mediating
role played by instituting an anti-colonialist republic and, of course, by the
consciousness of all those who create and defend it, even giving up their lives
if necessary ([1891] 2002, 293). So far this coincides with liberal political
sentiments of the time, which took a stand against the conservative ideologies
inherited from the colony and which tried to provide a mediating role for
incorporating indigenous and mestizo contributions toward a new national
project.[14] But Martí also inserted a strong dose of anti-hierarchical
“Americanism” with naturalist features into his platform. It is his naturalism
that provides the conceptual link between affirming a multiethnic America
and overcoming the hierarchical mentality of the colonial period. He claimed
that in our America one had “to govern with the soul of the earth and not
against or without it” ([1891] 2002, 292).[15] The failure to govern
appropriately meant that postcolonial Latin America was tired of having to
accommodate between “the discordant and hostile elements it inherited from
its perverse, despotic colonizer” and “the imported forms and ideas” ([1891]
2002, 292) that, lacking local reality, have delayed “the logical government”
(el gobierno lógico) (Martí [1891] OC 6:19).
What does Martí mean by “the logical government”? From what he says in
the essay, he seems to mean a government founded on the specific needs of
its people, not on imported, so-called universal formulas derived from
European models—or for that matter, from models imported from the United
States. This position is key to the importance his thought carries for
postcolonial critics and movements up to our own time. While Martí invokes
Enlightenment notions of reason and freedom, and of “the right of man
[human being] to the exercise of his reason” (“el derecho del hombre al
ejercicio de su razón” [OC 6:19]) in his view the exercise of reason is not
necessarily mediated by European values or extraterritorial powers. He refers
favorably to “the natural man” or to the “real man”: “the natural man . . .
knocks down the justice [justicia] accumulated in books because it is not
administered in accordance with the evident [patentes] needs of the country”
([1891] OC 6:18). Further on he invokes an Enlightenment ideal of
moderation, appealing to the “serene harmony of Nature” (OC 6:19–20) and
the “continent of light,” where with the help of a new generation engaged in
“critical reading [lectura crítica] . . . the real man is being born to America,
in these real times” ([1891] 2002, 293).
The real or natural man (or human being) of whom Martí speaks is
someone for whom the European concept of racial divisions and the socially
hierarchical society built on it do not apply. He places the distinction among
races as something that can provoke “futile hatreds” among peoples and
instead proclaims that “the justice of nature” reveals “the universal identity of
man” or, in today’s terms, of the human being ([1891] 2002, 295–96). “The
soul,” he continues, “equal and eternal, emanates from bodies that are diverse
in form and in color. Anyone who promotes and disseminates opposition and
hatred among the races is committing a sin against humanity” ([1891] 2002,
296). On this view he claims that “there is no racial hatred, because there are
no races” ([1891], 2002, 294). By “race” Martí appears to mean a class of
human beings that, on account of their color or related physical
characteristics, is thought to be superior or inferior to any other human type.
Although the concept post-dates him, Martí appears to think of “race” as a
socially constructed category. Specifically, he thought of it as a category that
delimits the humanity of the human being. In other words, for Martí, the
notion of “race” was always already imbedded within the discourse of
racism. In historical terms, he was probably correct but he lacked the critical
framework by which to speak of “race” as a socially constructed category.
What he did was to claim that in “nature” there was no such thing (this point
will be returned to later when the implications of his views for the Cuban
revolution of 1895 are discussed).
The “natural man” (or human being) of whom Martí speaks refers to
people of every color, all of whom he embraced in his alternative concept of
“nuestra América mestiza” ([1891] OC 6:19).[16] He reasoned that racial
prejudices were socioculturally constructed and could indeed result in
significant injustice toward targeted populations. This is why he warns that
there are indeed some acquired characteristics, dispositions, and interests that
accumulate over time in various peoples and that, at restless national
moments, can trigger in a dominant group what I have called “colonial
intentionalities” toward others whose appearance, color, and customs differ
from theirs. Such colonial intentionalities are described by Martí as “ideas
and habits of expansion, acquisition, vanity, and greed . . . that . . . , in a
period of internal disorder or precipitation of a people’s cumulative
character” could rise to the forefront and threaten the weaker countries, which
are represented as “perishable and inferior” by the dominant power ([1891]
2002, 296). Surely he uses diplomatic terms here to point out the potential for
U.S. expansionism toward the “isolated” and relatively “weak” Latin
American republics. He thinks the problem that he has outlined—in our
terms, the nascent conditions for neocolonialism—cannot be averted and that,
for the sake of the coming centuries’ peace, the facts of the impending
problem should be brought to light ([1891] 2002, 296).
Just as Martí enunciated a policy of governing according to the needs of
specific peoples in the light of reason and avoiding racial prejudice, he held a
view of the type of education that the peoples of “our America” should
receive in order to reach maturity in their democratic forms of government.
He engaged in a tacit polemic with the Argentine ruler and educator Domingo
Sarmiento, who had proposed the binary model of “civilization or barbarism”
according to which the civilizing goal of the Hispanic American republics
should be the importation of European ideas and the overcoming of the rural
(considered backward) ways of life and thinking found in the Argentine
pampas (Sarmiento [1845] 1998). Without naming Sarmiento, Martí
defended a different model of education and cultural development for the
American republics. “The battle is not between civilization and barbarity,” he
declared, “but between false erudition and nature” ([1891] 2002, 290). Here
we see that Martí recognized the binary by which Western colonizing thought
places “barbarity” on the side of “nature,” raising its own colonizing project
to that of a civilizing mission. But he wisely pointed out that this binary is a
form of “false erudition” and a false antagonism between culture and nature.
Since due to their exclusive reliance on Western models no Hispanic
American university curricula analyzed what is “unique to the peoples of
America,” he asks what kind of education will those aspiring to govern their
countries receive ([1891]2002, 291). In a pragmatic but also moral vein, he
decried that unless the pursuit of truth included seeking out the truth about
your own people—and by this he meant seeking out the subaltern populations
that were marginalized from knowledge, culture, and power—it would not be
possible to solve the problems that affect the people or the country.
Just as education should place priority on Our American history, the
manner of government should derive from the very own “constitution” of the
country (la constitución propia del país) ([1891] OC 6:17),[17] even if the
aim seems to be conceived by Martí as a universal one: to attain a state in
which all those who contribute to it, especially through their work, enjoy
freedom and prosperity. This is an Enlightenment model, with one major
variation. The methods and institutions through which a reasonable
government will be achieved are simply autochthonous. While Martí
appealed to Enlightenment concepts of “reason” and “liberty,” for him, both
of these were grounded in the recognition and appreciation of a non-
Eurocentric approach to Latin America’s sociocultural reality. Over the span
of the twentieth century, a significant tradition of Latin American
philosophical and political thought has been based on this Martían nuestra
Americanista ideal, which has functioned as a criterion of freedom from
colonialism and neocolonialism in diverse contexts. Perhaps the best known
of these is the selective appropriation of Martí’s ideas by the Marxist
leadership of the Cuban revolution. But many other examples abound,
including a strong influence on a sector of twentieth-century Latin American
philosophy (Schutte 1993; Cerutti Guldberg 1998) and on the politics of
United States, Latino, and Chicano studies since the 1980s (Saldívar 1990;
Acosta-Belén 1999).
What possible outcomes can Martí’s thought yield today for postcolonial
theory in the United States? I will explore two sides of this question in this
section. First, I juxtapose Martí’s position in “Nuestra América” to that of his
nineteenth-century contemporary, Sarmiento (1811–1888), in Facundo
(1845). Facundo is generally considered a paradigm of the Eurocentric
nationalist position in nineteenth-century postcolonial Latin America. In this
text Sarmiento outlines the dichotomy between “civilization” and
“barbarism” in the context of Argentina, which he diagnoses as two societies
with opposing values within the same country. I show that Sarmiento’s
binary opposition between “civilization” and “barbarism” is supported by
three other binaries, each of which is overturned by Martí to construct and
defend a multicultural non-Eurocentric vision of Latin America. The three
attending binaries are those of civilization/nature, the urban/the rural, and
Europe/America. For Sarmiento, the first of these terms must conquer the
second if there is to be any progress for the Argentine nation. Martí instead
proposes a perspective on nature, the rural, and America that, by contrast,
places the hopes of civilization and progress on the side of a balanced and
critical view of Latin America’s relationship with Europe and the United
States. In addition, he defends the multiethnic peoples of the Americas,
including peasants and people of humble means.
Second, I point out some differences between the reasoning Martí used to
advance his nuestra Americanista perspective against nineteenth-century
Eurocentrism and the reasoning some of us would use today at the start of the
twenty-first century. While Martí was successful in overturning Sarmiento’s
Eurocentric model of national identity and progress, he employed a naturalist
discourse currently outdated if we are to advocate comparable non-
Eurocentric, multicultural goals for our times.[18] In this respect, the
principal difference between Martí’s conceptual framework and ours is that
he appealed to nature to oppose social prejudice (a social construction)
whereas today we take our concept of nature, too, to be largely a product of
sociocultural construction. This allows us to make further distinctions that a
person of Martí’s generation and learning may have missed—for example,
with regard to gender. In conclusion, I argue that despite the differences in
our conceptual frameworks, the position Martí advocated in “Nuestra
América” should be a central element in the historical and political
appreciation of the relevance of Latin American political thought for
postcolonial theory and studies in our own time.
We may begin to unravel Martí’s overturning of Eurocentrism by
examining his deconstruction and transmutation of the “civilization versus
barbarism” metanarrative that, following Sarmiento’s account, ruled much of
Latin America’s nineteenth-century liberal political thought. Sarmiento
associated cultural progress with the “triumph of European civilization, its
institutions, and the wealth and liberty that come from it” (Sarmiento, 59). He
argued that nineteenth-century Argentina, as emblematic of “new American
societies,” was caught in an epic struggle “between European civilization and
indigenous barbarism, between intelligence and matter” (59). Sarmiento
provided a demographic context for this struggle: it is the struggle of the city
against the desert (81), of modernity against feudalism. “On the Argentine
plains . . . [s]ociety has completely disappeared; all that is left is the feudal
family, isolated, enclosed within itself, and with no collective society” (54).
Pointing out that when the people are dispersed among vast tracts of land, the
basic elements of modern civil society are absent, he argued that under such
conditions it was not possible for the police to work or to catch delinquents or
for children to receive standardized instruction in schools (54). Sarmiento
claimed that the gaucho way of life in the Argentine pampas represented the
site of barbarism. Even so, Sarmiento’s powerful descriptive prose can be
said to foster many inconsistencies. For example, Roberto González
Echevarría notes that “in trying to eradicate the gaucho, Sarmiento turned
him into a national symbol” (2003, 15).
Sarmiento argued that cities such as Buenos Aires and Córdoba contained
“books, ideas, civil spirit, courts, rights, laws, education: all the points of
contact and alliance that we have with Europeans” (79). Moreover, he
attributed the genealogy of South America’s independence from colonialism
to “the circulation of European ideas” (79). Such ideas, he claimed, were of
no interest in the countryside, so that the revolution of independence that
created the new South American republics was the product of urban,
European-based thinking, even if the countryside population used the
struggle to its own advantage. Two lifestyles within the same country
opposed each other: “The man of the city wears European dress, lives a
civilized life as we know it everywhere. . . . The man of the country wears
other dress, which I will call American, since it is common to all peoples; his
way of life is different, his needs, specific and limited” (53). The ideas of
progress, laws, access to education, civic organization, and various other
institutions found in cities could not be found in the countryside. Sarmiento
fails to note the differences both among Europeans and among Americans.
Obviously there were both conservative and progressive ideas in nineteenth-
century Europe. Moreover, even progressive ideas in Europe did not extend
necessarily to women’s rights or to non-Europeans in the colonies. Had this
not been the case, the Spanish colonies, Haitians, and colonized others
around the world would not have had to fight or shed blood for their
liberation. Similarly, to reduce all non-European dress to a single label,
“American,” fails to account for the ethnic and class differences within a very
diverse South America. It seems that for Sarmiento “European” became a
signifier for progress or, conversely, that he labeled “European” whatever he
promoted as “progress,” on the assumption that his audience will already
have made the same association. In sum, to that which appeared to show the
absence of European values or resistance to such values, he assigned the label
“barbarism.”
When political, economic, and cultural progress is seen as dependent on a
nation’s association with European ideas and with the replication of
European political institutions on American soil, there is little question that
the farther removed something or someone may appear from European
culture, the less civilized it will seem. Moreover, what is less civilized
appears as a possible or actual threat to civilization, so that the metanarrative
of civilization versus barbarism can easily be mapped on to the religious
narrative of good against evil. Suppression and eradication of barbarism (and,
by association, of evil) are legitimated under such narratives. Under the more
extreme forms of this ideology, a person’s worth is measured only in terms of
values associated with a particular ethnicity—namely, the European, or what
appears to resemble it.
The reason Martí is able to overturn the terms of Sarmiento’s binary is
because Martí held a very different concept of moral value. For Martí all
human beings are equal by nature insofar as they are human; they distinguish
themselves as morally virtuous or deficient according to their individual
actions, not according to their ethnicity, to which books they have read, or to
the region of the country or the world in which they reside. While Martí
defends the notions of cultural identity and difference, he rejects their use to
claim that individuals or people of one group are superior or inferior to those
of another group. “Both Latinos and [Anglo-]Saxons are equally capable of
virtues and defects,” he wrote in the journal Patria in 1894.[19] The virtues
and vices characterizing various ethnic or racial groups are socially
constructed, if by “social construction” we include people’s interaction with
the landscape or natural environment, which Martí thought was an important
part of a culture. This does not mean that there are no ethnic traits, or that
ethnic traits are easily overcome; peer approval, customs, and personal pride
for one’s own cultural traditions weigh heavily on the repeated performance
of ethnic characteristics. Nonetheless, it is possible by critical reading, noble
ideals, and work toward humanitarian common goals to overcome narrow-
mindedness and prejudice. For Martí, intellectual progress is not based on
how well Latin Americans understand European (and later, North American)
culture, but on how well they understand their own economic, cultural, and
political realities. Actually, since local and regional realities included
interactions with these other societies and cultures, what he advocated is the
ability to understand both in relationship to each other, with the proviso that
the priority should be to understand Latin American reality on non-
Eurocentric terms. To do so effectively one must set aside the idea that
European or North American ideas and institutions must serve as
unconditional models for Latin Americans. Instead, Martí held that to be
knowledgeable in our America is to be a creator of values, particularly since
these are emerging societies whose models of government are not pre-given.
They must be created (and at times even be invented) based on the actual
circumstances and needs of the people. “Governor, in a new country, means
Creator” (2002, 290).
The people, in turn, are conceived in an inclusive way: those at the margins
of society are not excluded from the representations of national or continental
identity. When Martí thought of “nuestra América,” he had a different vision
of Latin America than the one Sarmiento arrived at in Argentina. Martí had in
mind places where he had lived such as Guatemala and Mexico with their
vast indigenous populations as well as the Caribbean, with its great ethnic
and racial diversity, including its sizable African-descendant population.
Whereas Sarmiento saw two Argentinas (and by extension, two South
Americas)—one, European-like, and the other, primitive—Martí reversed his
glance toward Europe and saw two Spains—one bent on prolonging its
colonial hold over Cuba (which Martí characterized as brutal) and the other,
at least potentially sympathizing with the prospect of Cuba’s independence
from colonialism.[20] In other words, even within Spain and among Spanish
descendants Martí noticed and addressed the dialectic between colonialist and
anti-colonialist sentiments. This type of differentiation is extremely important
because it deflates the rushed and oversimplified stereotypes that so often
bitterly fuel religious, ethnic, and racial wars. Martí’s approach is not exempt
from generalizations (some of which will be addressed below). But his
interest in the diversity of the social and natural environments that help to
contextualize human character allows for flexibility in the otherwise tight
“match” (seen in Sarmiento’s Facundo) between a person’s identity and the
“location” from which she or he speaks, or acts.
NOTES
1. Translations from the Spanish-language works listed in the notes and references are my own. In a
few cases I have departed from the wording of texts available in English translations of José Martí. In
such cases, I indicate this by referencing only the Spanish-language edition for these passages.
2. In the interpretation of history, the poststructuralist questioning of the transparency of language and
of the subject of modern history strongly affect the contemporary critique of colonial discourse within a
postmodern context. See Patricia Seed, “Colonial and Post-Colonial Discourse,” Latin American
Research Review, 26, no. 3 (1991), 182–86.
3. Surely Martí did not imagine that—as the twentieth century demonstrated—Cuba would undergo a
political revolution that would attempt to resist U.S. hegemony on its own or with the help of an extra-
continental power such as the Soviet Union, without the backing of the majority of Hispanic American
republics.
4. In the 1891 article “Nuestra América” Martí contrasted the Indo-Hispanic, African-descendant, and
creole cultures of “our America” with the Anglo-based cultures of the United States. Roberto
Fernández Retamar has called attention to Martí’s use elsewhere of the expression “European America”
(Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker [Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989], 21, 24, 27 and passim; Martí, Obras Completas de José Martí,
[hereafter cited as OC] 25+ volumes [Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1963–65], 8:442), a term
that Retamar takes as a defining contrast to “nuestra América.” Martí referred to “la América Europea”
(European America) in an 1884 article describing a graduating ceremony at Vassar. The article contains
an interesting statement regarding his support for the advanced education of women (mellowed by his
simultaneous endorsement of women’s “feminine” traits). See “Una distribución de diplomas en un
colegio de los Estados Unidos” in OC 8:440–45.
5. For a discussion of Martí’s political formation during this period, see also Fernández Retamar,
“Prólogo,” in Martí, José, Política de nuestra América, edited by José Aricó (Mexico City: Siglo XXI,
1979), 26–28.
6. “De la tiranía de España supo salvarse la América española; y ahora, después de ver con ojos
judiciales los antecedentes, causas y factores del convite, urge decir, porque es la verdad, que ha
llegado para la América española la hora de declarar su segunda independencia” (OC 6:46).
7. In fact, Martí used the term colonialismo to describe the nature of the economic manipulation the
United States was engaging in before and during the 1889 hemispheric congress. He refers to “the
[economic] battle the United States is preparing to have with the rest of the world” and questions why
the United States should wage its [trade] battles against Europe “over the American republics, and try
out in free peoples its system of colonization?” (emphasis added; OC 6:57). This article was written in
New York on November 2, 1889, and published December 20, 1889, in La Nación, Buenos Aires.
8. “un pueblo que comienza a mirar como privilegio suyo la libertad, que es aspiración universal y
perenne del hombre, y a invocarla para privar a los pueblos de ella” (OC 6:53).
9. For a chronology of Martí’s life, see José Martí: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. by Esther Allen,
Introduction by Roberto González Echevarría (New York: Penguin, [1893] 2002), xxvii–xxxii. For a
biographical essay on Martí’s life and the historical reception of his work in Cuba and Latin America,
see Oscar Martí, “Martí and the Heroic Image,” José Martí’s “Nuestra América”: From National to
Hemispheric Cultural Studies, ed. Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1998), 317–38.
10. The two earlier stages of the war had been the Ten Years’ War or Big War (1868–1878) and the
Little War (1879–1880).
11. The earlier part of the nineteenth century had shown the territorial expansion of the United States
over previously Hispanic lands in the northern part of the continent. Florida was purchased from Spain
in 1819. Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, Nevada, and Utah were part
of Mexico in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Texas was part of Mexico until 1835 and
California until 1847. The rest were ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that
concluded the Mexican-American War in 1848 (see James Dunkerley, “Latin America since
Independence,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Latin American Culture, edited by John King
[New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 29). In 1855 the United States offered to buy Cuba
from Spain for one hundred million dollars. Spain was not interested (Martí 2002, xxvii).
12. Various translators have used “our mestizo America” to translate this phrase, although for Martí
“our America” is gendered female and is described as having the qualities of a nurturing, freedom-
loving mother. I am therefore retaining the term mestiza in the feminine. It is a mestiza America (not a
masculinized “mestizo” America) that Martí invokes and theorizes as “ours.” A famous speech of his
from December 1889, “Madre América” (“Mother America”) invokes the continent that nourishes its
children to independence from colonialism in feminine, maternal terms. See “Mother America,” in Our
America by José Martí: Writings on Latin America and the Cuban Struggle for Independence, ed.
Philip S. Foner (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 69–83.
13. The debate over whether Martí took sufficient steps to fight racism in Cuba will be considered
below.
14. For a classic study on nineteenth-century Latin American intellectual liberalism, including its
limitations, see Beatriz González Stephan, La historiografía literaria del liberalismo hispano-
americano del siglo XIX (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1987).
15. In terms of contemporary global politics, Martí’s position in favor of indigenous peoples and
peasants, and against the power of foreign corporations over regional and local resources, could be seen
as having some interesting affinities with the movement that the Indian environmental activist Vandana
Shiva calls “earth democracy.”
16. The term mestizaje has had multiple meanings and uses in the history of Latin America. It is
important to take its meaning in context. It is widely known that the term has been used in racist ways
to whiten and erase the presence and contributions of African-descendant and indigenous peoples.
However, it has also been used to challenge racism. I take it that Martí invoked the expansive, rather
than the reductionist, sense of “mestizaje.”
17. The translation by Esther Allen is possibly misleading here by referring to “the country’s natural
constitution” (Martí 2002, 290). Philosophically speaking, what is “propio” is neither reducible nor
equivalent to what is natural, since it can be “propio” (of one’s very own, of its very own) in a cultural
or historic sense. I also prefer to read the next sentence (“El gobierno no es más que el equilibrio de los
elementos naturales del país” [OC 6:17]) as meaning that government is nothing but the balance of the
country’s natural elements, which allows for personal judgment and collective action in recognizing
and/or facilitating such a balance, rather than Allen’s “The government is no more than an equilibrium
among the country’s natural elements” (Martí 2002, 290). If Martí had meant the latter, he could have
used the proposition “entre,” meaning “among,” but he did not.
18. This point is also shared by Jeffrey Belnap, “Headbands, Hemp Sandals, and Headdresses,” José
Martí’s “Nuestra América”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, ed. Jeffrey Belnap and
Raúl Fernández (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 208. I assume that the reason for this is
that today we are more aware that what we call “nature” is also largely a cultural construction.
19. “de virtudes y defectos son capaces por igual latinos and sajones” (OC 28:291).
20. Martí’s testimonial article, “Political Prison in Cuba,” published in 1871 in Spain, is a telling
example of this practice, already well defined for him at the age of eighteen.
21. I do not think that Martí’s principle of “just racism” is incompatible with the twentieth-century
principles of affirmative action (called “reverse discrimination” by its opponents in the United States)
as long as the measures are understood to be temporary and the measures’ objectives are as stated. He
apparently did not think such measures would be necessary in post-revolutionary nineteenth-century
Cuba because the Republic itself would be founded on non-discriminatory principles and during the
struggle many black leaders had already taken positions of power and responsibility in the
revolutionary movement. The Spanish American War, which interrupted the Cuban patriots’ struggle
for independence from Spain and imposed U.S. control over the island in 1898, cut short the vision for
which Martí gave up his life in 1895. With the United States imposing its own (anti-nuestra
Americanista) conditions for granting Cuban independence, the difficulties of achieving Martí’s racial
egalitarianism became fully apparent. For a comprehensive study of the racial question in Cuba, see
Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
22. Spain did not abolish slavery in Cuba until 1886, and did so in the aftermath of the treaty ending
the Ten Years’ War in 1878 (See Foner, pp. 13–14 and note 14). As a youth Martí witnessed slavery in
both the city and the countryside of Cuba. A section of his Versos sencillos describes the impact upon
witnessing the slave trade and a lynching on a small boy (presumably himself) who “swore / to wash
the crime away with his life.” “Un niño lo vio: tembló / De pasión por los que gimen: / Y, al pie del
muerto, juró / Lavar con su vida el crimen” (2002), 280–81. See also Hebert Pérez, “Martí, Race, and
Cuban Identity,” Monthly Review 55, no. 6, 2003.
23. In “My Race” Martí claimed that the first Cuban constitution of independence (1869) proclaimed
by the rebels freed the slaves, but this goal was not actually achieved within rebels’ control until
December 23, 1870, when the last provisions against slavery were removed (Foner, p. 314). De la
Fuente dates the themes of abolition and equality among the rebels as becoming prominent in 1871
(Fuente, 26).
24. To the racist and sexist question, “would you marry your daughter to a Negro?” Martí responded
that marriage is “the voluntary union between two beings of diverse sexes” (Martí 1978, 33). If the
daughter “that I would like to have,” he wrote, fell in love with a black man and her companion of
choice was both educated and of high moral character, he would support his daughter’s wishes. Martí’s
words on this subject were published for the first time in 1978 by Cuban scholars working on a new
critical edition of his writings. See also Pérez, 2003. I thank John Du Moulin for this reference. Over
the years Martí reunited several times with his wife, Carmen Zayas Bazán (with whom he had a son
born in Havana in 1878), but ultimately the reconciliations were unsuccessful. He is widely believed to
have had a daughter out of wedlock with Carmen Miyares de Mantilla in New York City in 1880. See
Martí, 2002, xxix. The Spanish colonial government did not lift the prohibition on interracial marriage
until 1881 (Stolcke, 39–41).
25. On the issue of sexual difference Martí was not egalitarian. For the most part he follows the
normative notions of gender difference held by his Latin American contemporaries.
26. He could have also considered “social construction” in an expanded sense, including the
interaction of individuals and communities with the natural landscape where they travel or reside.
27. One of the most prominent founders of Latin American Marxism was José Carlos Mariátegui
(1894–1930). For an analysis of his work, see Ofelia Schutte, Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in
Latin American Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 18–71.
28. A similar point was made by Foner in the Preface to his edition of Martí (1977, 9). Foner attributes
the observation about Emerson to Gordon Lewis, but does not provide a reference for it.
29. Retamar published his influential essay, “Calibán,” for the first time in Casa de las Américas, in
1968 (Havana, September-October 1971).
30. Walter Mignolo proposed the category “postoccidentalism” (in place of “postmodernism” or
“postcolonialism”) to name the tradition of Latin American thought, but despite its conceptual value,
the term has not caught on (“Posoccidentalismo: el argumento desde América Latina,” in Teorías sin
Disciplina: Latinoamericanismo, poscolonialidad y globalización en debate, edited by S. Castro-
Gómez and E. Mendieta [Mexico City: University of San Francisco and Miguel Angel Porrúa Editores,
1998], 33). Mignolo credits Roberto Fernández Retamar (“Our America and the West,” Social Text 15,
Fall [1976] 1986) for the term “postoccidental.”
31. For additional reading and perspectives beyond Martí, see José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven
Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, trans. Marjory Urquidi (Austin: University of Texas Press,
[1928] 1971); Fernández Retamar 1986, 1989; Schutte 1993; Mignolo, The Darker Side of the
Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); John Beverley et al., The
Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Santiago
Castro-Gómez and Eduardo Mendieta, eds., Teorías sin Disciplina: Latinoamericanismo,
poscolonialidad y globalización en debate (Mexico City: University of San Francisco and Miguel
Angel Porrúa Editores, 1998); Sara Castro-Klarén, ed., Latin American Women’s Narrative: Practices
and Theoretical Perspectives (Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana and Vervuert, 2003); Eduardo
Mendieta, Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2003); Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero, eds., After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments
of the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
Chapter Ten
Subaltern History as Political Thought
Dipesh Chakrabarty
One should note that this romantic-political faith in the masses was populist
as well, in a classical sense. Like Russian populism of the late nineteenth
century, this mode of thought not only sought political “goodness” in the
peasant but also, by that step, worked to convert so-called backwardness of
the peasant into a historical advantage. The peasant, “uncorrupted” by self-
tending individualism of the bourgeois and oriented to the needs of his or her
community, was imagined as already endowed with the capacity to usher in a
modernity different and more communitarian than what was prevalent in the
West.[13] An important result of the very restricted nature of franchise under
colonial rule and the induction of the peasant and the urban poor into the
nationalist movement was that constitutional law-making councils and the
street emerged, as it were, as rival and sometimes complementary institutions
of Indian democracy. “In the [legislative] Councils and the assemblies,”
wrote Shrikishna Datt Palival (1895–1968) in an essay in the Hindi monthly
Vishal Bharat (February 1936), “one meets power and wealth face to face
[and] the rulers’ rights are kept safe in a temple where [people’s]
representatives are denied entry, just like untouchables [in a Hindu
temple].”[14] The very restrictions put on constitutional politics then meant
that the field, the factory, and the street became major arenas for the struggle
for independence and self-rule—and it is these arenas that subaltern subjects
with their characteristic mode of politics (including practices of public
violence) entered into public life.
Mass-politics of Indian nationalism thus shared something in common with
the global characteristics of populism: the tendency to see a certain political
goodness in the peasant or in the masses; the tendency also to see historical
advantage where, by colonial judgment, there was only backwardness. To see
“advantage” in “backwardness” was also to challenge the time of stagist ideas
about history; it was to twist the time of the colonial “not yet” into the
structure of the democratic and anti-colonial “now.”
This short history of the romantic-populist origins of Indian democratic
thought—though not of Indian democracy as such and the distinction is
important—suggests a point fundamental to my exposition. The insistence, in
the early volumes of Subaltern Studies (first published in 1982) and in
Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India
(1983), that the peasant or the subaltern was always already political, not
“pre-political” in any developmentalist sense, was thus in some ways a
recapitulation of a populist premise often implicit in the anti-colonial mass
movements in British India.[15] But there was a difference too: the populism
in Subaltern Studies was more intense and explicit. There was, first of all, no
“fear of the masses” in Subaltern Studies analysis. Absent also, and this went
against the grain of classically Marxist or Leninist analysis, was any
discussion of the need for organization or a party. Guha and his colleagues
drew inspiration from Mao (particularly his 1927 report on the peasant
movement in the Hunan district) and Gramsci (mainly his Prison Notebooks).
This was, after all, the seventies: a period of global Maoism that Althusser
and others had made respectable, and excerpts from Gramsci’s notebooks had
come out in 1971. Both Gramsci and Mao were celebrated as a way out of
Stalinist or Soviet Marxism after Czechoslovakia of 1968. Many of the
historians in Subaltern Studies were participants in or sympathizers of the
Maoist movement that shook parts of India between 1969 and 1971.[16] Yet,
significantly, neither Mao’s references to the need for “leadership of the
Party” nor Gramsci’s strictures against “spontaneity” featured with any
degree of prominence in Elementary Aspects or Subaltern Studies. Guha’s
focus remained firmly on understanding the nature of the practices that made
up peasant insurgency in a period after the coming of colonial rule but before
they had been inducted into nationalism. Guha wanted to understand the
peasant as a collective author of these insurgencies by doing a structuralist
analysis of the space (and time) creating practices of mobilization,
communication, and public violence that constituted rebellion (and thus a
subaltern domain of politics). There were limitations, from Guha’s socialist
point of view, to what the peasants did, but these limitations did not call for
the mediation of a party. A cult of rebellion marked the early efforts of
Subaltern Studies, reminiscent of one of Mao’s sayings popular during the
Cultural Revolution: “to rebel is justified.” Indeed, from a global perspective,
one might say that Subaltern Studies was the last—or the latest—instance of
the long history of the romantic-popular search for a non-industrial
revolutionary subject that was initiated in, among other places, Russia in the
nineteenth century; that fundamentally shaped Maoism in the twentieth
century; and that left its imprint on the antinomies and ambiguities of
Antonio Gramsci.
The global romantic search for a revolutionary subject outside of the
industrialized West is exhausted today. Such a subject by definition could not
be the proletariat. Yet it was difficult to define a world-historical subject that
would take the place of the proletariat. Would the revolution, as Trotsky said,
be an act of substitutionism? Could the peasantry, under the guidance of the
party, be the revolutionary class? Would it be the category “subaltern” or
Fanon’s “the wretched of the earth”? When the young, left-Hegelian Marx
thought up the category of the proletariat as the new revolutionary subject of
history that would replace the bourgeoisie—this he did before Engels wrote
his book on the Manchester working class in 1844—there was a
philosophical precision to the name and it seemed to match on to the class of
workers born of the industrial revolution. But names like “peasants” (Mao),
“subaltern” (Gramsci), “wretched of the earth” (Fanon), and “the party as the
subject” (Lenin/Lukacs) have neither philosophical nor sociological
precision. It is as if the search for a revolutionary subject that was not-the-
proletariat (in the absence of a large working class) was an exercise in a
series of displacement of the original term. A telling case in point is Fanon
himself. The expression “the wretched of the earth,” as Fanon’s biographer
David Macey has pointed out, alludes to the Communist Internationale, the
song, “Debout, les damnés de la terrre / Arise, ye wretched of the earth,”
where it clearly refers to the proletariat.[17] Yet Fanon uses it to mean a
different subject he cannot quite define, but he is clear that, in the colony, it
cannot be the proletariat; early in his book he cautions that “Marxist analysis
should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the
colonial problem.”[18]
A collective subject with no proper name, a subject who can be named only
through a series of displacements of the original European term “the
proletariat” is a condition of both failure and of a new beginning. Where is
the beginning? First of all, the very imprecision speaks of the inadequacy of
Eurocentric thought. The history of this imprecision amounts to the
acknowledgment that if we want to understand the nature of popular political
practices globally with names of subjects invented in Europe, we can only
resort to a series of stand-ins (never mind the fact that the original may have a
simulacrum as well). This is because we are working at and on the limits of
European political thought even as we admit an affiliation to nineteenth-
century European revolutionary romanticism. Recognizing the stand-in
nature of categories like “the masses,” “the subaltern,” or “ the peasant” is the
first step toward writing histories of democracies that have emerged through
the mass-politics of anti-colonial nationalism. There is a mass-subject here.
But it can only be apprehended by consciously working through the limits of
European thought. A straightforward search for a revolutionary world-
historical subject only leads to stand-ins. Hardt and Negri’s “multitude,” is,
for all the brilliance of their analysis of global capitalism, another such stand-
in. But their use of the category “multitude” does register a question and a
task of our times: how do we name and write histories of the mass-subject of
politics today?[19]
Another failure of Subaltern Studies is clear here that serves as yet another
beginning. Guha’s great insight of peasant insurgency was that it was an act
of a collective subject, not of a collection of individuals. As a historian, Guha
did not want to psychologize this subject. He did not write either about a
Jungian collective unconscious or have recourse to any idea of “mob” or
“crowd” or even revolutionary group psychology. In other words, he did not
see the collective in the model of an individual or as making up a “one.” It
came into being conjuncturally; there was no need to conceive of it as
something as a transcendent entity continuing from one rebellion to another
though, clearly, insurgencies were mediated by memories of other
insurgencies. Guha’s own creative, though problematic, approach to
apprehending this subject lay through marrying French structuralism with a
Hegelian idea of a retrospectively read consciousness.[20] I am not sure that
the method succeeded. There were many criticisms of the lack of a proper
sociology to his method, of the fact that he treated so-called tribals, rich
peasants, poor peasants, and the landless on a par. Who exactly was the
subaltern? The critics had a field day shooting us down with these questions.
But I think there was something salutary in Guha’s insistence that the subject
of an insurgency was collective and in his refusal to see this collective either
additively—as a collection of individuals—or as something having a mind or
psychology of its own. In other words, this was not a subject whose history
could be written on a biographical model of birth and subsequent growth
toward maturity (the model prevalent in labor histories). In other words, even
the idea of the subject—an autonomous, sovereign being—had to be
“stretched” (in Fanon’s sense of the word) in order to be at all pliable in the
context of subaltern history.
This negative gesture of Guha’s throws a profound challenge to the
discipline of history. Historians of collective practices often practice a
methodological individualism that aligns the discipline with the practices of
the state or the elites. Imagine how inquisitors and the police deal with
collective acts they consider threatening or subversive. They pull individuals
out of the collective for the purpose of interrogation.[21] The same happens
in the court of law. Indeed, attempts on the part of historians such as George
Rudé to humanize the revolutionary “crowd” by finding individual “faces” in
it, is predicated on a prior individuation by the interrogatory process of the
police and the court. This mode of individuation may be easily recognized as
something central to the very operation of disciplinary power, as Foucault
once said: it individuates in order to control. But this tendency to treat the
collective agent as a collection of so many individuals—when we know that
the rioting crowd has indeed a collective agency—is also central to a very
particular form of political thought: the Hobbesian understanding of state
sovereignty. Historians of the subaltern classes uncritically ally themselves
with such thinking when they follow the police and the law in dissolving the
collective agency of the “crowd” or “the masses” into the story of “so many
individuals (“ringleaders” or not).
The political philosopher Etienne Balibar captures well the “fear of the
masses” that is built into this individuating procedure. He makes the point in
the context of a discussion of the difference between Spinoza’s and Hobbes’
attitude toward “the masses” that Spinoza called “the multitude.” I need to
quote Balibar in extensor—the relevant and important point comes at the very
end of the quote. Balibar writes:
Hobbes no less than Spinoza, of course, is a theorist haunted by the fear of the masses and their
natural tendency to subversion. His entire organization of the state, including the way in which the
distinction between the public and the private sphere operates, can be understood as a system of
preventive defense against the mass movements that form the basis of civil wars . . . and of
revolutions. It is in this context that the multitudo becomes in his writings the initial concept in the
definition of the contract [Leviathan, chs. 17, 18] . . . , in order to constitute the system juridically
and establish it ideologically (on equality). But in Hobbes’s writings it is only a question of a point
of departure, which is immediately left behind. Hobbes carefully separates the two elements that
Spinoza wants to bring together (thus intimately combining democratism and Machiavellian
realism). For Hobbes, the multitude that establishes the contract is not the concept of the mass; it is
the concept (“methodologically” individualist, as current Anglo-American sociologists say) of a
“people” always already decomposed, reduced in advance (preventively) to the sum of its
constituent atoms (people in the state of nature), and capable of entering one by one, through the
contract, into the new institutional relationship of civil society.[22]
NOTES
1. Hayden White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation,” The
Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997), 72.
2. F. R. Ankersmit, “Hayden White’s Appeal to Historians,” Historical Representation (Palo Alto,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 256.
3. White, 1997, 70–71.
4. White, 1997, 72.
5. Hayden White, “Historical Employment and the Problem of Truth,” Probing the Limits of
Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1992), 48. See also page 52. An angry denunciation of White’s position is elaborated in Carlo
Ginzburg’s essay “Just One Witness” in the same volume, 83–96. Martin Jay’s essay (“Of Plots,
Witnesses, and Judgments,” 97–107) attempts to produce a middle ground between White and
Ginzburg if not the “middle voice.”
6. See E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon Books,
1975).
7. I discuss this in some detail in my essay “A Small History of Subaltern Studies” chapter 1 in my
Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002), 1.
8. See the discussion in the Introduction to my book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought
and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
9. See Chakrabarty (2000) “Introduction” for details.
10. See Gyanendra Pandey’s essay on the topic in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds.,
Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
11. Francesca Orsini, “The Hindi Public Sphere and Political Discourse in the Twentieth Century,”
unpublished paper presented at a conference on “The Sites of the Political in South Asia,” Berlin,
October 2003.
12. Ibid.
13. For an excellent discussion of this point, see Andrzej Walicki, The Controversy Over Capitalism:
Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1989), chapters 1 and 2, in particular the section “The Privilege of Backwardness.”
14. Cited in Orsini, “The Hindi Public Sphere.”
15. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1983), chapter 1.
16. Shahid Amin, “De-Ghettoising the Histories of the non-West,” Gyan Prakash, “The Location of
Scholarship,” and my “Globalization, Democracy, and the Evacuation of History?” in At Home in
Diaspora: South Asian Scholars and the West, eds. Jackie Assayag and Veronique Benei
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
17. David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador, 2000), 177.
18. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press,
1963), 40.
19. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), part 4.
20. This may be seen as operating throughout the text of Elementary Aspects.
21. Carlo Ginzburg’s work is very instructive on this point. See his essay, “The Inquisitor as
Anthropologist” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 156–64. See also Carlo Ginzburg, The Night
Battles Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne
Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
22. Etienne Balibar, “Spinoza, the Anti-Orwell: The Fear of the Masses,” in Masses, Classes, Ideas:
Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 16. Emphasis added.
23. Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetic of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 21–23.
24. Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (Berkeley and New Delhi:
University of California Press and Oxford University Press, 1995).
25. Amin says: “In Naujad’s mind, chutki [a pinch of grain], bhik [alms], and gerua [ochre] clothes
together distinguished the otiyars of Chauri Chaura,” 176.
26. Ibid., 175–76.
Chapter Eleven
Double Consciousness and the Democratic
Ideal
Emmanuel C. Eze
In 1615 the British Isles had been an economically unremarkable, politically fractious and
strategically second-class entity. Two hundred years later the Great Britain had acquired the largest
empire the world had ever seen, encompassing forty-three colonies in five continents. The title of
Patrick Colquhoun’s Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire in Every
Quarter of the Globe (1814) said it all. They had robbed the Spaniards, copied the Dutch, beaten
the French and plundered the Indians. Now they ruled supreme. Was all this done “in a fit of
absence of mind”? Plainly not. From the reign of Elizabeth I onwards, there had been a sustained
campaign to take over the empires of others. Yet commerce and conquest by themselves would not
have sufficed to achieve this, no matter what the strengths of British financial and naval power.
There had also to be colonization.[2]
Colonialism has led to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and . . .
Africans and peoples of African descent, and people of Asian descent and indigenous peoples were
victims of colonialism and continue to be victims of its consequences.[3]
Lugard indicates that for Britain alone, the population in 1600 was 4,800,000,
in 1800 about 16,000,000, and in 1900 about 42,000,000.[11]
It would seem that Thomas Malthus has indeed been proven wrong, but
this would be the case only if we ignored the true meaning of the processes of
colonization as a form of “plantation.” How many ethnic groups were
“cleansed” in order to make room for the colonial European expansion?
Lugard’s nineteenth-century calculation conforms quite closely with figures
advanced by today’s historians. In 2003, Ferguson calculated that between
the early 1600s and the 1950s, “more than 20 million people left the British
Isles to begin new lives across the seas,” and “only a minority ever
returned.”[12] How many of the colonized peoples’ resources (material and
symbolic) had to be “repatriated”—(as Khan complained in the case of India)
or, in an arrangement Lugard euphemistically called mutually beneficial
“commerce”— in order to nourish Europe’s exploding population and the
insatiable capitalist engines of its Industrial Revolution?
Race, Capitalist Slavery, and the Colonial Project
Colonialism as a mode of imperial expansion was part of a larger historical
process—it contributed to Europe’s self-fashioning into a force of global
capitalist modernity. The brutality of this modern economic process is
nowhere as evident as in the institution of transatlantic slavery. The
antiquities in all societies—from the Athenian through the Ashanti to the
Roman—seem to have known slavery in some form: indentured servitude,
religious caste systems, or other forms of extreme class division within a
society that renders a particular section of population exploitable, with or
without rights of citizenship. But scholars of slavery agree that there was
something unique and unrepeatable about modern, transatlantic, and racial
African slavery. For the first time in human history the enslaver did not call
the enslaved “dog” or “beast” merely metaphorically. On account of skin
color, it was presumed that Africans were a “race unlike any other”—a race
whose enslavement, regardless of class or caste, was considered
“scientifically” valid. From high theorists of colonization (e.g., Hegel, Hume,
etc.) to the direct beneficiaries of the institution (e.g., British Jamaican and
American “planters,” such as John Long and Samuel Cartwright) modern
European intellectuals, on the basis of a strange influence of an Old
Testament myth about a Ham cursed by God, believed that they have found a
natural and legitimate “article of trade” in the person of the “black” African.
In addition to the economic, religious, and cultural reasons to colonize,
dispossess, and “civilize,” other nations, it was the theory of racial difference
that most served as justification for transatlantic slavery. John Newton, the
composer of the perennial religious hymn “Amazing Grace” became a
successful slave trader after his conversion to evangelical and missionary
Christianity, sailing across the Atlantic to import captured Africans for sale
throughout the Americas. In a letter of 26 January 1753 to his wife, a letter
composed during one of his voyages with his African “cargo,” he mused:
The three greatest blessings of which human nature is capable, are, undoubtedly, religion, liberty,
and love. In each of these how highly has God distinguished me! But here are whole nations
around me, whose languages are entirely different from each other, yet I believe they all agree in
this, that they have no words among them expressive of these engaging ideas: from whence I infer,
that the ideas themselves have no place in their minds. And as there is no medium between light
and darkness, these poor creatures are not only strangers to the advantages which I enjoy but are
plunged in all the contrary evils.[13]
Most highlands of Central Africa, including the head of the Zambezi River
surveyed by Livingstone and his team, proved, in fact, unsuitable for any
successful planting of an English colony. But the intent was clear, and failure
to achieve the intention in this case could be characterized as an exception
rather than the rule.
Some historians pretend to be at a loss when asked about the forces that led to
the demise of the slave trade and, eventually, the colonialism which justified
itself in part by claiming to be a “legitimate” and morally worthy alternative
to slave trading. Others accurately point out the failures of the earliest
colonial projects to convert Africans to the Christian religion. From daily
diaries of missionaries, colonial anthropological studies, and anti-colonial
writings, evidence suggests fierce cultural resistance on behalf of natives to
all forms of conquest and colonization. The complaints Livingstone confided
to his diaries during his first mission to Africa were typical. After seven years
of preaching the Gospel in Southern Africa, and after having learned the
Bakwena language, Livingstone appears to have made only one convert—and
a backsliding one at that. The neophyte, Chief Sechele, according to
Livingstone’s complaints, goes straight from the church back into his hut “to
drink beer.” Maintaining his evangelical optimism, however, Livingstone
thought: “A minister who has not seen as much pioneer service as I have
done would have been shocked to have seen so little effect produced by an
earnest discourse concerning the future Judgment.” But situations rapidly
deteriorated. The chief soon enough completely lapsed, beyond beer
drinking, to polygamy.
In Things Fall Apart, a novel in which the dominant theme is the British
colonial penetration of Eastern Nigeria, Chinua Achebe conveys a story about
a dialogue between Christian evangelists and their potential converts.
When they had all gathered, the white man began to speak to them. He spoke through an
interpreter who was an Ibo man, though his dialect was different. . . . Many people laughed at his
dialect and the way he used words strangely. Instead of saying “myself” he always said “my
buttocks.” . . . And he told them about this new God, the Creator of all the world and all the men
and women. . . .
At this point an old man said he had a question . . .
“If we leave our gods and follow your god . . . who will protect us from the anger of our neglected
gods and ancestors?”
“Your gods are not alive and cannot do you any harm,” replied the white man. “They are pieces of
wood and stone.”
When this was interpreted to the men of Mbanta, they broke into derisive laughter.
[T]he interpreter spoke about the Son of God whose name was Jesu Kristi. Okonkwo, who only
stayed in the hope that it might come to chasing the men out of the village or whipping them, now
said:
“You told us with your own mouth that there was only one god. Now you talk about his son. He
must have a wife, then.” The crowd agreed.
“I did not say He had a wife,” said the interpreter, somewhat lamely.
“Your buttocks said he had a son,” said the joker. “So he must have a wife and all of them must
have buttocks.”
The missionary ignored him and went on to talk about the Holy Trinity. At the end of it Okonkwo
was fully convinced that the man was mad. He shrugged his shoulders and went away to tap his
afternoon palm-wine.[19]
But Du Bois provides that word (or the African American response to the
racial insinuations of white people) in The Souls, from his own biography and
also from a historical sociology of the African American people.
Many commentators like to call Du Bois a “Race Man,” but often forget to
make clear that, like anti-imperialists and anti-colonialists anywhere (e.g.,
Gandhi, Césaire, Fanon, Senghor, or King), Du Bois was playing a racial
hand that the architects of empire, colonialism, slavery, and white supremacy
had dealt by developing the very idea of race. “Race,” as theorists from
Todorov to Mills remind us—and as we saw in Section 1, in the writings of
British colonialists—was entirely a modern European idea; an invention
driven by minority settler populations of European descent who needed terms
in which their own claims to colonizer superiority (and thus the inferiority of
the colonized) could be represented—either as a Divine ordinance or as a
Natural fact. Du Bois, in The Souls, was clearly caught in the
pseudometaphysics of history generated by white thinkers and worked to
cement what should have been considered an established racial disorder.
“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and the Roman, the Teuton and the
Mongolian,” he ventured, “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a
veil, and gifted with second-sight.” But none of the subsequent arguments of
The Souls or his other writings (like “Conservation of Races,” where he
offered biological as well as historical arguments to justify the cosmic
missions of each supposedly racial type) were able to convince a reader who
did not already believe in the existence of races (as one might believe in a
religion), that non-racialized modern processes could exist amid the ever
racialization of human populations. Why, for example, should seven races
exist when five, eight, twelve, twenty, or any other number of plausible
divisions can just as easily be conceived?
The strength of The Souls, instead, lies elsewhere. In describing the African
American as “second-sighted,” Du Bois was providing an existential and
psychological description that is instructive in understanding the
psychological legacies of economic, political, and social policies of slavery
and then racial segregation, in the colonial and postcolonial United States as
in elsewhere. The racially blackened slave or the freed Negro in the whitened
nation-spaces of the Americas, Du Bois recorded, comes to racial awareness
of the self “through the revelation of the other world.” This revelation, he
explained,
is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts,
two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone
keeps it from being torn asunder.[27]
Some metaphors from Hegel might allow one to see that Du Bois
dialectically came to a trans-racial answer to the racial (or racist) questions
that modern European colonialism and slavery in the United States had
posed. Like Senghor in Africa, Du Bois nursed the idea that in the cauldron
of African colonialism and American slavery lay the seeds of emergence of a
truly universal liberation of the self—of the colonizer as of the colonized—
from Nature. It was therefore in the pursuit of moral greatness for all races
that Du Bois, as Senghor thought, lay the conditions of freedom and integrity
for the colonized, as well as for the colonizing cultures and civilization.
It would be an error to read this dilemma as the familiar “If I had to choose
between my country and my friend, may God help me to choose my friend.”
Our conclusion would be different if, for example, instead of the police, the
story had said that our protagonist had been confronted by a delegation from
the Ulamma. The better analogy might be to another story that we could use
to illustrate Du Bois’s revised concept of double consciousness: an African
American professor of philosophy at a New York University remarked that
he was very concerned about terrorism in a cosmic way but, on a daily basis,
on account of a cross between his gender and his skin color, he believed he
should, by objective analysis of potential harm to his person, be more
concerned about the police.[37]
If these opinions reflect the sentiments of significant segments of racial,
religious, or postcolonial minority populations (the “second-sighted,” in Du
Bois terms) in the United States, the questions implicit in these opinions, and
which we should address, bearing classical social and political theories in
mind, are obvious. One of these questions would be: What is the function of
trust—trust in fellow citizens, in civil institutions and their public spaces of
shared life—for the functioning of a democracy? Is it possible that racial
double consciousness and postcolonial or postfundamentalist religious liberal
ambivalence, even as we celebrate their unarguably social revolutionary
potential in modernity and postmodernity, retains some of these revolutionary
characteristics as claims for diversity, but that it is also a claim fueled by
deformations in the social body? I prefer this sociological reading of the
question to Du Bois’s pseudometaphysical or theological arguments for racial
or any other forms of difference. Likewise, this question clearly does not
permit a return to any longing for a pre-Weberian enchanted sense of
community. The issue is not whether individuals or communities that form
nations could become racially fundamentally, religiously fundamentally, or
markedly fundamentally committed. Plainly, they do. But it would be useful
to interrogate in what sense such fundamental “identities,” even in their most
lucid forms, may be responses to what, following the example of continental
philosophers, one might characterize as a different, and differed order of lack
in the subject. Such a lack—the contours of which fundamental commitments
to race, religion, “the market,” or political nationalism might themselves be
merely the existential figures—demands, it seems, more careful historical
analyses, and patience, than the usual rhetoric of the liberal Right or the
liberal Left is willing or capable to exercise.
NOTES
1. I have therefore liberally relied on the most recent comprehensive study of the phenomena, namely,
Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2003).
2. Ferguson (2003), 51–52.
3. Durban Declaration of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia,
and Related Intolerance, 2001.
4. Seid Hossein Khan, The Seir Mutaqherin: or Review of Modern Times: Being an History of India,
From the Year 118 to the Year 1194 (Calcutta: Cambray and Co., [1789] 1903).
5. Ferguson (2003), 47–48.
6. Many historians are convinced that British economic policies—notably laissez faire and the faith
that “market forces” will correct for the impact of the 1877 famine—contributed to the neglect that led
to many more deaths than would have been necessary under appropriate government intervention
measures. Some historians have compared the British colonial policy in this famine to the Nazi uses of
hunger against the Jews in Germany. But others disagree, noting as difference the fact that while it was
wrong for any government to rely on market forces to stave off a major farming, the actions of the
British colonial government, unlike Hitler’s, was not murderous in intent if in fact.
7. Khan (1789).
8. J. J. J. Keswick, Calcutta business tycoon, in Ferguson (2003), 200.
9. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
10. Ferguson (2003), 56.
11. Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1965), 3,
note 1.
12. Ferguson (2003), 53.
13. John Newton, in Ferguson (2003), 79.
14. Against those who would excuse slavery on grounds that the African was less human than any
other or yet to be “civilized,” David Livingstone, who had the advantage of having lived in Africa
(though as an unsuccessful evangelist; he discovered that Africans were not interested to replace their
own religious myths with those of the Christian church), was quick to draw on this experience for his
defense of the dignity of the African. In Africa, rather than in chains at sea or enslaved in the
plantations of the New World, Africans, Livingstone wrote, are “wiser than their white neighbors.” In
contrast to those who write about Africa without ever having lived among them, Livingstone offers that
for all the years he spent on the continent, he “never entertained any suspicions of foul play while
among pure Negroes and was with one or two exceptions always treated politely, indeed so thoroughly
civil were the more central tribes [that] . . . a missionary of ordinary prudence and tact would certainly
secure respect.” Because of these experiences he not only refused to believe he wrote in any attribution
of “incapacity of the African in either mind or heart,” but also claimed: “In reference to the status of the
Africans among the nations of the earth, we have seen nothing to justify the notion that they are of a
different ‘breed’ or ‘species’ from the most civilized.” Livingstone, in Ferguson (2003), 129.
15. George Macartney, in Ferguson (2003), 35.
16. The Biafra genocide of the 1960s in modern Nigeria and the on-going civil strife in the Igbo
regions of that country, as well as today’s ethnic cleansing of so-called black Africans in the Darfur
region of Sudan, could be said to have been set in motion by the British colonial states which
engineered the political geographies of both modern Nigeria and modern Sudan. At national
independence, the reins of state in both countries were unequally yielded—in continuation of the
colonial policy of Indirect Rule, a policy first formulated by Lugard—to powerful feudal Islamist
elements in each country.
17. “The sort of men who are wanted for missionaries,” Livingstone exhorted, “are such as I see
before me. I beg you to direct your attention to Africa; . . . I go back to Africa to try to make an open
path for commerce and Christianity; do you carry out the work which I have begun. I LEAVE IT TO
YOU.” Livingstone, in Ferguson (2003), 155.
18. Livingstone, in Ferguson (2003), 156.
19. Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 144–46, passim.
20. As recently as the early 1960s, my parents could not get me admitted to a Catholic school until I
changed my name, through a Baptismal ritual, from Chukwudi (“God with us”) to Emmanuel (also
“God with us”!). The first, because of its Igbo sound, was considered by the officiating priests and
nuns, who were also the school’s admission officers, as too close to my great-grandparents’ “pagan”
background (my parents themselves, as my grandparents, had converted to Christianity, though all
continued to speak the Igbo language instead of colonial English or the Catholic ritual language of
Latin).
21. Ferguson writes: “This was an astonishing volte face . . . After the British first came to Sierra
Leone in 1562 it did not take long to become slave traders. In the subsequent two and a half centuries . .
. more than three million Africans were shipped into bondage in British ships [alone]. But then toward
the end of the eighteenth century, something changed dramatically; it was almost as if a switch was
flicked in the British psyche. Suddenly they started shipping slaves back to West Africa and setting
them free.” Ferguson (2003), 115–16.
22. Kezo, in Ferguson (2003), 115.
23. Whether we read about these new problems in the memoirs of Mahatma Gandhi, the
psychoanalytic racial theories of Frantz Fanon, or in the hearty poems of Wole Soyinka, such as his
1962 “Telephone Conversation,” generations of writers from the outerposts of Europe’s self-exhausted
empires commemorate experiences of postcolonial racism that greet the postcolonized “native” in the
metropolitan centers of Old Europe. Today, when it is not open discrimination in accommodation, it
may be corporate pay structures that pay the postcolonial immigrant 30 percent less for equal work.
Whether up from plantation slavery in the Americas, or up from the underbelly of the extremities of ex-
British and ex-European colonies, racism and xenophobia on global scales, as the Durban Declaration
maintained, remain among the most severe consequences of the modern imperial expansions of Europe
and its colonization of other peoples.
24. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America,
1638–1870,” Doctoral Thesis, Harvard University, 1895 (published 1896).
25. Samuel Johnson remarked, in Taxation No Tyranny, “How is it that the loudest YELPS for liberty
come from the drivers of Negroes?” (London: T. Cadell, 1775).
26. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (New York: Bantam, 1989), 1–2.
27. Du Bois (1989), 3.
28. The Supreme Court of the United States, Gratz et al. v. Bollinger et al., no. 02615, decided 23
June 2003. Whether the Court’s optimism is realistic or not, it provides nevertheless a right prism
through which to think about the problem of race and racialism in the coming centuries. Unlike the
distinctions that may obtain in non-human species, or across species, racial identities, the Court
implicitly acknowledged, may not be thought of as natural kinds, but instead as social and historical
divisions.
29. “The history of the American Negro,” Du Bois wrote, “is the history of this strife—this longing to
attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he
wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too
much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white
Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it
possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American,” Du Bois (1989), 3.
30. Available records indicate that, in addition to being a medical officer in the Confederate army,
Cartwright was also “a professor of diseases of the Negro,” in the Medical Faculty of the University of
Louisiana. His “cure” for drapetomania was simple: amputation of the toes—surely, to prevent the
slave’s run for freedom. Extended studies of Cartwright’s medical work may be found in Alexander
Thomas and Samuel Sillen, Racism and Psychiatry (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1974) and J.
D. Guillory, “The Pro-Slavery Arguments of Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright,” Louisiana History 9 (1968):
209–27.
31. Du Bois, “Preface,” Dark Water: Voices from within the Veil (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1920).
32. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Transcendentalist,” 1843; in The Emerson Reader (New York: Library of
America, 1983).
33. Terri Hume Oliver, “‘Double Consciousness’ in Souls,” Introduction to The Souls of Black Folks
by W. E. B. Du Bios (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
34. Akeel Bilgrami, “What is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity,” Critical
Inquiry, Summer (1992), 824–25.
35. Bilgrami (1992), 827.
36. Bilgrami (1992), 827.
37. This conversation occurred a few days after Ahmadu Diallo, a West African immigrant, was
“mistakenly” shot forty-one times by two New York Police officers.
Chapter Twelve
Colonialism and the State of Exception[1]
Margaret Kohn
The Hola concentration camp was located in a remote and desolate area of
Kenya. In 1959, the seventh year of the State of Emergency, it was divided
into two sections. There was an “open camp,” for former members of the
Mau Mau movement who were willing to cooperate with British officials but
still too dangerous to return home. The “closed camp” contained about five
hundred of the most hard-core prisoners who had endured years of detention,
torture, hunger, and brutality without confessing their oaths to support the
Mau Mau movement. The British press and the House of Commons had
begun to show some interest in the fate of the massive numbers of Kenyan
detainees, and a motion to authorize an independent inquiry into the
conditions in the camps had recently failed by a vote of 288 to 232. The local
British officials decided that they had to dismantle the camps quickly, but
first they had to break the last of the detainees, even if this meant
systematically employing torture.
On March 3, 1959, Hola’s Camp Commandant, G. M. Sullivan, decided to
implement the Cowan Plan, which was a systematic application of methods
that had been used haphazardly throughout the Emergency. The plan was
based on the concept of “dilution,” a tactic that had been successful in other
camps. Hard-core inmates were broken up into small groups, surrounded by
British officials and African guards, and beaten until they agreed to confess
their oaths and comply with all commands. Given the prisoners’ commitment
not to violate their oath of secrecy, this amounted to an order to beat them to
death. And that is exactly what happened. According to one survivor of the
Hola Massacre, the guards selected around one hundred detainees and
brought them to a work site, where they were ordered to dig an irrigation
trench.[2] Hundreds of armed African guards had been called in to execute
the plan. When the detainees refused to begin work, claiming they couldn’t
possibly complete the task in the time allotted, Sullivan blew a whistle and
the guards began beating them with clubs, sticks, and shovels. After a second
whistle, the officers counted six dead bodies. Sullivan blew a whistle again
and the massacre continued until there were ten dead and dozens more
severely injured.
The camp officials tried to cover up the massacre, claiming that the ten
men died after accidentally drinking tainted water, but overwhelming
evidence contradicted this account. An investigation ensued, and Senior
Resident Magistrate W. H. Goudie concluded, “In each case death was found
to have been caused by shock and hemorrhage due to multiple bruising
caused by violence.”[3] Despite the undeniable evidence of excessive force,
Goudie found that no criminal wrongdoing had occurred. He concluded that
it was impossible to decide which blows were legitimate attempts to force
detainees to work and which were excessively punitive. In any case, the
actions were carried out under the directive of the Cowan Plan and the judge
felt that it was not the responsibility of the judiciary to evaluate questions of
colonial policy.
Although the massacre at the Hola Camp attained some notoriety in the
British press, it was by no means a unique instance of violence against Mau
Mau detainees. In her book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of
Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, Caroline Elkins documents widespread patterns of
rape, torture, and murder. She estimates that 1.5 million Kikuyu were
detained during the State of Emergency (1952–1959), either in concentration
camps or in villages that were surrounded by trenches and barbed wire to cut
off any contact between Mau Mau guerrillas and their supporters. British
officials put the number of Kikuyu dead at 11,000, but Elkins uses
demographic data to support other estimates that the number of casualties is
closer to 100,000.[4]
Ironically, the State of Emergency that was implemented in order to secure
British rule may have accelerated decolonization. Although the Emergency
achieved the goal of crushing the Mau Mau, it also made colonial
government more costly, both economically and politically. Moreover, it
undermined the popular myths that European control over Africa brought
legality, civilization, and economic development to indigenous peoples. From
one perspective, some might see this episode in colonial history as evidence
that it is ultimately impossible to defeat a popular movement for national
liberation. But this optimistic assessment overlooks the long-term political
consequences of the State of Emergency. The State of Emergency was an
intensification of existing modes of colonial governance that destroyed the
remnants of indigenous sources of authority and order and replaced them
with unmitigated coercion. This essay focuses on the work of two African
intellectuals, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Achille Mbembe. Both have suggested
that the State of Emergency reveals the inner logic of “colonial rationality.”
Furthermore, they both draw attention to the way that this logic continues to
structure postcolonial states and undermine popular government. Their work
advances current debates in political theory by deepening our understanding
of the political effects of the state of exception. Moreover, their approach to
the concept of the state of exception, with its attentiveness to the lawlessness
at the heart of legality itself, illuminates the problem of founding a new state
out of the violent vestiges of the old order.
In the past decade there has been renewed interest in the related concepts of
martial law, emergency powers, and the state of exception. The state of
exception exists when the response to crisis involves granting prerogative to
the military or the executive and curtailing the rights of citizens and their
representatives.[5] In the field of political theory, this interest has focused on
the controversial work of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben. Agamben
published a timely book entitled State of Exception that concluded that the
state of exception (or martial law) is a space devoid of law. He argued that it
is not the logical consequence of the state’s right to self-defense, nor is it a
straightforward attempt to reestablish the juridical order by violating the letter
of the law.[6] For Agamben, martial law and other exceptional measures
reveal the Janus face of sovereignty: the power to declare the state of
exception is the same power that invests individuals with rights.
Until recently, most of the scholarly research on the state of exception had
focused on the paradigmatic case of Weimar Germany and the influential
writing of Carl Schmitt.[7] The age of empire, however, forced an earlier
generation of political and legal theorists to confront the conceptual
difficulties that emerge when the law provides for its own suspension.[8] In
the nineteenth century, the frequent and bloody use of martial law to quell
uprisings in the colonies was the occasion for extended public and scholarly
debates about the nature and limits of the law.[9] Surprisingly few
contemporary political theorists have considered the significance of
emergency measures in consolidating colonial rule and structuring
postcolonial governance.[10]
Two notable exceptions are Achille Mbembe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
Ngugi is a novelist and critic who lived through the State of Emergency as a
youth in rural Kenya. Two of his best-known novels, A Grain of Wheat and
Weep Not Child, are extended reflections on the moral and political
ramifications of the Emergency.[11] His treatment of the topic, however,
differs from the existing literature. Most of the debates about the state of
exception—for example the famous dispute between William Carlyle and
John Stuart Mill about martial law in Jamaica—take the legitimacy of
colonialism for granted.[12] The subject of disagreement is confined to the
necessity, effectiveness, and negative consequences of extralegal measures.
Ngugi approaches the topic from the opposite perspective and forces the
reader to ask what the emergency tells us about the legitimacy of colonialism
itself. The most interesting aspect of his work, however, is his penetrating
and complex analysis of the colonial approach to law and exception and the
way that it structured the postcolonial state. Ngugi’s literary depiction of
postcolonial Kenya is similar to Mbembe’s theoretical concept of
commandement, the distinctive form of governmentality in colonial and
postcolonial regimes. Drawing on the work of Mbembe and Ngugi, this essay
tries to understand the way that the colonial polity’s distinctive approach to
law and exception contributed to the authoritarian character of many
postcolonial African states.[13]
Although Ngugi does not use the language of law and exception, this remark
explains why something like the State of Emergency was an exception, albeit
one that revealed the logic of the law itself. During normal times, a mode of
governmentality that fosters fear, self-interest, and passivity ensures
compliance; when hegemony breaks down, then the “exceptional” side of law
and order—the use of force rather than fear—is necessary.
Ngugi’s work makes a number of contributions to the literature on the state
of exception. Most notable is his narrative rendering of the micropolitics of
life under Emergency Law. Reading his novels made me think of Hannah
Arendt’s claim that, “No philosophy, no analysis, no aphorism, be it ever so
profound, can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a properly
narrated story.” His most recent novel Wizard of the Crow, is a particularly
searing and satirical indictment of postcolonial African dictatorship. With its
seven hundred pages, multiple story lines, and layers of allegory, magical
realism, and absurdist humor, it is a novel that defies any simple summary.
Rather than trying to do so, I turn to the work of Achille Mbembe, political
theorist who develops a similar critique of postcolonial governmentality.
CONCLUSION
NOTES
1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2007 Association for Political Theory
Conference. I greatly benefited from the comments of my fellow panelists. I would especially like to
thank my collaborator Keally McBride, who introduced me to Ngugi. A version of this chapter appears
in Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride, Political Theories of Decolonization (Oxford University Press,
2011). All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.
2. The issue of forced labor was controversial because the detainees argued that they had not been
convicted of any crime and therefore could not be punished by hard labor. They claimed that they were
equivalent to prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention and could not be forced to work. See
Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, Mau Mau Detainee: The Account by a Kenyan African of His Experiences in
Detention Camps, 1953–1960 (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1975).
3. Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York:
Henry Holt, 2005), 347.
4. Elkins (2005), 429.
5. Clement Fatovic, Paper presented at the American Political Science Association Meeting, August
2006.
6. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2005).
7. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); William E. Scheuerman, Between Norm and Exception:
The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Ellen Kennedy,
Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
8. Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2003).
9. Rande Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
10. There are several exceptions, including Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency and Kostal, A
Jurisprudence of Power.
11. For a general discussion of the political theory that emerges in Ngugi’s writing, see M. S. C.
Okolo, African Literature as Political Philosophy (Dakar: CODESRIA Books, 2007).
12. See Margaret Kohn and Daniel O’Neill, “A Tale of Two Indias: Burke and Mill on Racism and
Slavery in the West Indies and America,” Political Theory (34): 2006.
13. Ngugi’s analysis of postcolonial Kenya bares a striking resemblance to Mbembe’s. In Petals of
Blood he advances the view that independence has done little more than put a black mask on the face of
neocolonial exploitation. Although African elites now run the government and have a share of
economic privilege, the basic political structure of commandement and the economic system of imperial
capitalism remain unchanged. But Ngugi’s analysis of the colonial régime d’exception has distinctive
elements that are worth considering in some detail.
14. In this paper I use the term Emergency to refer to the period of Kenyan history (1952–1960) when
the country was governed by special laws adopted to combat the Mau Mau. These laws included
measures that made it a capital crime for natives to take an oath of solidarity, to possess a weapon, to
criticize the government or to give material aid to the fighters in the forest. The Emergency also refers
to practices such as torture, screening, arbitrary arrest and incarceration for extended periods, forced
labor, and mass confinement in villages surrounded by barbed wire. These practices were widely used
and reflected the colonial government’s view that it was fighting a civil war and therefore the rule of
law did not apply.
15. Weep Not, Child was Ngugi’s first published novel (London: Heinemann 1964). His second novel,
The River Between, was written first (London: Heinemann, 1965).
16. The colonial state implemented a series of measures to ensure that peasant cultivators were forced
into the wage-economy where they would have to work for low wages on white farms. First, the
government established reserves limiting the areas where Kikuyu could live. Those who couldn’t gain
access to the limited supply of land were forced into wage labor. Second, the government enacted a hut
tax that amounted to the equivalent of two months of African wages. To ensure the docility of labor,
they also implemented a pass system and anyone outside of the reserves without a valid labor contract
could be fined or imprisoned. See Bruce Berman, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic
of Domination (London: Currey, 1990).
17. Lynn M. Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003).
18. See E. Adriaan et al., eds., Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and Power in West African Societies:
Perspectives from Legal Anthropology (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 1998).
19. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism (London: James Currey, 1996).
20. Martin Chanock, Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and
Zambia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
21. Mamdani (1996), 37–61.
22. Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1978).
23. Bruce Berman, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination (London:
James Currey, 1990), 368.
24. James Ngugi, Weep Not, Child (London and Ibdan: Heinemann 1967), 84–85.
25. The scholarly consensus is that Kenyatta was not a supporter of the Mau Mau. There is also
evidence that the Judge (Ransley Thacker) was bribed to ensure a conviction despite the paucity of
evidence. See John Lonsdale, “Kenyatta’s Trials: Breaking and Making an African Nationalist,” in The
Moral World of the Law, ed. Peter Cross (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), 196–239.
26. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (revised edition) (Oxford and Johannesburg: Heinemann,
1986), 34. Although these page numbers are from the revised edition (because it is more widely
accessible), my reading is based on the original edition.
27. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994).
28. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986), 53.
29. For example, Patrick Williams concludes that “uncertainties notwithstanding, the general
implications of the points in the preceding paragraphs seem reasonably clear: the nation (the people)
can be relied upon to work things out for themselves.” Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986), 76. For a similar
view, see Jan Mohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1983).
30. See, for example, C. B. Robson, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (London: Macmillan, 1979).
31. David Cook and Michael Okenimpke, Ngugi wa Thiong’o: An Exploration of His Writings
(Oxford: James Currey, 1997), 172.
32. Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (London and Nairobi:
Heinemann, 1977), 23.
33. Ngugi and Micere (1977), 25.
34. Ngugi and Micere (1977), 25.
35. To translate Kimathi’s argument into the language of European legal theory, his position is a
radicalization of the well-known position of Dicey who advanced a political understanding of the rule
of law (e.g., parliamentary supremacy) and challenged the German concept of rechtstaat, a formal
notion that rulers are bound by the laws that they make. For an excellent discussion of this issue, see
Franz Neumann, The Rule of Law: Political Theory and the Legal System in Modern Society
(Heidelberg and Dover: Berg, 1986); Judith N. Shklar, “Political Theory and the Rule of Law,” in
Hutcheson and Monahan, eds., The Rule of Law: Ideal or Ideology (Toronto: Carswell, 1987); H. L. A.
Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
36. Ngugi and Micere (1977), 25–26.
37. Ngugi and Micere (1977), 32.
38. Ngugi and Micere (1977), 34.
39. In Detained Ngugi explains that the motive for his arrest was not the critical views contained in his
English language novels but rather his involvement in the Kamiriithu Community Education and
Cultural Centre. Together with the villagers, he wrote and produced a play that told the story of Kenyan
history from the perspective of peasants and workers. When government officials heard about this
project, they withdrew the permit for public performance, raised the cultural center to the ground, and
arrested Ngugi.
40. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (Nairobi and London: Heinemann, 1981),
4.
41. Ngugi (1981), 32–33.
42. Ngugi (1981), 40.
43. Yash P. Ghai and P. McAuslan, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya: A Study of the Legal
Framework of Government from Colonial Times to the Present (New York and Nairobi: Oxford
University Press, 1970).
44. These examples are cited in Ngugi (1981), 44–45.
45. Mamdani (1996), 63–64.
46. Ngugi (1981), 19.
47. Ngugi (1981), 19.
48. Ngugi (1981), 13.
49. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
50. For an interesting, thoughtful analysis and critique of social theory, see Carole Pateman, The
Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). See also Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
51. See for example, Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. Jennifer Pitts
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
52. Mbembe (2001), 25.
53. Mbembe (2001), 25.
54. See, for example, W. F. Finlason, The history of the Jamaica Case founded upon official or
authentic documents, and containing an account of the debates in Parliament and the Criminal
Prosecutions arising out of the case (London: Chapman and Hall, 1868).
55. Mill was the most outspoken critic in Parliament of the use of martial law in the colonies. He also
took a very vocal and controversial role criticizing the government for failing to prosecute John Edward
Eyre, the colonial governor of Jamaica, for atrocities committed against blacks during a state of
emergency. See Kostal, 2006.
56. Mbembe (2001), 31.
57. Mbembe (2001), 28.
58. See Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial
Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
59. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria,” in Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. Jennifer Pitts
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
60. Mbembe (2001), 46.
Index
Aboriginal nations, 1
Achebe, Chinua, 1 , 2
Achugar, Hugo, 1
Acosta-Belén, Edna, 1
Adair, James, 1
Africa, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19
, 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 ,
37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51
Africa, Eastern, 1 , 2
African Americans, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10
African slavery, 1 , 2 , 3
Agamben, Giorgio, 1
Alaska, 1 , 2
Alexander the Great, 1 , 2
Alfred, Taiaiake, 1
Algeria, 1
Algonquians, 1 , 2
Althusser, Louis, 1
America, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ,
19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ,
36 , 37 , 38
America, Hispanic, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
America, native, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
American Revolution, 1 , 2
Americas, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ,
19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23
Amerindia, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16
Amin, Shahid, 1 , 2 , 3
Amsterdam, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Anglo-America, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Anglo-Saxon, 1 , 2
Ankersmit, F. R., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Appiah, Anthony, 1
Arendt, Hannah, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Argentina, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7
Ashanti, 1
Aristotle, 1
Asia, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ,
20 , 21 , 22 , 23
Athens, 1
Atlantic Ocean, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Augsburg, 1
Augustine, St., 1 , 2
Aurobindo, 1
Austria, 1
Aziz, Shah Abdul, 1
Baghdad, 1 , 2
Baines, Thomas, 1
Bakwena language, 1
Balibar, Etienne, 1
Bedinfeld, Commander Norman, 1
Belnap, Jeffrey, 1
Bengal, 1 , 2
Bentham, Jeremy, 1 , 2
Berlin Conference of 1884, 1
Berry, Christopher, 1
Bhabha, Homi, 1
Bilgrami, Akeel, 1 , 2
Bittlingmayer, Uwe, 1
Bohemia, 1
Bolivia, 1
Bombay, 1
Bourdieu, Pierre, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ,
17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25
Brazil, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17
Brecht, Bertolt, 1
Britain, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ,
19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ,
36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 ,
53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 ; colonialism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ,
10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 ; Parliament, 1 , 2 , 3
British East India Company, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Bruce Jr., Dickson D., 1
Buarque de Holanda, Sérgio, 1
Buenos Aires, 1
Burke, Edmund, 1 , 2
Bush, George W., 1
Calcutta, 1 , 2
California, 1
Calvinism, 1
Cambridge University, 1 , 2
Canada, 1
capitalism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18
, 19 , 20 , 21
Caribbean, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14
Carlos V, 1 , 2
Carlyle, William, 1
Cartwright, Samuel Adolphus, 1 , 2 , 3
de las Casas, Bartolome, 1
Catalonia, 1
Cayugas, 1
Central America, 1
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 1 , 2
Chanock, Martin, 1
Chaplin, Joyce, 1
Charles II, 1 , 2
Charlevoix, 1
Chaterjee, Partha, 1
Chaunu, Pierre, 1
Chin, Wang, 1
China, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14
Chomsky, Noam, 1
Christianity, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16
Circumcision Controversy, Kenyan, 1
Cobban, Alfred, 1
Cocke, Captain Lasse, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Cold War, 1 , 2
Colón. See Columbus, Christopher
Colonial Secretary’s office, 1
Colquhoun, Patrick, 1
Columbus, Christopher, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
commandement, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
commercium, 1 , 2
Committee of Trade and Plantations, 1
Communism, 1 , 2
communitarianism, 1 , 2
“Congo Free State,” 1
conservatism, 1 , 2
contractarianism, 1 , 2
Córdoba, 1
Covenant Chain confederation, 1
Cowan Plan, 1 , 2
Cree, 1
Crusades, 1 , 2
Cuba, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19
Cultural Revolution, 1
customary law, 1 , 2 , 3
Cyprus, 1
Czechoslovakia, 1
Darnton, Robert, 1 , 2
Davies, Sir John, 1
Declaration of Independence, 1 , 2
Delaware, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13
Delhi, 1
democracy, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18
, 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27
Derrida, Jacques, 1
Descartes, René, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
despotism, 1 , 2 , 3
Diderot, Denis, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17
, 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25
Dirlik, Arif, 1
Domingo de Santa Tomas, 1
Donoughmore Commission, 1
double consciousness, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11
doux commerce, 1
Du Bois, W. E. B., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ,
17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22
Dunbar, James, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16
Durban Declaration, 1
East Indies, 1 , 2 , 3
Echevarría, Roberto González, 1
egalitarianism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Egypt, 1 , 2 , 3
Elkins, Caroline, 1
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1 , 2
Empire, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14
Engels, Friedrich, 1
England, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ,
19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ,
36 , 37 ; colonialism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ; Poor Laws, 1
Enlightenment, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17
, 18 , 19 , 20 , 21
Eurocentricism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17
, 18 , 19 , 20 , 21
Europe, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ,
19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ,
36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 ,
53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 ,
70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 , 85 , 86 ,
87 , 88 , 89 , 90 , 91 , 92 , 93 , 94 , 95 , 96 , 97 , 98 , 99 , 100 , 101 , 102 ,
103 , 104 , 105 , 106 , 107 , 108 , 109 , 110 , 111 , 112 , 113 , 114 , 115 ,
116 , 117 , 118 , 119 , 120 , 121 , 122 , 123 , 124 , 125
Europe, Anglo-Germanic, 1
Europe, Eastern, 1 , 2 , 3
European colonialism and settlement, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12
, 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20
Fanon, Franz, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
feminism, 1 , 2 , 3
Ferguson, Adam, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7
Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 1 , 2
Ferrer, Ada, 1 , 2
feudalism, 1 , 2
Fiji, 1
Finland, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
First Legislative Assembly of Pennsylvania, 1
First Nations, 1
Five Nations, 1 , 2 , 3
Flanders, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Florida, 1
Foucault, Michel, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
France, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ,
19 , 20 , 21
Fraser, Nancy, 1
Free Society of Traders, 1
French Revolution, 1 , 2
Freud, Sigmund, 1
Freyre, Gilberto, 1 , 2 , 3
Galileo, Galilei, 1
Gandhi, Mohandas, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12
Gellner, Ernest, 1 , 2
Genoa, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Germany, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7
Ghana, 1
Ghulam, Sayid, 1
Gibbon, Edward, 1
globalization, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9
Glorious Revolution, 1
Goel, Sita Ram, 1
Goethe, Johann, 1
Goudie, W. H., 1
Gramsci, Antonio, 1 , 2 , 3
Great Awakening, 1
Great Britain, 1 , 2 , 3 . See also England; Scotland
Greece, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Grogan, Colonel, 1
Grotius, Hugo, 1 , 2 , 3
Guarani, 1
Guatemala, 1 , 2
Guha, Ranajit, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Guldberg, Horacio Cerutti, 1
Guru, Narayana, 1 , 2
Habermas, Jürgen, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10
habitus, 1 , 2 , 3
Haiti, 1
Hammer, Heinrich, 1
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, 1 , 2 , 3
Haudenosaunee, 1
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9
Heidegger, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1
Hill, Christopher, 1
Hinduism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ,
19 , 20
Hirschman, Albert, 1 , 2
Ho, Cheng, 1
Hobbes, Thomas, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7
Hobsbawm, Eric, 1
Hola concentration camp, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Holland. See Netherlands
Holme, Thomas, 1
Holocaust, 1 , 2
Home, Henry, Lord Kames, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Home Rule, 1
Honneth, Axel, 1
Hume, David, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Hungary, 1
Hupacasath, 1
Hurons, 1 , 2
Hussein, Saddam, 1
Iberian peoples, 1
Imperialism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ,
18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26
India, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ,
20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 ,
37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 ,
54 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 ,
71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 , 85 , 86 , 87 ,
88 , 89 , 90 , 91 , 92 , 93 , 94 , 95 , 96 , 97
Imperium, 1
Indian Constituent Assembly, 1
Indian National Congress, 1 , 2
Indies trading companies, 1 , 2 , 3
Indigenous, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12
Industrial Revolution, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Innu, 1 , 2
International Monetary Fund, 1
“Interregional System,” 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12
Iraq, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Ireland, 1
Iroquois, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14
Islam, 1 , 2
Italy, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
ius gentium, 1 , 2
ius cosmopoliticum, 1
Jamaica, 1 , 2 , 3
James, C. L. R., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Japan, 1
Jennings, Francis, 1 , 2
Jones, William, 1
Jordan, Terry, 1
Judaism, 1 , 2
Jung, Carl, 1
Kames, Lord. See Homes, Henry, Lord Kames
Kanienkeha, 1
Kanien’kehaka, 1 , 2
Kant, Immanuel, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Kaups, Matti, 1
Kenya, 1 , 2 , 3
Kenyatta, Jomo, 1 , 2 , 3
Khan, Gholam Hossein, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Khan, Husain, 1
Khan, Syed Ahmed, 1
Kikuyu, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Kimathi, Dedan, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
Kirk, Dr. John, 1
Kreckel, Reinhard, 1 , 2 , 3
Kuhn, Thomas, 1 , 2
Kupperman, Karen, 1
Kurds, 1 , 2
Labat, Jean Baptiste, 1
Late Woodland Owasco, 1
Latin America, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17
, 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 ,
35
law, rule of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
Lebanon, 1
Lenin, 1 , 2 , 3
Lenman, Bruce, 1
Lenape, Lenni, 1 , 2 , 3
Leopold, King of Belgium, 1
Lepanto, 1
Leroy Little Bear, 1
Levinas, 1 , 2
liberalism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18
, 19 , 20 , 21
Liberia, 1 , 2
Lisbon, 1
Livingstone, David, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Locke, John, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Logan, James, 1 , 2 , 3
Long, John, 1
Loyalists, 1
Lugard, Lord Frederick, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Lyall, Alfred, 1
Lyotard, Francois, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Macartney, Sir George, 1
Macaulay, Thomas, 1
Macey, David, 1
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 1
Mahicans, 1
majoritarianism, 1
Malthus, Thomas, 1 , 2
Mamdani, Mahmood, 1 , 2
Marcuse, Herbert, 1
Mariategui, Jose Carlos, 1
Mao Tse-Tung, 1 , 2 , 3
Martí, José, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ; “My Race,” 1 ; “Nuesta America,” 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
, 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ; Patria, 1
Marx, Groucho, 1
Marx, Karl, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17
Maryland, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7
Mau Mau, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9
Mbanta, 1
Mbembe, Achille, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11
Mediterranean, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Memmi, Albert, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Merrell, James, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Mesopotamia, 1 , 2
Methodists, 1
Mexico, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Micere, Githae Mugo, 1 , 2 , 3
Mignolo, Walter, 1 , 2
Mill, James, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
Mill, John Stuart, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ,
17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ; “Civilization,” 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; “A Few Thoughts on
Non-Intervention,” 1 , 2 , 3 ; On Liberty, Considerations on Representative
Government, 1 , 2
Minisinks, 1
modernity, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11
Mohawk, 1 , 2
Mongol Empire, 1
Mongolian, 1 , 2
Mudimbe, V. Y., 1
Mughal Empire, 1 , 2 , 3
Mukherjee, Radhakamal, 1
multiculturalism, 1
Muslim society, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15
Nandy, Ashis, 1
Naoroji, 1
Natal Code of Native Law of 1891, 1
Native Courts Regulations of 1897, 1
Native Pass Regulations, 1
native peoples, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
naturalism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Naujadi, 1
Nazi, 1
Needham, Joseph, 1
Negri, Antonio. See Hardt, Michael
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 1 , 2
Nehru, Motilal, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Netherlands, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16
Neumann, Franz, 1
New Sweden Settlement, 1 , 2
Newton, John, 1 , 2
New World, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
New York, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
New Zealand, 1
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 ; Detained,
1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ; A Grain of Wheat, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ; Petals of Blood, 1 ;
The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (Micere Githae Mugo), 1 , 2 ; Weep Not, Child,
1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ; Wizard of the Crow, 1
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Nigeria, 1 , 2 , 3
North America, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10
Old Testament, 1
Oliver, Terri Hume, 1
Oneidas, 1
Onkwehonwe, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Onondagas, 1
orientalism, 1 , 2 , 3
Orsini, Francesca, 1
Ottoman Empire, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 1
Pacific Ocean, 1 , 2 , 3
Palival, Shrikishna Datt, 1
Panama, 1
Parekh, Bhiku, 1 , 2
Parmenides, 1
patrimonialism, 1
Penn, William, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Pennsylvania, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12
periphery, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
personalism, 1 , 2
Peru, 1 , 2
Plato, 1 , 2
pluralism, 1 , 2 , 3
Plutarch, 1 , 2
Pocock, J. G. A., 1 , 2 , 3
populism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Port Alberni, 1
Portugal, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12
postcolonialism, postcolonial condition, postcolonial studies, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ,
6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ,
24
Potosí, 1 , 2
Prakash, Gyan, 1
Preservation of Order by Night Regulations of 1901, 1
Privy Council, The, 1
Protestantism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Public Security Act, 1
Puerto Rico, 1 , 2
Pufendorf, Samuel, 1
Puritanism, 1
Quechua, 1
Qutb, Sayyid, 1
racial self, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
racism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18
Radhakrishnan, 1
Raj, 1 , 2
Rameu, 1
Ranade, 1 , 2 , 3
Rancière, Jacques, 1
Raus, Virgina, 1
Rawls, John, 1 , 2 , 3
Raynal, Abbé, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9
realism, 1
Recht, 1
Reformation, 1 , 2
Renaissance, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10
republicanism, 1
Richter, Daniel, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Robertson, William, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16
, 17 ; The Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du
commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ,
10 , 11 , 12
Romanticism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
Rome, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Roy, Ram Mohun, 1 , 2 , 3
Royal Commissions, 1
Rudé, George, 1 , 2 , 3
Russia, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Said, Edward, 1 , 2 , 3
Saldivar, José, 1 , 2
Sarmiento, Domingo, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
Schama, Simon, 1
Schmitt, Carl, 1 , 2
Scientific Revolution, 1 , 2 , 3
Scotland, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ; Scottish Enlightenment, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Sechele, Chief, 1
Senecas, 1
Senghor, Leopold, 1 , 2 , 3
Seville, 1 , 2 , 3
Shackamaxon, 1
Shia, 1
Sicily, 1
Siconese, 1
Sikhism, 1
Sinus Magnus, 1
Sistani, 1
Smith, Adam, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ; Lectures on Jurisprudence, 1 , 2 ; Theory of
Moral Sentiments, 1 , 2 , 3
social contract theory, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
socialism, 1 , 2 , 3
Society of Traders, 1
Socrates, 1
Sombart, Werner, 1 , 2
South Africa, 1
South America, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Soviet Union, 1
Spain, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19
, 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26
Spanish-American War of 1989, 1
Spanish colonialism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Spanish settlements, 1
Spinoza, 1 , 2 , 3
Spivak, Gayatri, 1
Sri Lanka, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Stalin, Joseph, 1
State of Emergency, Kenyan, 1 , 2 , 3
state of nature, 1 , 2
Stoicism, 1
Stokes, Eric, 1
Subaltern Studies, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
subjectivism, 1
Sugrue, Thomas, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Sullivan, G. M., 1
Sunnis, 1
Supreme Court of United States, 1
Surinam, 1
Susquehannocks, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ,
17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24
Swanendale, 1
Swedish Delaware, 1
Tagore, Rabindranath, 1
Tartar states, 1
Taylor, Charles, 1 , 2 , 3
teleology, 1
Teuton, 1 , 2
Thompson, E. P., 1 , 2
Thorton, Richard, 1
Tilly, Charles, 1
Todorov, Tzevtan, 1 , 2
Tomlins, Christopher, 1
Troeltsch, Ernst, 1
Trotsky, Leon, 1
Tucker, Josiah, 1
Tully, James, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9
Turkey, 1 , 2
tyranny, 1
Uhuru independence celebrations, 1
Unitarianism, 1
United East India Company, 1
United Nations, 1
United States, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13
Uruguay, 1
utilitarianism, 1 , 2
Vagrancy Regulations of 1898, 1
Vasco de Gama, 1 , 2
Vatican Index, 1
Venezuela, 1
Venice, 1 , 2
Vespucci, Americo, 1
Vidyarthi, Ganesha Shankar, 1 , 2
Vietnam, 1
Virginia settlements, 1
Vishal Bharat, 1
de Vitoria, Francisco, 1
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1 , 2
wars of religion, 1
Wasáse, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Weber, Eugen, 1
Weber, Max, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ,
18
Wedgewood, Josiah, 1
Welfare State, 1
West, Benjamin, 1
Western societies, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ,
17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24
West Indies, 1
White, Hayden, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
white supremacy, 1
Williams, Robert, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1
World Social Summit, 1
“World-System,” 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
World Trade Organization, 1 , 2
World War I, 1
World War II, 1
Young, Iris Marion, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
Zacateca, 1
Zea, Leopoldo, 1
Zeno, 1
Zimbabwe, 1
About the Contributors
Iris Marion Young was, at the time of her death, professor of political
science at the University of Chicago, and had earlier been professor of public
and international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. She was the author of
dozens of books including Justice and the Politics of Difference; Throwing
Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory;
Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy;
Inclusion and Democracy; On Female Body Experience; and Global
Challenges. She was widely recognized as one of the leading political
philosophers and feminist theorists of her generation; her work and
contributions have been recognized by the establishment of an endowed Iris
Marion Young/Susan Moller Okin Prize for the best article in feminist
theory, by the American Political Science Association; an endowed named
award and lecture series in civic engagement at the University of Pittsburgh;
an endowed named lecture series in gender studies at the University of
Chicago; a special issue of Hypatia, the leading English-speaking journal of
feminist theory and philosophy; and the collection of essays Dancing with
Iris, edited by Ann Ferguson and Mechthild Nagel. Her final book,
Responsibility for Justice, has recently been published by Oxford University
Press.
Taiaiake Alfred is professor of human and social development and director
of Indigenous Governance Programs at the University of Victoria, Canada.
He is author of Peace, Power and Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto
(Oxford), and Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors: Kahnawake Mohawk
Politics and the Rise of Native Nationalism (Oxford).
Pratap Bhanu Mehta is president of the Center for Policy Research in New
Delhi, a member of the Global Faculty of the New York University Law
School, and a leading Indian public intellectual. He has been a professor at
Harvard University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is author of Facing
Democracy (Penguin). He has published articles on Indian political thought,
Max Weber and Hindu ethics, constitutionalism, ethics and international
affairs, and democratic theory.
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