In this closely integrated collection of essays on colonialism in world history, Frederick Cooper raises crucial questions about concepts relevant to a wide range of issues in the social sciences and ...humanities, including identity, globalization, and modernity. Rather than portray the past two centuries as the inevitable movement from empire to nation-state, Cooper places nationalism within a much wider range of imperial and diasporic imaginations, of rulers and ruled alike, well into the twentieth century. He addresses both the insights and the blind spots of colonial studies in an effort to get beyond the tendency in the field to focus on a generic colonialism located sometime between 1492 and the 1960s and somewhere in the "West." Broad-ranging, cogently argued, and with a historical focus that moves from Africa to South Asia to Europe, these essays, most published here for the first time, propose a fuller engagement in the give-and-take of history, not least in the ways in which concepts usually attributed to Western universalism—including citizenship and equality—were defined and reconfigured by political mobilizations in colonial contexts.
Offers an overview of citizenship’s complex evolution, from ancient Rome to the present. Political leaders and thinkers still debate, as they did in Republican Rome, whether the presumed equivalence ...of citizens is compatible with cultural diversity and economic inequality. The author presents citizenship as ’claim-making’--the assertion of rights in a political entity. What those rights should be and to whom they should apply have long been subjects for discussion and political mobilization, while the kind of political entity in which claims and counterclaims have been made has varied over time and space. Citizenship ideas were first shaped in the context of empires. The relationship of citizenship to ’nation’ and ’empire’ was hotly debated after the revolutions in France and the Americas, and claims to ’imperial citizenship’ continued to be made in the mid-twentieth century. The author examines struggles over citizenship in the Spanish, French, British, Ottoman, Russian, Soviet, and American empires, and...explains the reconfiguration of citizenship questions after the collapse of empires in Africa and India. The author explores the tension today between individualistic and social conceptions of citizenship, as well as between citizenship as an exclusionary notion and flexible and multinational conceptions of citizenship.
My book Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005) is a collection of essays engaging colonial and postcolonial studies and examining essential categories – including identity, ...modernity, globalization, nation-state, and empire – used in these and other scholarly domains. This essay discusses how this book came to be written, some of the arguments it provoked, and the continued salience of the colonial question between 2005 and 2023. It explores the relationship between empirical and theoretical scholarship, the difficulty of following conceptual categories across time, and the tension between concepts used by activists to make claims and scholars to analyze social and political phenomena.
As the French public debates its present diversity and its colonial past, few remember that between 1946 and 1960 the inhabitants of French colonies possessed the rights of French citizens. Moreover, ...they did not have to conform to the French civil code that regulated marriage and inheritance. One could, in principle, be a citizen and different too.Citizenship between Empire and Nationexamines momentous changes in notions of citizenship, sovereignty, nation, state, and empire in a time of acute uncertainty about the future of a world that had earlier been divided into colonial empires.
Frederick Cooper explains how African political leaders at the end of World War II strove to abolish the entrenched distinction between colonial "subject" and "citizen." They then used their new status to claim social, economic, and political equality with other French citizens, in the face of resistance from defenders of a colonial order. Africans balanced their quest for equality with a desire to express an African political personality. They hoped to combine a degree of autonomy with participation in a larger, Franco-African ensemble. French leaders, trying to hold on to a large French polity, debated how much autonomy and how much equality they could concede. Both sides looked to versions of federalism as alternatives to empire and the nation-state. The French government had to confront the high costs of an empire of citizens, while Africans could not agree with French leaders or among themselves on how to balance their contradictory imperatives. Cooper shows how both France and its former colonies backed into more "national" conceptions of the state than either had sought.
How empires have used diversity to shape the world order for more than two millennia Empires—vast states of territories and peoples united by force and ambition—have dominated the political landscape ...for more than two millennia. Empires in World History departs from conventional European and nation- centered perspectives to take a remarkable look at how empires relied on diversity to shape the global order. Beginning with ancient Rome and China and continuing across Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine empires' conquests, rivalries, and strategies of domination—with an emphasis on how empires accommodated, created, and manipulated differences among populations.Burbank and Cooper examine Rome and China from the third century BCE, empires that sustained state power for centuries. They delve into the militant monotheism of Byzantium, the Islamic Caliphates, and the short-lived Carolingians, as well as the pragmatically tolerant rule of the Mongols and Ottomans, who combined religious protection with the politics of loyalty. Burbank and Cooper discuss the influence of empire on capitalism and popular sovereignty, the limitations and instability of Europe's colonial projects, Russia's repertoire of exploitation and differentiation, as well as the "empire of liberty"—devised by American revolutionaries and later extended across a continent and beyond.With its investigation into the relationship between diversity and imperial states, Empires in World History offers a fresh approach to understanding the impact of empires on the past and present.
Of the many pathways out of empire, why did African leaders follow the one that led to the nation-state, whose dangers were recognized by Africans in the 1940s and '50s? Frederick Cooper revisits a ...long history in which Africans were empire-builders, the objects of colonization, and participants in events that gave rise to global capitalism.
The debate over the place in French society of people from North and sub-Saharan Africa is also a debate about history. One side-including people on both the right and the left-evokes a tradition of ...republican egalitarianism dating to the Revolution of 1789 and dismisses calls to recognize cultural or social difference among citizens as 'communitarianism'. The opposite side argues that French republicanism has always been exclusionary and discriminatory, bound historically to colonization and enslavement. This article points to what this present-day clash obscures: uncertainty and conflict over what the concepts of citizenship, nation, state, republic, and empire actually mean. It stresses citizenship as a claim-making construct. Colonized people and their descendants from 1789 to the collapse of French empire claimed the rights of the French citizen, thereby opening up a long debate over the relationship between citizenship and difference in a polity that proclaimed liberty, equality, and fraternity, a debate that still echoes in post-colonial France.
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In the 1950s and 1960s, colonial empires turned into what seemed to be a world of nation-states. But the first wave of decolonization came in the Americas between the 1780s and the 1820s. This ...article explores the relationship between these two waves and the wave of colonizations that occurred in between. Rather than assimilating the two episodes of decolonization to a single narrative, I argue that both entailed profound struggles in which national sovereignty was only one possible outcome and that in between empires were reinvigorated, transformed, and reinvented. The second wave of decolonization entailed what the first did not: undermining the very idea of empire. Both waves left unanswered a question that had concerned activists in their times: could political liberation be turned into economic and social justice? This article points to the uses and limits of the concept of decolonization in understanding struggles for global equality. Keywords: decolonization, colonization, empire, colonialism, settlement, space.
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