The Modern World After Colonialism: remaking the social sciences

This book provides a concrete set of resources through which students and teachers can work towards remaking the social sciences. The contributors each address specific issues of sociological concern, taking seriously the processes of colonialism, empire and enslavement that enabled the making of the modern world. The book is divided into sections that address the Making of the Modern World; the Politics of Inequality; Migration, Diaspora, and Asylum; Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism; and the Environment. Across the chapters, the contributors show the inadequacy of standard accounts which locate the emergence of modern institutions – the nation-state, democracy, industrial capitalism and the scientific revolution – within Europe’s internal history. But they also ask what difference it would make to standard social scientific categories and accounts of modern institutions if we took colonial and imperial histories into account. Focusing primarily, though not exclusively, on Britain’s colonial connections, the chapters traverse histories of enslavement and enclosure; class, labour movements and housing; asylum, refugees and border control; Black Feminisms, anti-racism and state attacks on multiculturalism; and extractivism, Green New Deals and the racial politics of climate change. In doing so, this volume shows that the modern world cannot be adequately understood by analytical categories or frameworks that fail to respond to the colonial connections through which the modern world has been forged<p></p>