Empires and colonialism: an essay in historiographic reconstruction

<p dir="ltr">The nation-state is the primary political unit of analysis across the social sciences. It is understood to organize the formal international division of the world as well as social relations domestically. Its emergence is associated with processes that are said to bring into being the modern world, alongside the accompanying displacement of a system of empires, associated with earlier historical periods. Such understandings present nations and empires as distinct political entities and fail to recognize the conjunction of the emergence of the nation-state with European colonial expansion and an ongoing expansion of new overseas European empires. In this article, I set out an alternative account of how we might understand the varieties of empire and varieties of colonialism that characterize the modern period. I shall argue that colonialism is a distinctively modern phenomenon which, in turn, gives European overseas empire a character different from other empires contemporaneous with them. This difference rests, in large part, in the specificity of a political economy of colonialism that is often misidentified as a separate capitalist modernity.<br></p>