Postcolonial Sociology: From Nations to Empires

Journal title MONDI MIGRANTI
Author/s Gurminder K. Bhambra
Publishing Year 2019 Issue 2019/2 Language Italian
Pages 17 P. 21-37 File size 175 KB
DOI 10.3280/MM2019-002002
DOI is like a bar code for intellectual property: to have more infomation click here

Below, you can see the article first page

If you want to buy this article in PDF format, you can do it, following the instructions to buy download credits

Article preview

FrancoAngeli is member of Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA), a not-for-profit association which run the CrossRef service enabling links to and from online scholarly content.

The necessity of a postcolonial imagination within the social sciences is more ur-gent than ever. As the rise of contentious politics disfigures our contemporary landscape - both here in Europe and globally - there is a growing need to address the historical processes that are producing our present. In this article, I ask what difference would be made to sociology, and the social sciences more broadly, if we took seriously postcolonial arguments. In particular, if we acknowledged the cen-trality of colonial endeavours to our current social and political configurations. It is only by engaging with this past more directly that we can hope to address the many challenges we face.

Keywords: Colonialism, history, nation, empire.

  1. Bhambra Gurminder K. (2017). The Current Crisis of Europe: Refugees, Colonialism, and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism. European Law Journal, 23, 5: 395-405;
  2. Bhambra Gurminder K. (2016). Comparative Historical Sociology and the State: Problems of Method. Cultural Sociology, 10, 3: 335-351; DOI: 10.1177/1749975516639085
  3. Bhambra Gurminder K. (2014). Connected Sociologies. London: Bloomsbury.
  4. Bhambra Gurminder K. (2007). Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
  5. Byrd J.A. (2011). The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  6. Conrad S. (2013). Rethinking German colonialism in a global age. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41, 4: 543-566; DOI: 10.1080/03086534.2013.836352
  7. Drayton R. (2011). Where Does the World Historian Write From? Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism. Journal of Contemporary History, 46, 3: 671-685; DOI: 10.1177/0022009411403519
  8. Dunbar-Ortiz R. (2014). An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press.
  9. Fedorowich K. e Thompson A.S., eds. (2013a). Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
  10. Fedorowich K. e Thompson A.S., eds. (2013b). Mapping the Contours of the British World: Empire, Migration and Identity. In: Fedorowich K. and Thompson A.S., eds., cit.: 1-41.
  11. Ferguson A. (1966 [1767]). An Essay on the History of Civil Society edited and with an introduction by Duncan Forbes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  12. Fox C. (1995). Introduction: How to Prepare a Noble Savage: The Spectacle of Human Science. In: Fox C., Porter R. e Wokler R., eds. Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth Century Domains. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  13. Greenfield B. (1991). The Problem of the Discoverer’s Authority in Lewis and Clark’s History. In: Arac J. and Ritvo H., eds. Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  14. Hansen P. e Jonsson S. (2014). Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
  15. Hopkins A. (1999). Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History. Past & Present, 164 (Aug): 198-243.
  16. Knöbl W. (2014). The Americas, civilizational analysis, and its current competitors: Bringing (revolutionary) politics back in. In: Arjomand S.A., ed. Social Theory and Regional Studies in a Global Age (pp. 313-337). New York: Suny Press.
  17. Lewis S.L. e Maslin M.A. (2015). Perspective: Defining the Anthropocene. Nature, 519(7542): 171-180;
  18. Locke J. (1764 [1689]). Two Treatises of Government edited by Thomas Hollis. London: A. Millar et al.
  19. Mommsen W.J. (1984 [1959]). Max Weber and German Politics 1890-1920 - translated by Michael S. Steinberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  20. Mommsen W.J. (1974). The Age of Bureaucracy: Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
  21. Smith, W.D. (1980). Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum. German Studies Review, 3, 1: 51-68.
  22. Steinmetz G. (2007). The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  23. Wagner P. (2014). World-sociology beyond the fragments: Oblivion and advance in the comparative analysis of modernities. In: Arjomand S.A., ed., Social Theory and Regional Studies in a Global Age (pp. 293-311). New York: Suny Press.
  24. Weber M. (1980 [1895]). The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address). translated by Ben Fowkes. Economy and Society, 9, 4: 428-449.
  25. Wolfley J. (1991). Jim Crow, Indian Style: The Disenfranchisement of Native Americans. 16 American Indian Law Review, 167: 167-202 -- http://digitalrepository.unm.edu/law_facultyscholarship/356.
  26. Zahra T. (2016). The Great Departure: Mass Migration From Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
  27. Zimmerman A. (2010). Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  28. Zimmerman A. (2006). Decolonizing Weber. Postcolonial Studies, 9, 1: 53-79; DOI: 10.1080/13668250500488827

Gurminder K. Bhambra, Sociologia postcoloniale: dalle Nazioni agli Imperi in "MONDI MIGRANTI" 2/2019, pp 21-37, DOI: 10.3280/MM2019-002002