Elements of the Philosophy of Right (original) (raw)
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Prepared for the Association of Political Theory 2019 Meeting in Irvine, CA
After gaining independence from European rule, British and Spanish Americans were forced to consider how they should organize their new nations' interactions with one another and with the rest of the world. Their thinking on this subject was strongly influenced by their situation, which is to say that their thinking was centrally concerned with empire. Though Britain's government came to terms with its separatist subjects in 1783, the British Empire retained a network of colonies and outposts across the North American continent and throughout the Caribbean, and British naval supremacy only increased during the United States' first decades of independence, posing a consistent threat to American autonomy. Meanwhile, Spain's monarchs refused to recognize the independence of their former colonies, and not only retained outposts in the Caribbean and across the Pacific, but also conspired for decades with a revolving cast of holy and unholy allies to return the Americas to the imperial fold.
(Comparativ 3_4/2020): Comparing Colonialism: Beyond European Exceptionalism
Comparativ, 2020
link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/161 Editorial The topic of empire continues to keep the social sciences at large busy. After it had seemed for a long time as if the topic had definitely been handed over to historians, who are concerned with a past phenomenon that only occurs as a nostalgic reflex in the present, empires are suddenly also of interest again to the social scientists concerned with the present under quite different aspects. The question of whether the United States was and still is an empire and whether such imperial configurations were needed to maintain an international order after the multilateralism of the Cold War had come to an end played a crucial role in relaunching the debate about empires. A second layer of interest was informed by postcolonially inspired interest in the continuing mechanisms of earlier colonial empires now striking back in various ways and thus remaining present in today’s seemingly post-imperial world. At a third level, observations that view empires as a rather loose association of rule with unfinished territorialization came to the fore in interpretations of empire as a more appropriate form of governance under conditions of global or at least transregional weakening or even dissolution of boundaries. While we recently looked back at the similarities and differences between empires for the historical period from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries in a historically comparative thematic issue of this journal (no 3/2019), the current double issue, conceived from the perspective of historical sociology, is concerned with a geographically even broader comparison that seeks to revise the thesis of a European exceptionalism in the history of colonialism and imperialism that is often put forward implicitly rather than explicitly. This makes it necessary, first of all, to look for colonial imperial expansion also outside Europe and not to construct a “non-European world” as the target of expansion, as an overseas history, now out of fashion, did for a long time. This means not only to question the geography of comparative studies of empires, but also to reflect critically on their privileged time frame and to include examples that lie beyond the particular European expansion period that is often portrayed as starting in the fifteenth century. In a third level, the nesting of empires is at stake, because the confrontation with imperial conquest from outside by no means put an end to state-building processes inside the imperially overformed regions, from which a whole complex of new questions about the relationship of the various empire-building processes can be derived. Colonialism, in this perspective, is not a relationship between Europeans and non-Europeans, but a much broader, almost universal kaleidoscope of subjugation, settlement into regions other than the one of origin, and arrangements between external and internal elites. What distinguishes pre-modern forms of imperial rule and colony-building from those since the late eighteenth century, however, are (1) their positioning in struggles for dominance at a global scale, (2) the complicated blending between the formation of nation-states and ongoing attempts at imperial expansion, which can by no means be reduced to a teleology from empire to nation, and (3) the relationship between capitalist adventurism and political projects of empire building, which follow different logics but always interact. To abstract these processes in such a way that they can be made available as theoretical elements to other disciplines requires at the same time a wide range of expertise for many case studies, an important selection of which is brought together in this issue. Specialists will read these case studies as enriching knowledge about individual empires, while the thematic issue as a whole, not least with its introduction by the editors and its afterword by Frederick Cooper, pursues an ambition that goes beyond the individual case and at the same time offers a broadening of perspective beyond meticulously deconstructed European exceptionalism and a contribution to a general theory of empires.
ILUSTRATION AND THE COLONIAL EMPIRE
Between 1780 and 1808, the main reflections on the colonial Portuguese empire came from settlers and Portuguese-born subjects living in Brazil. The Portuguese-Brazilian perspective was linked to both training at the University of Coimbra and to lived experience in Portuguese America. To think of empire was to examine the centrality of Lisbon and Brazil and to evaluate the links between the kingdom, the Brazilian lands and other possessions in Africa. Gradually, for those who were depicted in illustrations, Brazil became a center for Portuguese domains in Angola and Mozambique. In fact, long before the arrival of the Portuguese court, America had already gained centrality in the visual and written production of His Majesty’s subjects. Keywords: Portuguese Enlightenment, colonization, Overseas Empire.
The persistence of Coloniality in "Empire" (Conference Paper)
Hardt & Negri’s acute analysis of post-Fordist capitalism and contemporary governmentality has been a topic of heated arguments and controversies among critical Latin American scholars since the publication of “Empire”. One of the sectors that has engaged the most with the ideas in the book is one that self-describes as the Modernity/Coloniality group, formed by academics like Santiago Castro-Gomez, Ramon Grosfoguel and Walter Mignolo, among others. For them, Capitalism is a system that took shape and became hegemonic at the dawn of what Immanuel Wallerstein described as the world-system, in the 16th century and has been from the start a structure of heterogeneous elements in terms of forms of control of labour-resources-products as in terms of the peoples and histories articulated in it. From their perspective, the classic Marxist succession of modes of production (slavery, feudalism, imperial capitalism and so forth) is misleading; the modes of production were simultaneous in time and entangled in space. They do not like to use the word Capitalism alone, because it only emphasizes one of the dimensions of the colonial matrix of power. Grosfoguel insists that Capitalism is only one of the multiple entangled constellations of the colonial power matrix of the European / modern / colonial / capitalist / patriarchal world-system. Hardt & Negri’s perspective is seen as innovative because of its emphasis in the central role played by immaterial production and its close links with biopower and biopolitics , but the members of the Modernity/Coloniality group think that “Empire” is nevertheless a Eurocentric critique of modernity, conceived from the hegemonic side of the colonial difference. Only from there one could think that industrial workers are diminishing while immaterial labour is growing (this is the time when industrial work has grown the most in history). The fact that Capital has nearly exhausted the external spaces for its realization and now has to open new terrains in its inside, thriving in the products of immaterial labour does not mean that coloniality has disappeared, but that it is in a process of reorganization. The heterogeneity of racialized modes of production persists, even with the hegemony of post-Fordism. When Hardt and Negri see that globalization and post-Fordism have made geography and colonialism nearly irrelevant and outdated because the market has subsumed every territory, Castro-Gomez and the members of the Modernity/Coloniality group see that capital is now looking for post-territorial colonies to continue expanding. Now, besides the traditional underpriced commodities and the cheap industrial products of the maquilas, capital needs the information contained in genetic codes (expropriated through patents defended by supranational trade institutions) and non-western knowledge systems; traditional knowledge is not searched to destroy it, but to preserve it (and subsume it), although it’s still regarded as of low epistemological value. There’s a reorganization of coloniality in the making, one where the categories created by modernity (race, ethnicity, gender, age and class) continue to be important but are being reconfigured and articulated with others like religion.
Historical research on colonialist enterprises in different parts of the world is en vogue. One reason for this attention is a new search for the origins of today's globalising processes, of which colonialism is seen as one of the starting points. Having long been designed within the analytic framework of the nation state, historical research has recently suggested that solely national approaches are insufficient to analyse these potentially global relations and has consequently drawn its attention to the exchanges and interactions between colonial regimes, colonising and colonised societies and the common context of a colonial global order. This attention to global entanglements and the search for their early manifestations thus resulted in an adaptation of transnational approaches to the history of colonialism, approaches that try to overcome the nation state as the organising principle of historical narratives. 1 The methodological debate on how transnational histories of colonialisms should be written drew attention to comparisons, transfers and intertwinements between colonies and colonising powers. 2
THE IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE, DAVI D ARMITAGE
The history of the rise, decline, and fall of the British Empire has most often been told as the story of an empire whose foundations lay in India during the second half of the eighteenth century. That empire formally encompassed parts of south Asia, Australasia, Africa and the Americas. Its ascent began with British victory at the battle of Plassey in continued almost unabated in South Asia and the Pacific until the end of the Napoleonic Wars resumed momentum in the latter half of the nineteenth century during the European ‘scramble for Africa’, and then unraveled definitively during and after the Second World War. William Pitt was its midwife, Lord Mountbatten its Sexton and Winston Churchill was its chief-mourner in Britain. Its ghost lives on in the form of the Commonwealth; its sole remains are the handful of United Kingdom Overseas Territories, from Bermuda to the Pitcairn Islands. In this account, the American Revolution, and its aftermath divided the two (supposedly distinct) Empires, chronologically, geographically and institutionally. The Peace of Paris that ended the Seven Years War marked the end of French imperial power in North America and South Asia. Twenty years later, the Peace of Paris by which Britain acknowledged the independence of the United States of America marked the beginnings of newly configured British Atlantic Empire, still including the Caribbean islands and the remaining parts of British North America; it also signaled the British Empire’s decisive ‘swing to the east’ into the Indian and Pacific oceans. Historians of the eighteenth-century British Empire have protested against any easy separation between the ‘First’ and ‘Second’ British Empires on the grounds that the two overlapped in time, that they shared common purposes and personnel, and that the differences between the maritime, commercial colonies of settlement in North America and the military, territorial colonies of conquest in India have been crudely overdrawn. Nevertheless, among historians, and more generally in the popular imagination, the British Empire still denotes that ‘Second’ Empire, which was founded in the late eighteenth century and whose character distinguished it decisively from the ‘Old Colonial System’ of the British Atlantic world that had gone before it.