Empires and Colonialism

An Essay in Historiographic Reconstruction

Bibliographic Data

ID10832016
AuthorsG K Bhambra (0000-0003-3658-1575, University of Sussex, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume65
Issue3
Pages192-205
Publication date2024-09-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTidsskrift for samfunnsforskning (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0040-716X • E-ISSN: 1504-291X
PublisherScandinavian University Press (PUBLISHER • NO)
DOI10.18261/tfs.65.3.6
OpenAlexW4402240080
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited29

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

Archaeology · Colonialism · Political science · Sociology · Australian History and Society · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History

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