Global Historical Sociology: Theoretical and Methodological Issues – an Introduction

Introduction: Strategies of Conceptual Tension

Mikhail Bakhtin designed an oblique trajectory to enter the cultural imagery of the world that Rabelais created in Gargantua and Pantagruel. He chose to uncover the formal figure that enabled the fundamental comic mechanism for the personification of power during ages of transition: the dissonance between the way authority believes it is being perceived by the subjects it rules over, and the way subjects actually sense the decline of authority and see through its representatives.

The old authority and truth pretend to be absolute, to have an extratemporal importance. Therefore, their representatives (the agelasts) are gloomily serious … They do not see themselves in the mirror of time, do not perceive their own origin, limitations and end; they do not recognize their own ridiculous faces or the comic nature of their pretentions to eternity and immutability. And thus these personages come to the end of their role still serious, although their spectators have been laughing for a long time. They continue to walk with the majestic tone of kings and heralds announcing eternal truths, unaware that the time has turned their speeches into ridicules. (Bakhtin, 1984: 213)

Sociology is among the agelasts most loyal to the authority of the West. This explains why the mechanisms of taunt and ridicule, far from being non-existent in the sociological imagination, lie outside, beneath and beyond the margins of the rationalized schemas that make a sociological argument acceptable. Sociology here plays an ambivalent role. It speaks the language of control to the rulers and the language of emancipation to the ruled. In its ambiguous existence it is induced into adopting the survival strategy of preserving a critical distance from either side of the asymmetrical power divide. On the contrary, sociology should be seeking to contribute to the elaboration of new regimes of theoretical and empirical adequacy, better able to understand the current worldly reconfigurations of power and its unequal distribution across sexuality, age, race, gender, class, cosmologies, culture, religion, and ethnicity.

This special issue traces explorative and entangled paths into the ongoing crisis of the authority of Western social sciences in unilaterally establishing the meaning, directions and rhythms of history and social change. The limits of the globalization of European knowledge, despite its universalizing aspirations, involve its inability to grasp the inherited multiplicities of the colonial worlds, the resilience of non-Western knowledges to homogenization, the resistance against cognitive annihilation of subaltern standpoints, and unleash the transformative potential of different histories and alternative conceptualizations.

Compared to the theoretical horizon of the turn of the Millennium, the sociological critique of Eurocentric modernity and its universalistic pretensions moves forward and elsewhere. This critical endeavour is not only dismantling the ideological nature of modernization theories (Escobar, 2008; Latham, 2000), and opposing some of the hallucinatory mantras of globalization theories (Rosenberg, 2004). Sociology, when it awakens from neo-positivist dreams, finds itself engaged with the unavoidable investigation into the parochialism of the image of the world it has contributed to construct, as well as with a painful process of unearthing the chauvinist, colonial, capitalist, and imperial roots of its institutional raisons d’etre, political legitimacy and cultural respectability (Burawoy, 2005; Patel, 2009; Steinmetz, 2013).

The problem that social theory is called to address is the same epistemological conundrum that, among others, Philip Abrams (1980), Andrew Abbott (1991) and Immanuel Wallerstein (1991) posited as the fundamental knot to be unravelled: the relation between history and sociology, between narrative and explanation, between the occurrence of events and the definition of causes. David Inglis (2013) has raised this problem more recently. He notes how reflexivity and self-criticism, which seem to characterize sociology more than other disciplines in the social sciences, often prove insufficient to address ‘the very nature of sociology itself as a historically-situated form of knowledge production’ (Inglis, 2013: 100). This lacuna does not consist merely in the marginalization of the sub-disciplinary field of ‘historical sociology’, as reconstructed by Steinmetz (2007) in the context of American sociology. Rather, it maps the epistemological vacuum of the absence ‘of a historically-oriented sociology, as attuned as possible to the complexities both of human history and of the multiple means of conceptualizing it’ (Inglis, 2013: 102). Moreover, postcolonial theory has been effective in demonstrating that even when sociology is not blind in front of the need to widen its analytical horizons through complex historical vision, it still remains constrained within the boundaries of the frame of Eurocentric modernity (Bhambra, 2007a). Either when modernity is articulated in time in terms of successive stages of societal development (Wagner, 2010), such as ‘advanced’ or ‘late’ modernity, or when it is articulated in space in terms of ‘multiple’ modernities (Eisenstadt, 2002), the primacy of the West is safeguarded by scaling down the historical position of Europe from that of supreme geohistorical entity to that of prima inter pares (Ascione, 2015: 3). These constraints prevent the sociological imagination from fully acknowledging the vast constellation of non-Western historical and social agencies that co-formed, ab origine, global colonial capitalist modernity (Dirlik, 2007). Thus, ‘global historical sociology’ connotes the broad research programme aimed at making sociology not only an intellectual endeavour inevitably engaged with long-term and large-scale processes of social change, but also a critical perspective constantly concerned with the geopolitics of knowledge and the multiplex configurations of power behind the regimes of theoretical and empirical legitimation wherein sociological thinking takes place.

Earlier generations of social theorists moved from the presumption that this lack of reciprocal understanding between historical and sociological thinking could be rendered transparent once and for all (Magubane, 2005). Contemporary social theory, conversely, confronts the intrinsic limits that the persistence of this knot inscribes in aspirations to establish univocally how stories and concepts are reciprocally co-formed. Inasmuch as social theory aspires to take a global turn, it has to register the liminal impossibility of fulfilling the 19th-century programme of pre-disciplinary sociology to be a universally legitimate historical science of society. Sociology becomes aware of the fragmented perspectives on social change that emerge when taking into consideration the situatedness of knowledge and its geopolitics. At the same time, social theory should be well positioned to engage actively with the cultural and political flows that move across its own cognitive borders. For the pluralization of theoretical horizons within and from the margins of the postcolonial world irreversibly blur the epistemological boundaries that provided the architecture of Western knowledge with the transitional semblance of a coherent, reliable structure (Chambers, 2003, 2015). The globalization of sociology across the world(s) changes not only the adequacy of existing responses to the questions that the relation between narratives and concepts raises. It also asks new uncanny questions, and radically interrogates both the vocabulary and the grammar in which such questions and answers are formulated. In so doing, invoking tools and insights from a broad range of intellectual fields that run from the epistemology of science to literary criticism, it exploits the loci of theoretical translation and methodological frictions.

Social theory, as well as history, now attempts to take a global turn that places the worldly co-extensiveness of modernity and colonialism at the centre of the agenda (Fan, 2012). The collective endeavour to make sociology a more historical, inclusive and globally oriented field of knowledge leads us to question the narratives upon which the master-narrative of European exceptionality and superiority is grounded, exposing the explanatory models that made these narratives coherent, together with the normative schemes that extend the realm and scope of that alleged coherence (Seth, 2009). Beyond narratives, explanations and norms, global historical sociology radically engages in remaking, rethinking, or unthinking, both fundamental concepts and also modernity itself as an overall theoretical framework in which they are embedded (Adams et al., 2004; Ascione, 2016a; Bhambra, 2007b).

Social theory inherently concerns concept formation (Outhwaite, 1988). Yet, for a long time, its heuristic logic has been driven by three dogmas: that the founding narrative was the ‘transition to modernity’ as it occurred in Europe; that the explanandum was the ‘rise of the West’ as a worldly phenomenon of human progress; and that the norms deducible from this unique experience described a model of reference for the rest of the world as a path towards ‘modernization’. All three assumptions have been drastically destabilized. Alternative narratives have emerged from the silenced borders of modernity that propose stories which do not fit into the hegemonic cartography of the modern world. Such dissonances suggest entirely new issues whose understanding only becomes possible when long-term and large-scale colonial and postcolonial connections across the globe are taken into consideration. At this point, diverse entangled geohistorical contexts and processes give rise to other ways of thinking and understanding, claiming their own rights to universalism, as opposed to those that Europe and the West (as hyperreal constructs) have produced. It follows that many of the concepts that sociology inherited from 19th-century paradigms fall short in expressing both the spatial articulation of the historical processes they were presumed to represent, and the changing power relations that force this overall drive towards different kinds of sociological thinking. Old assumptions are reduced to apodictic conjectures, while those which were anti-Eurocentric conjectures move to the status of plausible assumptions (Ascione, 2014). As a consequence, the chauvinist, capitalist, colonial and imperial formation of concepts such as ‘modernity’, ‘nation-state’, ‘global’, ‘secularism’, ‘rights’, ‘science’, ‘citizenship’, come to be disclosed.

Within this transfigured context for knowledge formation and theory production, contributors to this special issue share a common goal: actively to transgress the critical borders of mere deconstruction and move beyond them. This translates into a double movement: an examination of the intimate relations between the manner in which existing concepts are formed and safeguard the existing asymmetries of power; and an investigation into what these concepts exclude, mortify, silence and control. This double exploration, within and across semantic fields, histories, theories and thinkers, stretches and strains inherited concepts, producing unplanned tensions. Here, experiences and conceptions that were earlier elided are opened up and re-located within historical processes of concept formations.

This is not simply a fall-out from diverging analytical practices. Rather, it is the sought-for methodological outcome of setting into play a series of heterogeneous analytical strategies. These strategies are principally oriented toward three problematics: canonization, re-signification, and re-conceptualization. Canonization means the reconstruction of the canon of sociology to include those thinkers that had been excluded by the self-biography of the discipline, because they did not fit the image of modernity as an endogenous, necessary, progressive, legitimate, self-evident, pristine European phenomenon. The reintegration of such thinkers provokes a radical transformation in the universalistic purpose and global scope of sociology, as well as a different understanding of its colonial formation. Re-signification alludes to a more specific semiotic process, where concepts are lifted from their usual contexts and relocated within new realms of understanding. This strategy opens up new paths to sociological imagination and, at the same time, it calls for further interventions to clarify and outline the aim and adequacy of such proposed semantic slippages, overlappings, and coming to terms with the discrepancies between ongoing global transformations and the provincial existing vocabulary devoted to their understanding. Re-conceptualization implies an effort to redefine available sociological concepts in order to enhance their analytical and imaginative capacity. This does not translate necessarily into an extension of the semantic field of the concept in question. The strategy of re-conceptualization can be oriented to enlarge the connotative space of the term as well as the historical-social dimensions it can legitimately claim to be referring to. But it can also be reoriented to delegitimize and finally exclude a set of meanings or references from the semantic fields of the concept under scrutiny. In the following contributions, each of these strategies is laid out in an entangled way, and their strengths and limits are exposed in relation to each other and to the emergent field of sociological enquiry that the contributions in this special issue advance.

Canonization

Connell (1997) sets the terms of the problem. She tackles the disciplinary rituals that reproduce the self-representation of sociology as a prevalently white and masculine form of knowledge that emerged as a response to the transition to the Industrial Age and to a bourgeois society in Europe. A bunch of founding fathers led by the triumvirate Marx–Durkheim–Weber animates this disciplinary history. This story began in Europe in the 19th century, but came to be made canonical as a consequence of the rise of American structural-functionalism since the 1930s.

It is now well recognized that the idea of classical theory embodies a ‘canon’, in the sense used by literary theory: a privileged set of texts, whose interpretation and reinterpretation defines a field. (Connell, 1997: 1512)

Which thinkers and texts have the right to be part of the canon is a crucial matter of concern. The criteria adopted to form and reproduce the canon are inspired by political and ideological concerns, reflecting historical asymmetries of power. But these concerns remain hidden behind the canopy of alleged self-evidence, which endows the existing canon with a status of apparent irrevocability. What were the criteria upon which the classical canon of sociology were constructed? Connell notes that 19th-century sociology covered a wide range of topics that today would fall under the rubric of ethnography and anthropology. Since the second half of the 20th century, the consolidation of the disciplinary canon of sociology elides any explicit reference to non-European worlds and gives prominence to the processes of modernization and capitalist industrialization, by constructing them as endogenous European and North American phenomena, confined within the boundaries of methodological nationalism.

Steinmetz (2013) evokes a rich hidden genealogy of sociological thinking that in the 19th century was oriented towards the study of the colonial worlds, but that is no longer part of the canon. For Steinmetz, in fact, the first step towards a globally oriented sociology that places the colonial question at the centre of its agenda consists in the critical reassessment of the contribution this hidden or forgotten genealogy is able to give. This canonization of forgotten thinkers touches a central issue in the disciplinary formation of sociology. Bhambra (2014) captures this process when she asserts that sociology came to focus on the definition of ‘us’, the ‘modern’, ‘advanced’, ‘European’, ‘Western’, while anthropology was devoted to the construction of ‘them’, the ‘traditional’, ‘backward’, ‘non-European’, ‘non-Western’. Thus, to the extent sociology fails at addressing the constitutive nexus between its own self-definition and the notion of modernity-versus-tradition as a relational process of construction of both identity-and-otherness in time and space, the sociological imagination remains unable to compose the constitutive schism that lies at the foundation of its disciplinary history. Yet, despite the awareness of this schismatic disciplinary path, the question remains: is this fracture the product of a mistaken path that diverged from what sociology could have been, or rather was its route wholly at one with the epistemological, methodological and ideological premises of disciplinary sociology?

In her contribution to this special issue, Zine Magubane answers this question in a counter-intuitive and original way, and heads towards the latter interpretation. Instead of focusing on thinkers and ideas whose inclusion in the canon of sociology can enlarge the theoretical base of the discipline and make it more historically-as well as more globally-oriented, Magubane proposes the canonization of two early figures of American social theory whose racist, pro-slavery attitudes show unequivocally the ‘racial ontology’ that lies at the foundation of American sociology as it emerged at the beginning of the second half of the 19th century. Magubane proposes a critical integration into the canon of sociology of ‘Henry Hughes and George Fitzhugh, pro-imperialist defenders of slavery, who wrote the first two books in America that self-consciously adopted the label “sociology”’. The context for the emergence of American sociology, Magubane explains, was a decisive historical moment when the debate around the abolition of slavery mobilized interests and ideas that were never politically neutral, objective or purely speculative.

If sociology as it was constructed in Europe was the ‘science’ of society that assumes the why and how of modernity as its object of investigation, it is noteworthy that the founding fathers of American sociology were slaveholders who selectively adopted insights from European sociological thinking to support their own view of what was original and specific to American modernity. Magubane’s paper radicalizes these circumstances as she maintains that:

For the pro-slavery advocate turned sociologist, the best thing that stream of European thought could bring them was evidence of how antithetical free labor was to achieving modernity. Or it might provide further evidence that what Europeans were attempting to accomplish with revolution and socialism, Americans had already accomplished with slavery.

Notwithstanding the fact that free labour was the European sociological hallmark of modernity, whose prevalence over other forms of labour caused the departure from traditional societal organizations towards modern societies, Hughes and Fitzhugh elaborated a derivative discourse that considered slavery as a superior form of labour. Slavery, rather than free labour, was able to guarantee a better market efficiency, since it allowed for ‘having enough bodies to pick cotton in the right place, at the right time, at the right price. This was something only a slave labor system could accomplish, hence it was the superior modernizer’ (Magubane, 2016: this issue). Thus, what made America rich, unique and modern in its own terms, was precisely slavery.

The idea that slavery is co-constitutive of the modern world and a distinctive historical and sociological phenomenon, elaborated in this ultraconservative, racial version of modernity since the 1850s, is substantially coherent with the critique of race and racism that WEB Du Bois would develop a few decades later from a very different ethical and political standpoints. This idea largely anticipates one of the main tenets of several post-Second-World-War perspectives engaged in the critique of Eurocentrism and colonialism, from Latin America dependency theory to postcolonial studies. What is different is that while for Hughes and Fitzhugh slavery was what made American modernity unique and superior, and could denote the particular sphere of expertise of American sociology, Magubane suggests that the ongoing collective effort toward the construction of a global historical sociology has precisely to register the relevance of slavery as a world constitutive phenomenon (O’Connell Davidson, 2015). The centrality of slavery in the construction of the modern world forces us to recognize that race and racism are in fact inherent to the historical and sociological knowledge. Race and racism inform not only the way the history of the modern world is narrated, or the way social change is explained; rather they are intrinsic to the epistemological foundations of the conceptual apparatus of social theory as well as they provide an underlying code to its semantics. (Cazenave, 2014). Magubane insists on explaining how this epistemological centrality is systematically neglected. The principal evidence for this is the relegation of issues of race and ethnicity to a subspecies of sociological thinking often institutionalized and disciplined in terms of the sociology of racial or ethnic relations. Canonization, she argues, cannot simply be reduced to the inclusion of thinkers and theories into the body of literature considered necessary for the ritual self-definition of sociology. Canonization inevitably implies a reconsideration of the spaces of semantic tension and dissonance that thrive beneath the reiterated usage of the vocabulary of sociology. Magubane critically focuses on the colonial construction of a hierarchy of knowledge between sociology in general and the sociology of race in particular, as a residual, more limited, and more specialised space of investigation.

Re-signification

The broad context for Gurminder Bhambra’s intervention in the debate is provided by her research programme in Connected Sociologies (Bhambra, 2014). Bhambra carries the notion of ‘connectedness’ across the border between history and sociology. She problematizes the colonial relations of power underlying the criteria for selecting the histories from which sociological concepts are formed, by drawing from Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s proposal of connected histories. Subrahmanyam stresses the condition of possibility that allows us to discover relations between spaces and times, events and processes, actors and structures through historiographical enquiry: ‘if we ever get to “them” by means other than archaeology, the chances are that it is because they are already plugged into some network, some process of circulation’ (1997: 762). Bhambra transposes Subrahmanyam’s assumption into sociological thinking, and enriches its significance by maintaining that the approach of Connected Sociologies ‘starts from a recognition that events are constituted by processes that are always broader than the selections that bound events as particular and specific to their theoretical constructs’. The focus on connections clearly displaces the analytical priority usually given to specific standpoints, since it is the presumption that social phenomena occur endogenously within the boundaries of determined social entities that legitimates a ‘particular standpoint linked to colonialism’ to transcend the particular space and time of its emergence and claim universal validity. Bhambra renders evident how the epistemological option of connectedness in historical sociology directly interpellates postcolonial theory by exposing the historical and colonial nature of the asymmetries that run along the relations existing between different standpoints and the power differentials that sustain the authority to establish the procedures and rules of validation of knowledge. The methodological upshots of this approach disclose new theoretical paths which provide a viable alternative to standard ideal typical and comparative analyses in the concept formation procedures of social theory.

In his contribution to this special issue, Fa-ti Fan tackles the crucial issue of the relations between histories and concepts drawn from a broad historiographical, rather than sociological, perspective. Fan underlines that the manner in which the birth and development of science is narrated is at the core of the European sociological self-understanding of modernity. This necessarily implies that the reconsideration of modern science inevitably involves a profound transformation in the basic understanding of the framework of modernity, as regards the narrative and explanatory apparatus it deploys. Fan maps the vast and growing constellation of thick historiographical inquiries that in recent decades have provided different forms of refutation of the European master-narrative of scientific modernity, its alleged superiority, and the mechanisms of its diffusion from the West to the Rest that Western historiography, even in its more self-critical versions, still tends to take for granted. In so doing, he elucidates how colonial and imperial histories of science agree, without necessarily overlapping, with postcolonial theory, inasmuch as they all construct interpretative models of scientific modernity that question the presumed neutrality and universality of science.

Fan explains how the convergences of these revisionist moves have generated a global turn in theoretical practice. This global turn re-calibrates its focus of analysis and gives more emphasis to the process of the circulation of knowledges, practices and ideas, among subjects, and across cultural and civilizational boundaries. In this context, Fan examines the process of re-signification which involves notions such as ‘trade’ and ‘circulation’. As Fan notes in his paper:

The rise of modern science had much to do with commerce and trade in the global context; voyages, maritime trade, and the East India companies were intertwined with scientific activities. Thus, the language of trade is not simply a metaphor but also an attempt to reconstruct the historical link between science and commerce. The perspective of trade provides a useful approach to history of science that foregrounds knowledge in motion and scientific contact.

Harold J Cook (2007) has eloquently shown the co-extensiveness of trade and science within the 16th and 17th-century wave of Dutch globalization. Yet, Fan shows that while on the narrative level trade and science reciprocally co-formed and jointly constructed the modern world, from a conceptual point of view, their terminological conflation, realized through the extension of the semantic field of trade to describe the exchange of ideas and practices, is misleading.

It is certainly true that the intersection of economy and other spheres of life in modern times, including science, has been profound. But to conflate the two or to reduce one to the other is counterproductive, even in the context of the modern world. It probably reflects a modern Western bias in insisting on imposing the model on the very different social settings across history and geography. (Fan, 2016: this issue)

Fan interrogates the notion of ‘circulation’, and he explains his dissatisfaction with it, given the degree of neutrality that circulation suggests, for not doing justice to the complex networks of power that can produce, but also interrupt, or selectively allow movements of knowledges. While Fan is sceptical about uncritical borrowings of terminologies across theoretical contexts, he proposes a broader strategy of re-signification centred on the phrase ‘Asia as method’. Fan proposes to address the risks of over-generalization and theoretical reification involved in the usage of the notion of the ‘global’ through a problematization of the issue of scale, as an antidote against Eurocentrism. ‘Shouldn’t regions be taken seriously too?’, he asks. ‘Asia’ here does not refer to a determined territorial or civilizational entity, derived from the cartography of what James Blaut (1993) has identified as the ‘colonizer’s model of the world’. Rather, Fan explains why and to what extent ‘Asia as method is a critical and strategic regionalism that resists the global hegemony of Western modernity’.

Re-conceptualization

Bhambra’s contribution is a powerful critique of the construction of the concept of ‘nation-state’ and its protracted usage in sociology. Historical sociology has recurrently raised the problem of the analytical reductionism involved in comparative method, grounded on ideal types and articulated via the nation-state (McMichael, 1990, 2000). Yet Bhambra shows why this methodological inadequacy is also theoretically illegitimate and analytically misleading because the concepts of ‘nation’, ‘state’ and ‘nation-state’ which the social sciences inherited from Weber’s sociology are all based upon ‘the elision of colonialism and empire as constitutive aspects of modernity’s development’, rather than being blunt but still reliable devices, suffering from a generic inability to come to terms with entangled processes moving across national boundaries. This elision, Bhambra contends, is both historical and theoretical. Even though the state was narrowly conceptualized as a socio-political entity delineated by territorial boundaries, colonial relations connected the formation of the European nation-states with their imperial and colonial areas of expansion overseas. Thus the external/internal divide that provides the coherence of the mental representation of the concept of ‘state’ alludes to situations altogether more fluid than social theory is often willing to admit. Bhambra focuses on the process of concept formation that led Weber to connote the state as a political, cultural and legal institution, in order to show that the inadequacy of our notion of the state does not derive from incomplete definitional or attributive procedures, nor from the erroneous interpretations of historical occurrences. The Eurocentric limits involved in the Weberian concept of the state arise from the epistemological architecture which generated and reproduced it. This architecture is organized around a particular logic of reciprocal legitimation between the interpretative schema of ideal types and empirical data drawn from the historical processes to be comprehended and explained. This reiterative legitimation is grounded in cultural and ideological colonialism that ‘precludes the possibility of establishing a general understanding based upon consideration of the different perspectives and inoculates each perspective from any criticism that taking another perspective seriously might engender’ (Bhambra, this issue).

Bhambra underlines how the narrative and theoretical elision of connections is also the precondition for the construction of national identity involved in the Weberian notion of nation-states. The emergence of the political space of the German nation-state proceeds through the separation between the national ‘us’ and the foreign ‘them’. Here, the internal border pushed eastward by the Germanification of the eastern provinces is co-extensive with the production of the external imperial and colonial border in West Africa. An analogous process of nation-state formation during the same decades, running from the second half of the 19th century to the First World War, couples the Italian Risorgimento and the colonization of the south of the Italian peninsula together with the colonization of Libya and the so-called Horn of Africa (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, 2012). In the case of both the Italian and the German states, the institutional as well as rhetorical construction of national identity and the state apparatus involved a profound process of silencing the histories of imperialism, colonialism and internal subalternization that were the foundational acts of both nation-states as they came into being.

Bhambra suggests that the nation-state can be re-conceptualized by including the missing colonial links within the historical narrative of the emergence of the nation-state and the public discourse of national identity. But a further effort also needs to be applied to re-imagining in a radical manner the spatio-temporal and political boundaries of the nation-state. This means including the territorial and extra-territorial dimensions that connected the emergence of European states with their own overseas areas of imperial and colonial expansion. In this manner, notions such as ‘citizenship’ or ‘migrations’ would assume a different and more inclusive meaning, and their significance could be mobilized to respond to the ongoing processes of worldly reconfiguration of regional and global political spaces. Re-conceptualization solicits conceptual polysemy. Against the well-established, territorialist, Weberian definition of the nation-state that prevails in historical sociology and provides the unit of analysis for comparative method, a decisively diverse conception can be developed. The latter seeks to reconstruct the concept of nation-state on the base of what Edward Said called the ‘imagined cartographies’ of postcolonial worlds, and the connected histories that make the world global, but not necessarily Eurocentred (Said, 1979).

The problem of re-conceptualizing the global across history and sociology is the topic of Gennaro Ascione’s contribution. Ascione depicts the reconstruction of the ‘global’ as a methodological and political issue, which is moved by the effort to relocate the colonial construction of the conceptual archive of social sciences to the centre of any process of concept formation. The exponential diffusion of different varieties of globalization theory over the last four decades is the main reason for the elusiveness of the concept of the ‘global’ in the social sciences, and its conflation with over-generalized understandings of its meaning in public discourse. Geoff Eley (2007) has investigated from a broad historiographical perspective this heterogeneous semantic field, and has mapped the different analytical trajectories that came together to project retrospectively the idea of the world as a single interacting globe, back to successive waves of integration and intensification of the spatio-temporal networks co-forming modern capitalism. As Subrahmanyam (2007) notes, Eley’s attempts at ‘historicizing the global’ bring into consideration both the processes of the long-term development of modern capitalism, and globalization as a discursive phenomenon. Yet, Ascione emphasizes that, notwithstanding the disagreement amongst historians regarding the space-time coordinates of globalization(s), what denotes the ‘global’, and thus qualifies a set of historical processes as globalizing forces, is usually taken for granted. A sociological understanding of the normative power and limitations of the concept of the global is needed in order to avoid the resurgence of the Eurocentric and diffusionist bias in social theory that marks both modernization and globalization theories. When the conceptualization of the global is considered as a methodological issue and not only an explanatory or narrative one, the history of the ideas that this term conveys changes in a radical manner. Julian Go (2014) narrates the limits of post-Second-World-War historical sociology as a resolute strategy of ‘occluding the global’. This is secured through reliance on the state as a unit of analysis, with the singular ‘exception’ of world-systems analysis whose approach paid attention to the global entanglement of processes of social change and knowledge production. For Ascione, the negation, as well as the underrating or the misconception, of such global entanglements was not so much an occlusion of the global as a strategic, Eurocentric and colonial construction of the global, aimed at relegating the colonial outside the realm of theory production.

Ascione re-interrogates this genealogy and re-articulates the political space delineated by the reconfiguration of world politics through decolonization. Three episodes are considered: the terms-of-trade controversy and what Toye and Toye (2004) identify as the North American onslaught on the first attempts to decolonize social theory from a proto-dependentista perspective; the relocation of world-systems analysis within the ‘global turn’ in American sociology inaugurated by the American Sociological Association at the end of the 1960s, and the disentanglement of epistemological relationalism from holism and systemic thinking produced by postcolonial and decolonial theory in sociological thinking. By assuming the centrality of decolonization as theoretical praxis, the way the colonial difference is conceived becomes the main criterion to reconstruct the genealogy of the ‘global’. Ascione suggests that the methodological debate around the unit of analysis should not be limited to the formal criterion according to which the shift toward the ‘global’ would suffice to overcome the Eurocentrism biases typical of state-centrism and methodological nationalism. On the contrary, the endeavour should involve an investigation into the politics of competing methodological choices, epistemological assumptions and cultural biases, against the grain of what Ascione calls the ‘coloniality of method’. In so doing, Ascione extends the significance of the concept of ‘coloniality’ elaborated by Anibal Quijano. Quijano’s original definition emerged as a transposition of Kwame Nkrumah’s notion of neo-colonialism into the realm of historical sociology. Coloniality was first deployed to show how, regardless of formal independence, the international system of the states was a strongly unequal and hierarchical vector in which newly decolonized states and their populations were racialized both politically and socio-culturally (Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992). The concept of coloniality has further proven extremely useful in conceptualizing the complex colonial matrix of power that characterizes modernity in toto: a shifting set of hierarchical articulations organized across asymmetrical relations of power and resources, whose historical construction is transformed into an anthropological essence (Grosfoguel, 2004; Mignolo, 2007). This matrix operates not only through narratives and explanations in history and the social sciences; it is also profoundly inscribed inside methodological strategies, extending and reproducing concept formations on the back of earlier colonial biases. In fact, it is via the embodiment of historical asymmetries of power within apparently neutral and viable categories of analysis, that the Eurocentrism inherent in the Western conceptual apparatus of modern knowledge constantly resurfaces within the manner that the global is constructed and operationalized.

The archetypical nexus between modernity and Eurocentrism in the social sciences is the main concern of Sanjay Seth’s contribution. In Seth’s article we are encouraged to prise open the central concept of modernity and to break its links with a self-fulfilling tautology in which the concept and the reality it proposes to describe and explain become one. Through carefully unpacking its theoretical filiation in a set of conceptual force fields, it becomes possible to consider the historical and disciplinary ground that endorses modernity’s claims while simultaneously registering its limits and its problematical premises. This brings us to face the question of whether a non-Occidental conceptualization of modernity is historically feasible and culturally significant. It certainly requires that we step beyond the simple scenario of merely adjusting and fine-tuning the term once we recognize that modernity as a concept and series of practices has historically also been the name for Occidental hegemony. From the interlacing of modernity, progress and development, there emerges a teleology that, in turn, becomes a theology, endorsing Occidental superiority in all manner of ways – from epistemological to cultural and racial violence.

If modernity, as a dynamic process, is considered the property of the West, all other historical and cultural formations are largely reduced to the expression of static societies constituted as anthropological objects of inquiry. Novelty and change can apparently only enter the world from the West. In other words, the motor of history and the development of mankind (an extremely complicated and problematic issue in itself) is located in the global centrality of the Occident. As Seth insists, this situation consistently poses the question of why other societies and cultures are not ‘European’, that is, are not dynamic and transformative in the manner that these processes have been understood to be in Europe.

This, in turn, creates the sharp distinction between the seeming uniqueness of Europe and the rest of the world. Although this distinction has been modified and diluted through European expansion under the sign of capital on a planetary scale, the initial premise has hardly been dented in the subsequent knowledge formation of the social (and human) sciences. Clothed in scientific neutrality, such premises articulate a cultural and historical hierarchy that continues to command the languages and lexicons of modern knowledge production.

The challenge to this geopolitical arrangement, whose powers unilaterally map the world from a European base and source (which, after all, is a colonial arrangement) has certainly led to authors researching modernity outside of its European confines. Seth cites the pioneering work of the black intellectuals Eric Williams and CLR James, and then, more recently, world-systems and dependency theory. These are all theories that continually touch the metonymic relationship between modernity and capitalism and the necessarily global requirements of the latter. This certainly leads to a form of thinking globally which undoes European centrality and its creation of margins and peripheries. In an altogether more complicated, even rhizomatic, understanding of a mobile constellation, all the parts and diversities are drawn upon in what Nicos Poulantzas once called a global mode of production (1973). Here the resources – both human and material – of Africa, the Americas and Asia loom into view, proposing what Lisa Lowe (2015) has recently called The Intimacies of Four Continents. At this point, recognition of the centrality of colonialism and capitalism as the often unregistered linchpins of modernity and its violent effects on the world, produces an altogether more troubled concept, robbed of methodological neutrality. For the European exceptionality that Seth unpacks certainly also lies in the systematic violence with which it militarily, culturally and economically imposed itself on the planet. Here Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is perhaps actually a more telling account than Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

In this asymmetrical set-up of powers that continues to set the West off from the rest, how the narrative of modernity is told – by whom and where – rather than the evidence of empirical facts acquires centrality. In what is clearly a contested domain, Seth suggests that what acquires increasing importance is not the search for an alternative genealogy of the modern, but rather a pluralization of genealogies that split modernity from a single template.

In the terms proposed by Charles Taylor, the crux of the matter is not merely one of historical chronologies and geographical location: modernity as the West. This is because Taylor (2004) argues, modernity is not simply to be considered as the latest stage of a historical development, but rather, and altogether more significantly, as the custodian of universal truth. In other words, modernity proposes the breaking through to a transcendental level from where it is apparently possible to unveil the world and abandon the anthropological limits of other epistemologies and associated cultures. Stripped of particularities, the modern subject can render the world an object and overcome the ambiguities of earlier cosmologies. In other words, we are not dealing with a historical construction amongst others, or a religious claim to universal understanding, but rather with a disenchanted epistemology able to see the world as a distinct and separate object of inquiry. This, in the eyes of Fredric Jameson and Bruno Latour, is the narrative that we ‘moderns’ apply to the world and to ourselves. Here modernity creates a precise field in which its knowledge claims are most successful and can go largely unchallenged. It is precisely here, Seth concludes, where modernity is not a ‘thing’ but a conceptual force field, a project open to contestation and reworking, that returns us to its historical formation and exercise of powers, and that brings us to an understanding of it as a particular, and certainly not unique, modality of knowing, and living on, the planet.