American Sociology’s Racial Ontology: Remembering Slavery,Deconstructing Modernity,and Charting the Future of Global Historical Sociology

Introduction: Of Paradoxes and Periodization

Consider this paradox. On the one hand, the ‘very definition of the conditions of modernity only emerged with the establishment of sociology as a discipline’ (Bhambra, 2007: 53). Sociology has been commonly understood as both ‘created by the conditions of modernity’ as well as a ‘distinctively modern form of explanation’ of that condition (Bhambra, 2007: 52, 47). The ways in which the conditions of modernity were defined were such that it became permissible (if not a requirement) for sociologists to write and speak of the events and changes brought about by modernity (industrialization, democratization, revolution, etc.) as subjects apart from the struggles and strivings of people of African descent, even though the arrival of this population in ‘the West’ preceded every American and European sociologist of renown. Most sociologists are taught that the discipline’s foundational experience (modernity) and its associated ideas and ideals are ‘free of, uninformed and unaffected by the four-hundred-year old presence of first Africans and then African Americans in the United States’ (Morrison, 1992: 4). The formulation Tocqueville came up with in 1835, that allowed him to celebrate American democracy in the midst of American slavery, still holds conceptual if not political weight. The Negro, Tocqueville said, is ‘collaterally connected with my subject without forming a part of it’ (1945 [1835]: 343). The Tocquevillian formula, translated to sociology, holds that people of African descent have not only had no significant place or consequence in the origin or development of the discipline, but also that the characteristics of its canonical theory, concepts, and methods emanate from a particular ‘Europeanness’ that is separate from and unaccountable to their existence. The histories and strivings of African descent people can, therefore, be relegated to a space of their own, defined as ‘race relations’ or ‘the sociology of race’, which is itself set apart from ‘general’ sociology and its study of ‘modernity’. Because of the way in which race is ‘segregated as a “topic” within sociology’, little room is left for discussion of how race has ‘structured and continues to structure the sociological enterprise’ (Bhambra, 2014: 477).

However, the analytical bifurcation of ‘general sociology’ and the ‘sociology of race’, and the subordination of the latter to the former, sit uneasily with certain other facts (far less spoken of, but nevertheless known) relating to the history of sociology in the United States. Mainly, that what was once called ‘the Negro question’ (later renamed ‘the sociology of race relations’, ‘the sociology of race’, or ‘race and ethnicity’), despite its named status as a ‘subfield’ has, from the moment of sociology’s appearance on the American stage, given shape, form, and content to a discipline that has had to make do with studying ‘society’ – what Turner and Turner (1990: 23) rather ungenerously called ‘the undefined residual category in the social sciences’.

The first two books written in English with the word ‘sociology’ in the title were written by ‘pro-slavery imperialists’ who saw slavery as a modern system of social relations whose survival depended upon colonial expansion (Fitzhugh, 1854; Hughes, 1854). George Frederick Holmes, a leading pro-slavery writer, authored The Science of Society (1883), one of the first sociology college textbooks. Both Fitzhugh and Hughes were devotees of Comte and were among the first to introduce his work to American readers (Ambrose, 1996; Wish, 1941). Hence, while all social sciences have had some theories about race, racial difference, and racism, ‘sociologists have long monopolized empirical inquiry into these matters’ (Stanfield, 1985: 20). Although all the social sciences contributed to the development of a social scientific study of race in some way, ‘it was only amongst sociologists that such study became a full bodied specialty’ (McKee, 1993: 1). It is this history that led Stanford Lyman to conclude: ‘to trace the black man in American sociology is tantamount to tracing the history of American sociology itself’ (1972: 15). Lyman wrote those words close to five decades ago. More recently, Stephen Steinberg observed that Robert Park and Ernest Burgess’ Introduction to the Science of Sociology, which very quickly earned the colloquial name the ‘Green Bible’ – a nod to both the color of the jacket cover and the text’s foundational status – made Park’s ‘race relations cycle’ the theoretical scaffolding for the entire volume. The ‘Green Bible’ not only gave academic sociology a defining statement of its subject matter, it did so in a way that decisively marked academic sociology’s separation from philosophy and history on the one hand, and reformist or ‘charity’ initiatives on the other. The text also provided a guide for connecting theory with empirical research – a trait that not only defined the distinctiveness of the Chicago school of sociology but of American sociology in general. Thus, ‘inasmuch as Introduction to the Science of Sociology was the leading textbook for the first two decades of sociology’s establishment as a discipline, it might be said that sociology as a discipline evolved out of a racial ontology’ (Steinberg, 2007: 50).

If sociologists, from Comte’s time onward, have ‘defined the discipline by defining the object’ (Breslau, 2007: 46), a deeper examination of how sociology has defined its object of study by silencing this aspect of its history is warranted. As R.W. Connell (1997: 1546) once argued, ‘what we need instead of “classical theory” is better history—sociological history—and an inclusive way of doing theory’. Making slavery the signal event in American modernity and the discipline that arose to explain it, throws the sagacity of isolating the study of race from matters of general sociological concern into radical doubt. ‘The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear’ (Baptiste, 2014: xxi–xxii). Nor is the idea that sociology’s origins ultimately trace back to this suffering easy to contemplate. But it is necessary. ‘Slavery reshaped the modern world … it was both modernizing and modern’ (Baptiste, 2014: xxii). The discipline that purports to take modernity as its special object of study, thus, has a particular responsibility to grapple with these uncomfortable truths. In the pages that follow I will discuss the various ways in which sociology’s submerged ‘racial ontology’ holds epistemological significance for the future of global historical sociology. It will be shown that new categories for historical sociology can only emerge if we expose the analytical maneuvers that made the bifurcation of ‘general’ and ‘race’ sociology possible and, acting on the basis of that knowledge, work to construct a global historical sociology that refuses the distinction.

A prerequisite for American sociology’s becoming more ‘global’ is an ‘increase in the discipline’s reflexivity about the national conditions of its own production’ (Kennedy and Centeno, 2007: 671). As we strive to generate new categories for global historical sociology, those of us writing from North America must be particularly mindful of the fact that:

we cannot treat the international as a simple categorical distinction from American sociology, or within American sociology. It rather functions in association with the discipline’s debates about method, theory, and above all standpoint. (Kennedy and Centeno, 2007: 669)

These questions of standpoint go straight to the heart of the analytical and conceptual bifurcation of ‘general sociology’ and the ‘sociology of race’. It is here, on this battleground, that, as Ascione states in the Introduction to this special issue, the fight to rethink modernity in its original global character and constitutive colonial nature must be waged and won. The contest concerns not only unmasking the conceptual matrix that positions the sociology of race in the sociological canon, but also unveiling the mechanisms through which ‘those who were subject to colonial domination [have been] rendered absent or insignificant to what are presented as national [sociological] traditions’ (Bhambra, 2014: 473).

The stakes are heightened by the fact that the American sociology of race, which Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999) point out exercises outsize influence globally, has been highly resistant to viewing American racism through the prism of colonialism. This tendency is only reinforced by the standard refusal of American social science in general, and American sociology in particular, to see American modernity, inaugurated in 1776, as anything but anti-colonial. No clearer fusing of these two perspectives can be found than when Omi and Winant (1994: 47) surmised that, because the United States was ‘created out of a colony’, Black nationalism, with its framing of US racism as a form of colonialism, never gained political traction. Ditto for why internal colonialism theory, the social scientific perspective Black nationalism most closely parallels, never gained intellectual traction. In answer to the question, ‘how effective are perspectives that frame US racism as a form of colonialism’, Omi and Winant answer thus: ‘The analogy between US conditions and colonial systems of discrimination composed of colonizers and colonized—systems which made use of racial distinctions—does not automatically carry over into postcolonial society’ (1994: 46).

As a counterpoint to this view, I propose that the era Omi and Winant identify as ‘postcolonial’ and that American sociologists more generally call ‘modernity’, is better understood as the era wherein the ‘counter-revolutionary modernity’ of slave trading and slaveholding was born. The former was inaugurated in 1688 when, as a result of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, the monopoly held by the Royal Africa Company ended and the slave trade was ‘modernized’ – governed by the imperatives of free trade. Standard accounts of England’s revolution emphasize that the monarchy’s retreat led to the ascendancy of a rising class of merchants. They rarely mention, however, that those ‘rising merchants’ put their energies into the ‘lushly lucrative’ market in enslaved Africans and ‘descended maniacally’ upon the Continent (Horne, 2014: viii). The blood, sweat, and tears of Africans, surrendered involuntarily, provided the impetus for the capitalist takeoff in the mainland colonies (Horne, 2014). The newly rich in colonial North America, their fortunes driven by slavery, grew restive and chafed at the control of their colonial overlords. The rights of ‘modern’ slaveholders in a ‘modern’ and ‘free’ slaveholding republic would be secured by the revolution in 1776. Standard histories, which see 1776 as a straightforward anti-colonial revolution, underplay the significance of the freedom that the rebels won to exercise their rights as slaveholders.

The Somerset case, decided in 1772, declared that James Somerset (born in Africa, enslaved in the American colonies, and brought to London by his master) was free, as slavery was not recognized on British soil. Mainland colonists saw the Somerset case as having deep implications for them. They decried Lord Mansfield, who decided the case, as having ‘cheated’ an ‘honest American’ out of his rights as a slaveholder. The case helped to fuel anti-London sentiment and was part of the reason why ‘slaveholding Patriots went to war in 1775 and declared independence in 1776 to defend their rights to own slaves’ (Horne, 2014: 211).

Because slavery was so central to the birth of American modernity, the inauguration of the American take on the science that took ‘modernity’ as its object was marked by the publication, in 1854, of two books by pro-slavery imperialists. Most historians of sociology, even those who adopt a critical, postcolonial stance, dismiss these books as anachronisms that do not belong in the history of sociology proper (Connell, 1997). This is a mistake. The timing of these two books coincided with the ‘high-noon of the White republic’ and the ‘market revolution of Jacksonian America’ (Nimtz, 2003: 7). The authors’ decisions to call their studies ‘sociology’ were deliberate. Fitzhugh called sociology ‘the technical appellative of a new-born science’, saw sociologists as ‘doctors’ who diagnosed society’s maladies, and provided ‘remedies for its cure’ (1854: vi). Sociology was not simply the ‘science of modern society’. It was, more accurately, the science of America’s ‘slaveholding imperialist modernity’.

American Sociology, Pro-Slavery Imperialism, and American Modernity

Classical theory, as taught to graduate and undergraduate students alike, emphasizes a specific connection between European and American sociology. Classical theory textbooks (as well as the discipline’s professional practitioners) take for granted that sociology was the brainchild of ‘great men theorizing European modernity’ whose thoughts and ideas became the theoretical corpus for the founders of academic sociology in America. Many compendiums of classical theorists align with George Ritzer’s Classical Sociological Theory wherein he contends: ‘European theorists largely created sociological theory, and the Americans were able to rely on this groundwork’ (1996: 44). Dorothy Ross makes a similar point in her history of American social science when she writes: ‘America’s distinctive national ideology and social scientific task emerged from European social science’ (Ross, 1991: xvii). Despite the symbolic dominion and influence of American sociology around the globe, it is European history that has been built into American sociology’s self-understanding of its own project.

The relationship between American and European intellectuals has been depicted as one wherein American intellectuals were inspired by the lofty ideals of European modernity. Bernard and Bernard (1943: 6) describe the founders of American sociology as akin to active observers, sitting on the banks of a river watching ‘the stream of European thought flow past, dipping in occasionally for whatever struck their imagination or seemed to serve their needs’. There is nothing in the picture to suggest slaveholders were intellectuals, familiar with Charles Fourier’s utopian socialism, much less that they would propose that Fourier ‘procure overseers from Virginia to govern [his] phalanxes and phalastries’ (Fitzhugh, 1854: 72). For the pro-slavery advocate turned sociologist, the best thing that ‘stream’ of European thought could provide 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. Of the revolutionary tumult of 1848 Fitzhugh remarked:

The poor must have bread. Government must furnish it. Liberty without bread was not worth fighting for. A republic is set up in Paris that promises employment and good wages. … Louis Napoleon is made Emperor. He is a socialist and socialism is the new fashionable name of slavery. … He is now building houses on the social plan for working men. Just as we southerners do for our Negro women and children. (Fitzhugh, 1854: 42)

Conflating Europe with modernity, and crafting an imagined American response thereto, has been particularly important for American sociology. It has authorized a rewrite of the discipline’s origin story. Instead of the true story, which is that ‘pro-slavery imperialists’ led the adoption of sociology in the United States, we have been told that a vague, universal interest in ‘modernity’ united American practitioners and their European forebears. However, as George Fitzhugh makes plain in the preface to Sociology for the South: Or, the Failure of Free Society, the decision to label what he was doing ‘sociology’ was neither accidental nor easily arrived at.

We hesitated some time in selecting the title of our work. We did not like to employ the newly-coined word Sociology. We could, however, find none other in the whole range of the English language, that would even faintly convey the idea which we wished to express. (Fitzhugh, 1854: v)

Even the word sociology tended to ‘grate so harshly on Southern ears’ because it signaled the arrival of the problems of free society – ‘revolutionary tumults, uproar, mendacity, and crime’ (Fitzhugh, 1854: vi). It was only because the book was intended to show that the South was ‘indebted to domestic slavery for our happy exemption from the social afflictions that have originated this philosophy, it became necessary and appropriate that we should employ this new word in our title’ (p. vi). If sociology provided an accounting of how societies became modern or not, Fitzhugh maintained that his book belonged in that tradition as a corrective to the prevailing notions that slaveholding societies were not modern.

The ancients took it for granted that slavery was right, and never attempted to justify it. The moderns assume that it is wrong, and forthwith proceed to denounce it. The South can lose nothing, and may gain, by the discussion. She has, up to this time, been condemned without a hearing. (Fitzhugh, 1854: iv)

Henry Hughes was equally determined to see the South retain its slavery system and modernize. This would be accomplished, in part, through spatial expansion. Hughes, author of Treatise on Sociology: Theoretical and Practical was more vocal on this matter than Fitzhugh. In a eulogy written for John Anthony Quitman, leader of an unsuccessful effort to annex Cuba and make it a slave state, Hughes declared that he ‘approved the uncompromising Quitman’ and wanted a monument built to honor him (1978: 163). Hughes wanted to colonize Nicaragua and make it a receptacle for non-slave-holding Whites and connect the Mississippi Valley economy with the emerging economies of the Pacific. He saw Cuba as the ‘mouth of the Mississippi’ and the place where the ‘political economy of slavery joined the global economy’, and thus sought to overthrow the island’s Spanish colonial government and annex it to the US as slave territory (Johnson, 2013: 15). Karl Marx wrote despairingly of men like Hughes who advocated for ‘unceasing piratical expeditions of the filibusters against the states of Central America’. These were done for nothing else but the ‘conquest of new territory for the spread of slavery and of the slaveholders rule’ (quoted in Nimtz, 2003: 94).

Hughes and Fitzhugh parted company, however, on the question of whether re-opening the Atlantic slave trade, declared illegal in 1807, would be a help or hindrance to modernization. Fitzhugh, a resident of Virginia, thought no.

From several quarters propositions of late have been made for the revival of the African slave trade. The South has generally been opposed to this trade, the North favorable to it. Such is likely to be the case again; for the North would make much money by conducting the trade. The settled South loses much by the depreciation of their Negroes. (Fitzhugh, 1854: 210)

The Chesapeake’s enslaved population had already become self-reproducing by the 1780s. When the tobacco economy collapsed, states like Virginia in the upper South were left with a slave surplus, which speculators sold to plantations in the lower South at great profit. It was such that Marx described the upper South as a ‘slave-breeding region where the slave raised for the market became an element of annual reproduction’ (1909: 559). Fitzhugh, like most Virginians, feared that reopening the slave trade would flood the market and tend to depress prices. Hughes, who was not only a resident of the lower South, but also an investor in the African Labor Supply Company, proposed to get around the 1807 ban by rebranding imported slaves as ‘warrantees’ or ‘apprentices’. ‘These apprentices may, without a violation of the United States Constitution or statutes, be elevated into our labor system’ (Hughes, 1859: 14). Sociology for the South was an extended meditation on the superiority of slave-labor systems over free-labor systems for producing ‘progress’, defined as the ‘systematic quantitative adaptation of labor and capital’ (1854: 104). Or, put in plain English, 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. ‘Free labor can never grow cotton because only systematic labor can cultivate a systematic crop’ (Hughes, 1859: 11).

When Hughes called cotton a ‘systematic crop’, he was referring to the fact that the creation of innovative financial tools was making it easier for an even larger portion of the Western world to invest directly in slavery’s expansion (Baptiste, 2014). The United States seized control of the world export market for cotton, the most important industrial commodity, in the 1820s. Cotton thus became the dominant driver of US economic growth. Between 1815 and 1820 cotton became the world’s most widely traded commodity. By the mid 1850s, when Hughes and Fitzhugh produced their treatises, profitability was being secured not only by territorial expansion but also by increases in efficiency. Enslaved Africans were ‘the world’s most efficient producers of cotton. And they got more efficient every year’ (Baptiste, 2014: 113). They did so because they were systematically beaten and tortured. ‘Violent supervision could extract the maximum amount of labor’ (Baptiste, 2014: 118). This torture was responsible for one of the most dramatic rises in productivity in the history of the modern world. The dramatic increase is remarkable not only because it happened but more importantly because ‘the history of the modern world, of industrialization, and great divergences, of escape from the Malthusian trap, has almost never noticed it’ (Baptiste, 2014: 126–127). The fact that ‘racial terror is not merely compatible with occidental rationality but cheerfully complicit with it’ fits unevenly (if at all) into sociology’s narrative about modernity (Gilroy, 1993: 56). And yet it was there, in these early texts – veiled and occluded in some instances; obliquely celebrated in others. It is there, for example, when Fitzhugh makes the case for how well slaves would be treated in a modern slave system by admitting to the ‘pristine cruelty’ of the system in the not-too-distant past (1854: 211).

Connell (1997) makes the point that the way in which the sociological canon was constructed deleted the discourse of imperialism from sociology, which was negative, but also expunged open racism from the discipline’s theoretical core, which was positive. Overall it had the ‘undesirable effect of excusing most sociologists from thinking about global society at all’ (Connell, 1997: 1545). The parallel holds true for the writings of Fitzhugh and Hughes. When we do not engage with them we are spared from reading such outrageous utterances as ‘negroes must never be citizens because political amalgamation realizes sexual amalgamation’ (Hughes, 1859: 13). Erasing them from sociology’s history, however, provides cover for a wholly inadequate rendering of the discipline’s emergence in the United States. This rendering of history, which has been accepted as fact not only in graduate and undergraduate textbooks, but also by many respected historians of social science, posits American sociology’s relationship to ‘European modernity’ in a way that completely empties the concept of meaning. The aspects of European modernity that held the most interest for Hughes and Fitzhugh were precisely the ones that Bhambra (2013) identifies as the ‘colonial global’. The ways in which historical sociology has framed modernity are, thus, deeply connected to how slavery has been erased from American sociology’s historical memory.

The fact that American sociology has isolated the study of race from more general considerations has also worked to entrench the kind of localism, parochialism, and methodological nationalism that global historical sociology now seeks to unseat. Kennedy and Centeno make the point that in social science,

national boundaries can be quite powerful when they work implicitly. For a global sociology to reduce these constraints, we need first to recognize them, and this requires some consideration of why national constraints are hard to see, especially in the United States. (Kennedy and Centeno, 2007: 668)

In the following section I look more closely at what kinds of ‘national constraints’ operate in American race scholarship, and suggest that the national constraints that came to operate so powerfully in the sociology of race center precisely on the aversion that many race scholars have to analyses that frame American racist practices as sharing important affinities and similarities with colonialist practices. These national constraints have operated as powerful barriers to a full embrace of the possibilities of and for a global sociology.

Global Sociology and the Sociology of Race: Yet Another ‘Missing Revolution’

Saskia Sassen has written about how sociology faces ‘methodological and theoretical challenges’ to studying global processes that are exacerbated by the fact that some sociological subfields have a ‘built in resistance to studying the global’ (2010: 3). She might well have been speaking about the sociology of race. For at least a decade there have been calls to make the sociology of race more global. In a lead article in Ethnic and Racial Studies, one of the most prominent sociologists of race called for theories that addressed racism from a global perspective, noting that the ‘global racial situation remains volatile and undertheorized’ (Winant, 2006: 988, original emphasis). It is important to note that this same theorist and his co-author, in their book Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, one of the most frequently cited books in race scholarship today, explicitly rejected colonialism as having analytical purchase in the study of US racism, and questioned the effectiveness of a politics linking the struggles of African Americans with those of Africans and other colonized peoples.

We include Pan-Africanism, cultural nationalism, Marxist debates on ‘The National Question,’ and perspectives focusing on internal colonialism as specific analyses of race and racism which take shape within the nation-based paradigm. What these approaches share is their reliance on elements derived from the dynamics of colonialism to demonstrate the continuity of racial oppression prevailing in colonialism’s heyday. (Omi and Winant, 1994: 37, original emphasis)

What they call ‘nationalist perspectives’ or ‘radical perspectives’, global historical sociologists would most likely identify as ‘postcolonial’. While they do not specifically name postcolonial sociology, it is clear that they would reject it. The links between ‘US conditions and colonial systems of discrimination composed of colonizers and colonized—systems which made use of racial distinctions’ are, in their estimation, ‘tenuous’ (Omi and Winant, 1994: 47). The explanation they offer for this tenuousness is the shop-worn, but ever useful, American exceptionalism:

Often influenced by movements and traditions whose reference points were located outside the US, many radical perspectives simply fail to address specific US conditions. Part of the confusion resides in the fact that race in the US is concurrently an obvious and complex phenomenon. (Omi and Winant, 1994: 3)

Omi and Winant appear not to be alone in this view. The sociology of race provides a plethora of examples of how ‘American sociology has focused substantially, if not exclusively on American society’ (Kennedy and Centeno, 2007: 667). A recent survey of the ‘best books in the race field since 2000’, written by the author of the much cited (and by his own estimation ‘commercially successful’) Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and Racial Inequality in Contemporary America (2010), identifies 27 key books (Bonilla-Silva, 2013: 37). Of these, nine explicitly state in the title that they deal only with the United States (Feagin, 2010; Jeffries, 2010; Jung, 2006; Klineberg, 1969 [1944]; Nakano Glenn, 2002; Omi and Winant, 1994; Pascale, 2007; Saito, 2009; Wilson, 1980). An additional six, while not explicitly identifying the ‘national accent’ in the title of their work, nonetheless limit their focus to America (Alexander, 2010; Lewis, 2003; Patillo-McCoy, 1999; Roberts, 2011; Royster, 2003; Young, 2006). Only four anchor their analysis of racism in colonialism or take a global approach (Andrews, 2004; Jung, 2006; Telles, 2006; Zuberi, 2001). Only two deal with the longue durée (Andrews, 2004; Feagin, 2010).

Only a fraction of studies that fall under the ‘race relations’ umbrella take on racism from the perspective of the longue durée. Nevertheless, most adopt a periodization which sees racism as beginning with the journeys of exploration, followed by slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights revolution, and the ‘post-Civil Rights’ era. The latter category is currently the locus of intense disciplinary debates as sociologists struggle with how to characterize and theorize about it – offering ‘post-racial’, the era of the ‘new racism’, the era of ‘color-blind racism’, or the era of ‘laissez-faire racism’ as possible interpretations. My reframing of American modernity as a story about the modernizing of slavery through imperial expansion throws into question the utility of this long-standing periodization as well as the analytical parameters it has established whereby sociologists judge the racism of today as ‘new’.

My reframing suggests that the Jim Crow era is better understood as the ‘long era of global Jim Crow’ (1865–1965) that was marked by sustained efforts to articulate the ‘new South’ and the ‘global South’ as co-joined and coterminous political and economic projects. Recall Fitzhugh’s glum assessment that ‘free labor can never grow cotton’ (1854: 11). He was not the only one who had that fear. Just as slavery collapsed, the global demand for raw cotton exploded.

Emancipation forced cotton capitalists toward their own revolution—a frantic search for new ways to organize the cotton-growing labor of the world. Reconciling the emancipation of America’s cotton growers with the need for ever more raw cotton was not easily accomplished. (Beckert, 2014: 275)

Cotton was picked by hand until the 1930s. The goal of the architects of ‘global Jim Crow’, therefore, was to guarantee the continued stability and profitability established during slavery. Far from being armchair academics, sociologists like Robert Park and Thomas Jesse Jones were instrumental to its realization (Magubane, 2013; Zimmerman, 2010). The Togo-Tuskegee cotton program, which sought to ‘reproduce the American economy of black cotton growing in Africa’, brought African Americans (trained by Booker T. Washington in the ‘Tuskegee way’) to West Africa (Zimmerman, 2010: 4). Projects like this one, with concrete methods and aims and well-known advocates, by miracles of abstraction and de-contextualization, morphed into ‘data’ that formed the basis for conceptual abstractions like ‘modernization’. Variables, theories, and methods were plucked out of the transnational histories that generated them in the first place. ‘Plucking’ was followed by ‘erasure’; thus authorizing a comparative sociology premised on the idea that societies are distinct, nationally bounded entities wherein social change is generated by endogenous mechanisms (Bhambra, 2007).

The significance of African Americans to the global empire of cotton also caught the attention of Max Weber, who, it is true, did not incorporate issues of slavery and colonialism into his conceptual framework of modernity. Nevertheless, he not only took it upon himself to make a trip through the United States South in 1904, but also made a special point to visit Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. It is thus that Max Weber began as a sociologist writing on Polish migrant laborers in Germany, took a detour through the US South, and emerged as a general theorist of culture and economics. Historians have definitively shown how important the visit to the South and the Tuskegee Institute was for Weber’s scholarly work (Honigsheim, 2000; Scaff, 2011; Zimmerman, 2010). His detour through the South was a signal moment in the development of his theories on economic sociology (Zimmerman, 2010). Yet, given the silence around that trip both in standard histories of sociological theory and in much of Weber’s own work, scholars can be forgiven for assuming that he, like other classical sociologists, did not engage with matters of race and empire.

Although the era of ‘global Jim Crow’ might seem overly long, the one-hundred-year time span allows us to see how the drive to maintain systems of commodity production built on forced labor, and resistance thereto, linked such seemingly disparate occurrences as the Berlin Conference (1884–1885), Booker T. Washington’s ‘Atlanta Compromise’ speech (1895), the League of Nations (1920), the Pan-Africanist conferences (1900–1927), the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (1935), the African-American anti-colonial politics of the 1940s, the Cold War (1950), and, most critically, the era of ‘Cold War Civil Rights’ (1950–1965).

The latter concept is key, as it foregrounds the ways in which the Civil Rights movement was a product of global dynamics. As Dudziak’s (2000) work has shown, the concessions made by the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations were partially in response to the ideological leverage ‘negative publicity’ about US racism provided the Soviet Union (Von Eschen, 1997: 145). Reinserting the Civil Rights movement into transnational history makes clear to what extent its gains were predicated on ‘severing the black American struggle for civil rights from the issues of anti-colonialism and racism abroad’ (Von Eschen, 1997: 3).

Von Eschen (1997) has shown that the decision taken by American liberals, Black and White, to embrace anti-Communism and endorse the United States becoming the legitimate leader of the free world, had a profound impact on social science. Although Von Eschen references ‘social science’ quite broadly, and does not single out sociology, the evidence that she presents clearly shows that sociology was the discipline most seriously impacted by what she calls the ‘rewriting of race and racism’ (1997: 155). One of the foundational tenets of American liberalism was that colonialism abroad and racism at home did not occupy the same analytical, political, or economic frame. In practical terms, the rewriting of race and racism meant a ‘shift away from a sophisticated analysis rooted in history and toward psychological and social psychological research on race relations’ (Von Eschen, 1997: 155). It was precisely when the epistemology of race was ‘rewritten’ that the many barriers to the kinds of ‘connected, non-ethnocentric, relational theorization’ that global historical sociology is currently seeking to instantiate were erected.

Because Von Eschen’s analysis centers on Black Americans and anti-colonialism, the body of scholarship in which the rewriting was most keenly felt was amongst Black social scientists. They were far more likely than their White counterparts to have been engaged in analyses of race that emphasized the continuities between racism and colonialism. The generally racist milieu in which American sociology operated meant that there was already a suffocating silence around these scholars and their work (Bhambra, 2014; Stanfield, 1985; Steinberg, 2007). For sociology’s institutional history ‘there were two distinct institutionally organized traditions of sociological thought—one Black and one White’ (Bhambra, 2014: 472). What the rewriting of race authorized that was of most impact to the White-dominated and controlled sociological establishment was the rise of a ‘vision of objectivity that made African Americans the least qualified persons to comment on racism in America’ (Von Eschen, 1997: 158). It became not only plausible, but also somewhat laudable, for sociology to have a subfield ‘devoted to the study of “race relations” in which blacks had only token representation’ (Steinberg 2007: 15).

Equally important to note is that African-American sociologists working in segregated institutions had not been lobbying for race as a ‘subfield’. Before the turn of the century DuBois had realized the urgency of ‘putting science into sociology’ through the study of African Americans (1991: 51). In 1904 he lamented that ‘nothing can exceed our remarkable and reprehensible ignorance of the Negro people’ (1978a: 55). This ultimately traced back to imperial politics and the ways it silenced some perspectives on the race question while amplifying others. DuBois condemned the cynicism whereby,

if the Negroes were still lost in the forests of central Africa we could have a government commission to go and measure their heads, but with 10 millions of them here under your noses, I have in the past besought the Universities almost in vain to spend a single cent in a rational study of their characteristics and conditions. (DuBois, 1978a: 55).

DuBois’ comments were likely a partial response to the exhibition of Ota Benga, a Congolese man pejoratively called the ‘pygmy in the zoo’ who was exhibited at the St. Louis World’s Fair, which was also the occasion for the 1904 Congress of Arts and Sciences (Bradford and Blume, 1992). Some of the discipline’s leading lights were present – Ferdinand Tönnies, Gustav Ratzenhofer, Lester Frank Ward, Franklin Giddings, WI Thomas, and EA Ross. Ward, Giddings, Thomas, and Ross would each go on to take a turn leading the American Sociological Association, founded in 1905. As these men delivered papers on various aspects of ‘modernity’, ‘fair goers outside were watching reenactments of the Boer War and living exhibits of Filipinos eating dogs’ (Go, 2014: 86). And, most likely, they were ogling Ota Benga.

The ‘dog-eating Filipinos’ were there courtesy of America’s imperial exploits in the Spanish–American War, and they too were implicated in the peculiar silences and evasions that characterized sociology’s engagement with the ‘Negro question’. DuBois lamented:

We can go to the South Sea Islands half way around the world and beat and shoot a weak people longing for freedom into the slavery of American color prejudice at the cost of hundreds of millions, and yet at Atlanta University we beg annually and beg in vain for the paltry sum of $500 simply to aid us in replacing gross and vindictive ignorance of race conditions with enlightening knowledge and systematic observation. (DuBois, 1978a: 55)

In 1900, just after the war commenced, he opened his article on the ‘Twelfth Census and the Negro Problems’ with the following observation:

The Spanish war and its various sequels have gravely increased some of our difficulties in dealing with the Negro problems. There has come a significant change in public opinion—a growing indifference to human suffering, a practical surrender of the doctrine of equality, of citizenship, and a new impetus to the cold commercial aspect of racial intercourse. All this means increased difficulty in stirring the heart of the nation to such great reformatory movements as the proper solution of the Negro problems demands. (DuBois, 1978b: 65)

The proper solution of the ‘Negro problem’ did not demand that African Americans be discussed as subjects apart from those of agriculture, land, political economy, class alliances, agriculture, revolution, literature, art or modernity. Rather, the aim was to develop a social science that recognized, and tried to account for, their entire implication within the vital questions of modernity and could receive the kind of publicity that Mississippi planter Alfred Stone got for Studies in the American Race Problem, the ‘first sociological text to gain widespread popularity in the sociological community’ (Stanfield, 1985: 25). The text, wherein Stone argued that the solution to the ‘Negro problem’ lay in White control over a disorderly and disruptive population, was lauded by the American Journal of Sociology, cited by many subsequent books on ‘race relations’, and ‘was even incorporated into the sociological bible, Introduction to the Science of Sociology’ (Stanfield, 1985: 25).

Conclusion

What significance does the above hold for the future of global historical sociology? On the one hand, given the politics of knowledge production and consumption, the centrality of ‘the race question’ to American sociology past and present is likely to be felt and experienced globally. Kennedy and Centeno (2007: 668) point to the ‘power and privilege of American sociology in the world’ that make it so easy to ‘imagine the world in American terms’. This trend is particularly marked in race scholarship. For, as Bourdieu and Wacquant so aptly observed, the fact that American sociology of race was able so effectively to ‘globalize’ itself is ‘one of the most striking proofs of the symbolic dominion and influence exercised by the USA over every kind of scholarly production’ (1999: 45).

Therefore, any effort to ‘rethink modernity in its original global character’ must begin with an examination of the ‘least understood inequality in social science issues … the production of racial inequality in social scientific knowledge’ (Stanfield, 1985: 3). Specifically, it requires us to engage what Stanfield rather inelegantly calls the ‘societal conditioning factors’ which have shaped the origins and development of sociology; specifically, to think about the different moments of silencing that have occurred which make it possible to conflate Europe with modernity without precisely saying what modernity is (Bhambra, 2011). Modernity as a frame is inadequate for addressing the global and colonial in sociology because modernity has operated as cover for a set of displacements. In American sociology in particular, what standard histories of sociology call ‘modernity’ and then go on to make a cornerstone of sociological concern, should more accurately be termed ‘slaveholding modernity’. And American sociology, rather than being seen as the ‘science of a new industrial society’ is better understood as the science of the ‘Negro problem’. I say, ‘Negro problem’ rather than ‘race relations’ not only because this is what the founders of academic sociology in the United States called it, but, more importantly, because of what the phrase itself reveals.

It reveals without euphemism the illegitimacy of the problem in the context of a democratic polity. Proposing to decide the fate of people occupying the nominal status of citizens otherwise than with their participation and assent is [a] profoundly undemocratic, indeed anti-democratic undertaking. … Race relations, as an ideological formation of the problem, popularized with genius by Booker T. Washington, arose precisely as a way to disguise the anti-democratic essence of the problem by providing for it both a definition and a solution apparently capable of bypassing the issue of naked power that lay at its core. (Fields, 2001: 814)

Thus, if global historical sociology is to arrive at alternative concepts and terminologies, it must do so through an examination of how it came to be that American sociology has a national sociological tradition which insists upon (and subsequently globalizes) the integrity of a conceptual architecture very much at odds with the actual historical conditions that account for its emergence and (arguably) its continued existence and domination.