“For us, an agricultural colony (colonie) is a rural institution that extends its benevolence to all those who have access, whatever their title, and where the benefits are shared… That obligation may consist of the work of clearing or of ordinary cultivation, of more or less demanding service, or the obligation of a simple stay, it basically does not matter: the rule applies to all, to obey is required of all. Each contributes according to their ability, according to the contract or obligation they hold. Everyone who inhabits a colony is a colon whatever role they play, whatever work they perform, whatever particular rights are granted to them.”^[1]

In the early and mid-nineteenth century, a “colon” – a term that would be more firmly fixed later in the century to overseas settlers throughout the French empire – conveyed multiple referents. It could refer to a “pioneer settler” in Algeria as we might expect, but just as frequently to a member of a state-run establishment for paupers in central France, a penal colony inmate in New Caledonia, or an orphan child in a rural residential shelter in Provence.^[2]
The semantic slippage displayed in the French treatise on the “agricultural colonies of education” quoted above captures a feature of colonization that contemporary studies of colonialism and empire have since muted or discarded: different notions of a colony and who its members coexisted, were contested, and actively compared. Imperial expansion and modes of confinement, resettlement of delinquents, pauper programs, and the recruitment of imperial pioneers were not separately conceived and executed projects with wholly different architects and different names.^[3] The spectrum of meanings implicit in the words colonie and colon were diffused across overlapping collaborative projects. Government planners and social reformers themselves were concerned that the term colonie covered such a wide range of institutional arrangements.^[4] They too asked whether pioneer colonies should be treated alongside long-settled agricultural ones, whether colonies of rescue for foundlings, of repression for criminals, and of education for industrial and agricultural pioneers were not all forms of social relief designed to moralize those who would inhabit them.^[5]
The social etymology of colonie draws us to something else: a strikingly broad breadth and scope of imperial comparison developed through the exchange of principles, practices, and technologies between empires in their metropolitan regions and far-flung domains.^[6] If etymologies highlight the careers of words, social etymologies reveal the contexts of these developments. Social etymologies register which practices these concepts illuminated and gathered into commensurable form. As the epigraph above suggests, French blueprints for agricultural and pauper colonies drew on strategies of empires often presumed by scholars to have fashioned themselves after European ones. But Catherine II and her successors’ initiatives in Russia, for example, were considered by French observers as exemplary efforts to create a reasoned empire through colonization.^[7] As France turned to Russia, Russia in turn looked to the American West for models of settlement and expansion.^[8] Such borrowings that stretched from France to Russia and Russia to the United States mark a competitive politics of comparison that accelerated circuits of knowledge production and imperial exchange.^[9]
Yet, for students of European empires, what constituted the objects of comparison is perhaps more arresting than the comparisons themselves. French planners admired both the programs that housed abandoned children in rural “colonies” on the outskirts of St. Petersburg and Moscow as well as those that recruited the urban poor and foreign workers to colonize Russia’s steppes and vast eastern territories.^[10] Russian programs to house orphaned children were relevant both to making an orphaned underclass productive in France and to producing from that group “colonists” suitable for North African homesteads. Envisioning three stages of physical acclimatization and moral education, French planners proposed “preparatory colonies” for children one to twelve years of age (outfitted with nursemaids and a bovine population), “colonies of transition” for those aged twelve to fourteen where adolescent bodies might be first “bronzed by the sun in Provence, Roussillon or Languedoc,” and finally “colonies of application” where those aged fourteen to twenty-one would be primed for cultivation of the soil and already equipped for a disciplined cultivation of the self.^[11]
Such a range of comparisons is dissonant to students of European colonial cultures, because it references and revives long buried connections. What were once politically tethered terms – components of related but diverse reformist state projects – now appear as mere homonyms dislocated from each other and from the commensurabilities that once linked them. Much of the scholarly space in which studies of the colonial is profiled and concentrated, the field of “colonial studies” – with its abiding focus on late nineteenth through mid-twentieth century European empires – misses those untidy connections. Its default model of empire fails to address how much ambiguous nomenclature and opaque criteria for the depth and breadth of intervention were fundamental structural features of European and non-European imperial states alike. Indeed, the reference to “refiguring” in our title is intended to address a refiguring of several sorts: of our approaches to and understandings of empire, shifting both our analytics and the scope and scale of imperial forms to which we pose our queries.
The fact that French commissions on the education of impoverished children could look at once to the Saratov colonies on the Volga and to Crimean colonies in the Russian south alongside those established in the Amur basin on the Chinese frontier underscores the inclusive and changing breadth of their comparative frames.^[12] This dynamic, non-static quality demands that we attend less to what empires are than to what they did and do, for these transformative practices altered their relations with other empires and with their own subject populations. Cross-imperial knowledge acquisition and application included poaching practices, searching for new technologies, invigorating categories of exception and difference, and competing for status. Such cross-imperial scrutiny shares recognition of the portability of practices and ideas, be it in form or in goal, across and within imperial systems.
French social planners and state officials did not imagine that all these sorts of colon were the same. Here in this mid-nineteenth century moment, when officials were as preoccupied with getting rid of certain segments of the metropolitan population as they were with conquest, some distinctions were in flux, others were not yet operative. The discrepant and confused counts offered by historians for the numbers of “colon” that left for Algeria between l848 and l851 – and the conditions under which they did so – is itself instructive. According to some, “14,000 Parisian workers” were sent by decree in September l848, followed by three thousand “republicans” after Louis Napolean’s coup d’etat in 1851.^[13] Others state the Second Republic arrested nearly fifteen thousand people in 1851, of which six thousand were “deported Republicans.”^[14] How many of those arrested were also deported as “political undesirables” is hard to say: “disorder” in Paris led to four hundred fifty political deportations to the Algerian penal colony of Lambese, and deportations to at least six former colonies agricoles newly converted into colonies penitentiaires (penal colonies).^[15] Colonists from Malta, Italy, and Spain, as well as “other Parisian workers encouraged… to emigrate voluntarily,” were added to the mix of French soldiers established in villages-militaires in l840.^[16] Thousands more were recruited under an intensive colonization program to make colon out of a lethal mix of unprepared urban poor alternately referred to as the unemployed (les sans-travail), the insurgent (les revoltes), and the rootless and dispossessed (deracine). The changing connotations of colon reflect this movement of people and projects. Here the colony emerges less as a geographic space than as a political one with directionality.
How ethnic, religious, and social differences mattered varied and were not managed in the same way. Administrative attention to social differentiation and the complex social taxonomies intended to secure them did not necessarily congeal only around racial distinctions nor instill the intensities of political anxiety associated with late nineteenth century European colonialisms. In the l850s, frames of imperial reference were mobile and migratory, moving across geographic and political space as well as institutional arrangements. This was true of the Ottoman and US empires, as well as of European ones.^[17] As social imaginaries and political arrangements shifted focus from empire and emperor to empire and nation, they were joined by new programs and policies of containment and expansion. Paradoxically, these new projects required both the production and protection of social categories and social kinds, and often anxious defense of such distinctions by those they privileged.
In this volume we see analytic purchase in staying close to the specifics of these arrangements. Still, our collective effort is as much about what such imaginaries afford for thinking beyond the skewed templates that have guided the study of imperial governance, forms of sovereignty, and their acquisitive states. We begin, therefore, with a French genealogy not to dwell in iconic European models but rather to underscore what has shaped both scholarship on empire and its frames of reference. Scholars from many quarters now stress the problems inherent in taking Europe as either a historical or conceptual paradigm for how empire – if not the world – works.^[18] The strong undertow of European history and its epistemic frames has methodological consequences as well. Challenging this pull requires more than acknowledging its ubiquity. It requires new assessments of what have been treated as defining coordinates of imperial rule. A number of the essays included here question both earlier imperial logics and the contemporary analytics in which past coeval empires such as the British and Ottoman or Dutch and Japanese are not considered equally (or even) imperial.
The critical points raised by our brief turn to the ambiguities of the term colonie then are not confined to the French context. First, these ambiguities capture a range of social experimentation that would later be rendered as incommensurate kinds. Etymological entries for colon (cultivator, pioneer, colonist, settler, boarder, camper) convey a truncated genealogy of the social forms represented by the term.^[19] Second, these ambiguities suggest a differently circumscribed meaning and space of “colonization” that would later be narrowed in common convention. Third, they counter the prevailing narrative of “Western Europe as the ultimate model of advanced and enlightened civilization”^[20] and instead move toward a shared analytical space for forms of rule not predicated on a West/northern Europe vs. the Rest dichotomy.

ON THE ANALYTICS OF IMPERIAL FORMATIONS

Our collective focus is less on empires than on imperial formations. The term “imperial formations” itself is a common one, but the reasoning behind our choice is not. We think here of Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar’s use of “social formation” to signal the “concrete complex whole comprising economic practice, political practice, and ideological practice at a certain place and stage of development.”^[21] We add cultural practice to this configuration in order to stretch our concerns to a broader set of practices structured in dominance. Raymond Williams’ sense of a “formation” as a social form suggesting “effective movements and tendencies” that have “variable and often oblique relations to formal institutions” also motivates us here.^[22] We take up the notion of imperial formation as a critical analytic to underscore not the inevitable rise and fall of empires, but the active and contingent process of their making and unmaking.^[23] Our interest lies less in institutions and fixed ideologies than in the prevalence of blurred genres of rule and partial sovereignties.
Empires may be things, but imperial formations are not. They are polities of dislocation, processes of dispersion, appropriation, and displacement. They are dependent both on moving categories and populations. Not least they are dependent on material and discursive postponements and deferrals: the “civilizing mission,” imperial guardianship, and manifest destiny are all promissory notes of transformation. As states of deferral, imperial formations manage and produce their own exceptions, which can be easily named: conditions of delayed sovereignty, temporary intervention, conditional tutelage, military takeover in the name of humanitarian intervention, violent intervention in the name of human rights. They thrive on deferred autonomy, meted out to particular populations incrementally, promised to those in whose lives they intervene. They create new subjects that need to be relocated in order to be productive and exploitable, dispossessed in order to be modern, disciplined in order to be independent, converted in order to be human, stripped of old cultural bearings in order to be citizens, coerced in order to be free.
Imperial formations are not steady states, but states of becoming, macropolities in states of solution and constant formation.^[24] Several of the tacit notions that have informed characterizations of European colonialisms over the last two decades distract from appreciating the features that imperial forms may share. One such problem is a fixation on empires as clearly bounded geopolities, as if the color-coded school maps of a clearly marked British empire were renderings of real distinctions and firmly fixed boundaries. As Thongchai Winchakul has observed, however, imperial maps were a “model for, rather than model of, what they purported to represent.”^[25] Imperial ventures are and have been both more and less marked, opaque, and visible in ways scholars of European empires have not always registered or sought to see.
It is not coincidence, however, that our models of empire have a tunnel vision quality to them, since such perspectives are, in part, scripted and endorsed by imperial states themselves. Rather than considering empire as a steady state, we posit these formations as ongoing polities of dislocation, dependent on refiguring spaces and populations, on systemic recruitments, transfers, and promotions of governmental and non-governmental agents, on the reassignment of native military away from their colonies of origin, and on a redistribution of peoples and resources in territories, contiguous and overseas.^[26] Imperial formations may present themselves as fixed cartographies of rule. This volume^[27] insists that they are not. At any one time, their designated boundaries are not necessarily the sole force fields in which they operated or their limits of governance and authorization.^[28]With this in mind, we turn our attention to the range of imperial actors – to people on the fringes of empires as well as at their centers, to designated subjects as well as colonial administrators, to those with companion and countervailing motivations to empire, and to those who reside in the categorical edges of the imperial.
Gradations of sovereignty, and sliding scales of differentiation are hallmark features of imperial formations. The British empire was not “in” India;^[29] its historical coordinates pass through Wales, Scotland, Protestant Ireland, the Caribbean, and North America.^[30]Nor was the French empire, as Frederick Cooper contends in this volume,^[31] located in the colonies; the French empire was a single but differentiated France, in which Napoleon’s continental expansion was part of an older and more recent pattern of expansion overseas. As Ann Stoler has argued, “blurred genres of rule are not empires in distress but imperial polities in active realignment and reformation.”^[32] The insight that different “semblances of sovereignty” characterize the relationship of both domestic native American peoples and those who inhabit US overseas territories, as legal historian Alan Aleinikoff holds, has a wider relevance than just to the United States.^[33]
What is striking in the historical record is not the absence of these liminal and disparate zones but their exceptional treatment and scholarly misrecognition of them. Ambiguous zones, partial sovereignty, temporary suspensions of what Hannah Arendt was later to call “the right to have rights,” provisional impositions of states of emergency, promissory notes for elections, deferred or contingent independence, and “temporary” occupations – these are the conditions at the heart of imperial projects and are present in a broad range of them.^[34] If the expanse of spatial sovereignty is unstable so are the terms for the inclusion and exclusion of peoples. Imperial formations are founded on sliding scales of basic rights, as Jane Burbank shows so clearly in the case of Russia. Such conditions required constant judicial and political reassessments of the criteria for affiliation, distinctions that invariably exceeded any clear division between ruler and ruled.
Sometimes empire-states were intent to establish their order by clarifying borders, but just as often they were not. Agents of imperial rule have invested in, exploited, and demonstrated strong stakes in the proliferation of geopolitical ambiguities.^[35] The observation invites a re-viewing of what counts as imperial expansion and what does not. Those terms signaling the unclarified sovereignties of US imperial breadth – unincorporated territories, trusteeships, protectorates, possessions – are not the blurred edges of what more “authentic,” non-virtual, visible empires look like, but variants on them.^[36] Uncertain domains of jurisdiction and ad hoc exemptions from the law on the basis of race and cultural difference are guiding and defining imperial principles.
Students of colonial history should know this well. Edward Said’s insistence that all empires claim to be unlike all others is a critical one in holding that discourses of exceptionalism are part of the discursive apparatus of empires themselves.^[37] We extend Said’s insight: imperial states by definition operate as states of exception that vigilantly produce exceptions to their principles and exceptions to their laws.^[38] What scholars have sometimes taken to be aberrant empires – the American, Russian or Chinese – may indeed be quintessential ones, consummate producers of excepted populations, excepted spaces, and their own exception from international and domestic law.
As we expand our notion of imperial force fields to early modern forms of empire, to imperialisms without colonialism, to empires by other names, and to imperial formations outside of Europe, our efforts to do so without sacrificing historical specificity and theoretical validity come with risks. If so many of the elements that we have considered imperial are called into question here, the reader might rightly ask what attributes still mark something as imperial.
There is consensus among the authors of our volume on some points but differences in emphasis remain. However, many agree on inequitable treatment, hierarchical relations, and unequal rule.^[39] Fernando Coronil insists that empire is a concept that identifies “relatively large geopolitical formations that establish dominion by hierarchically differentiating populations across trans-regional boundaries.” All agree that the forms of domination and exploitation go beyond economic exploitation and geopolitical domination; that empire-states, as Frederick Cooper writes, “determine the forms in which opposition could gain a foothold and the terms in which (cotemporaneous and our current) analysis of colonization could be articulated.” Jane Burbank turns us to the vast “organizing capacity” of imperial states, to the scope and scale of intervention, violent or otherwise. A hierarchical sense of difference organizes and also informs imperial practice. As Ussama Makdisi demonstrates, American missionaries in the Ottoman Middle East believed in “the righteousness of their cause [and] the inevitability of their triumph.”^[40]
One thing that unites these perspectives is the shared emphasis on how knowledge is organized and conceived. Imperial projects are predicated on and produce epistemological claims that are also powerful political ones. As Coronil aptly sums up the prevailing premise of new scholarship on empire, it is “the privilege of empires to make their histories appear as History.”^[41] Just how they do so may vary, but “modalities of representation predicated on dissociations, that separate relational histories, that reify cultural differences and turn difference into hierarchy” are critical epistemological features with deep political effects.^[42] Dissociated histories sometimes appear blatant, once identified, as in the case of Haiti’s part in the French Revolution,^[43] while sometimes the lineaments that connect remain harder to track, as Peter Perdue argues for the unintended endorsements of subsequent racial politics by successive Qing emperors or as Nicholas Dirks contends in the case of the missed importance of empire for the development of modern sovereignty. But as the cases in the presented volume underscore, imperial polities are not, as we once imagined them, based on fixed forms and secure relations of inequity: they produce unstable relationships of colonizer and colonized, of citizen to subject and unequal struggles over the forms of inclusion and the principles of differentiation.^[44]
There is nothing comprehensive about this list of imperial attributes, nor is definitional satisfaction the goal of this particular volume.^[45] In fact, we focus in some sense on the very opposite: namely, on disparate nomenclatures as well as shared ones; on contexts in which “national interest” and human rights are the terms that replace and efface imperial intervention; and on situations in which unequal rule corresponds to the imperial attributes mentioned above, but those polities call themselves by other names. The varied terms empire-states give to their interventions and forms of sovereignty may stymie scholarly attempts at definition but these creative vocabularies are also part of the imperial game.
Claiming exceptionalism and investing in strategic comparison are fundamental elements of an imperial formation’s commanding grammar. As we expand the imperial forms to which we look, it is increasingly clear that overt comparison and claims to exceptionalism went hand in hand.^[46] At the same time that architects and agents of empire sought comparison, they claimed exceptional status for the imperial ventures of which they were a part. In the cases of the Ottoman, Chinese, Dutch, US, and Russian empires, searches for comparison and claims to exceptionalism were not contradictions but compatible conventions. Comparison provided the legitimating grounds for exceptional status, immunity, and exemption from international law – hallmark features of imperial statecrafts. As such, our widened perspective underscores common emphasis on exceptionalism across imperial time and space. Alongside the inclination to appraise and compare, to borrow and share across empires, was – and is – the claim to exceptionalism that occupies academic projects as much as those of imperial states.

THE POLITICS OF IMPERIAL COMPARISONS

The lexical intricacies of colonie provide insistent reminders that some of these features taken to be fundamental to late nineteenth century European empires at an earlier moment were particular, distinct, and not long entrenched. Those features that provide the template of European colonial empires and the scholarship about them – sharp distinctions between metropole and colony, an abiding preoccupation with race over other exclusions, the incessant proliferations of distinction in the pursuit of profit – look less like imperial universals when considered across a thicker swath of imperial ground.^[47] Our goal, however, is not to simply turn universals into particulars, but to question the logics supporting universal claims. In our volume we specifically, therefore, bring together scholars of European and non-European empires – British, Chinese, Dutch, French, Japanese, Ottoman, Qing, Russian, Soviet, Spanish, and U.S. – to reexamine the theories and imaginaries, the histories and politics upon which our understandings of colonies and colonialism, empires and imperialism have and continue to be worked out.^[48]
We use the term “colonial studies” with a specific body of literature in mind: that which developed out of Edward Said’s enabling challenge in the late l970s to put specific forms of cultural production and regimes of truth at the creative center of imperial politics. It is less Said’s intervention that concerns us, one that pointedly included the US empire in its purview, than a subsequent scholarship that has focused almost solely on the ways in which certain European states – France, England, and the Netherlands most notably – framed their imperial projects.^[49] Several of the contributors to our volume – Dirks, Cooper, and Stoler – are among those whose work at one time steered colonial studies in that prevailing direction.^[50] Anthropology and history were not the only disciplines interested in European colonialisms. The impetus came from postcolonial theory as well, from cultural studies, English, and philosophy departments, whose take on empire derived from an unacknowledged and often unexamined European prototypic model.^[51] Many analyses are still wed to this constricted model, not least new studies of non-European empires and the sorts of relations those polities establish with their subject populations.
Insisting that the structures of imperial rule should not be drawn solely from late nineteenth century Europe invites entry into a far wider geographic and historical field.^[52] Imperial agents themselves employed ideas from earlier or other polities, albeit often with different intentions and results. They modeled their practices on those of other polities, but their modeling was less a wholesale replication of practices than a bricolage of imitation. Such administrative work entailed a re-functioning of practices in different places and to different ends. Imperial architects talked about models, but comprehensive borrowing is rarely what they had in mind.
What might be awkwardly termed “modular modeling” is a more accurate description of what they actually did in specific contexts and at specific times. This was a piecemeal project that suggests partial adoption of certain practices while other parts are carefully left behind. And what they retained is as of much interest as what they discarded. The modular quality of political forms, a characteristic Benedict Anderson has identified in the making of nineteenth century nationalisms and that Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler have used loosely to describe the fashioning of new colonial projects, captures such comparative labor in the uneven stratigraphies of imperial formations themselves.^[53]
Attention to modularity foregrounds convergence and counter-intuitive comparisons: a French empire that looked to Russia and Australia, a Russian one that looked to Spanish creole communities in Latin America, a Qing empire that looked to the Ottomans and the Portuguese, and an Ottoman empire that was keenly aware of American missionary activities in Hawaii. Attention to such lateral, oblique, and global visions does something more: it undercuts both developmental and linear models. It allows us to think with multi-dimensional movement rather than with the one-dimensional clarity of maps; with different densities of concern and with different surfaces coming into contact.
Comparison, however, was strategic and situational, relevant and revelatory in some times, irrelevant and to be avoided at others. Our analytic turn, thus, does not aim to resurrect a comparative imperial studies based on national character, as Cooper and Stoler, among others, criticized over a decade ago.^[54] Nor are we intent to provide a model or formula for how these comparisons should be carried out. Rather, our sights are set on those questions that treat comparison as an active political verb. Those questions might include when comparisons are enlisted and set aside – why, by whom, and to what effect? What commensurabilities are required and what differences are effaced? What kinds of new knowledge are mobilized in making new comparative claims? Such questions do specific analytic labor: they refuse a lack of reflection on the work that comparison does as an act of governance and as a located political act of analysis.^[55]
Inviting attention to the politics of comparison does not mean that we expect these comparative ventures to be pursued in parallel ways. Nor do the contributors here do so, in fact, some do not explicitly compare at all. Some attend to comparison and convergence at the same time. Some look more to shared imaginaries and intentions, others to shared structural consequences and economic effects. Nor is there consensus as to whether we should be comparing those policies that were envisioned but unrealized, or those that were effectively enforced.
We call for an appreciation of the fact that the shifting references for what constitutes comparison are at once historical and political issues.^[56] They are not benign. The fact that some scholars have found their materials more amenable to comparison than others is also due to the nature of archival formations themselves. Dutch authorities who sought comparisons with Australian colonization of its hinterlands, or with Spanish authorities in the Americas, rarely did so across the board. Comparisons were invoked to legitimate violence, interdictions, and to counter specific social reforms. As such, the will to compare on the part of scholars may be thwarted by the nature of archival organization – by the idiosyncratic contexts and events for which comparative frames were enlisted in the technologies of rule.

THE NATIONAL, THE GLOBAL, THE IMPERIAL

If colonial studies has produced a representational archive of empire that seems to mimic that of well-bounded nation states, it has also generated debate about the relation between empire and nation. Frederick Cooper argues that we have overemphasized the national impulse for empire,^[57] while Prasenjit Duara contends that we have not recognized that impulse enough.^[58] Duara argues that as developed in Manchukuo, the prevalent modern imperial form is empire without colonialism, i.e., empire beholden to a nation-state project rather than to an expansionist or territorial one. For the most part, empire has been viewed as an extension of nation-states, not as another way or even a prior way of organizing a polity. Irene Silverblatt counters with the argument that nations and nationalism were “born from colonial processes.”^[59] Cooper also sees it otherwise: even those model empires of western Europe were not simply extensions of a home polity.^[60] In the case of France, he maintains that empire was not seen as a monolithic or even coherent project, but as a series of projects, of relationships with different peoples and polities. Inclusion and differentiation were not stable across French imperial territories, but widely varied and subject to debate.
The common notion that imperial formations build on old differences and foster new ones underwrites much of recent imperial historiography. Yet, empire-states are not always invested in escalating differences between social groups. Using the case of Ottoman religious tolerance and American missionary intolerance, Ussama Makdisi contends that neither Ottoman nor American colonial sensibilities were secular, liberal, or modern. If the Ottomans tolerated difference, Peter Perdue shows how Qing China accommodated difference through a series of shifting paradigms for civilizing projects. In the case of Russia, Jane Burbank contends that the right to difference grounded imperial organization. In assessing that logic, Burbank suggests that we pay more attention to what constitutes an imperial habitus, “the unrecognized self-reproducing and adjusting field of practiced empire.”^[61] Adeeb Khalid, however, insists that what looks like colonial difference in the Soviet Union may be part of several different state projects, only one of which – the imperialism of benevolence – is indebted to empire or its technologies of rule.
It is not only nation-state projects that get melded with imperial ones. The policies, personnel, and practices of multinational corporations and globalizing technologies can become so entangled and embedded that they seem indistinguishable as well. However, there is a newness to globalization that no one would want to disavow in its present form. But imperialism is not globalization. We do not suggest that emergent forms of global networks reiterate the networks with which we are familiar from earlier nineteenth and twentieth century imperial forms. Those emerging now are animated by new forms of global consumption, marketing, and communication and should not be reduced to earlier forms that depended on different technologies of production and exchange. What Arjun Appadurai calls “the rush to history,” the refusal to reckon with what is located in this moment should grab our collective attention.^[62] We wrestle here with how new innovations make room for and may build on specific recuperations, longer genealogies of which they are a part. As Inderpal Grewal similarly observes, US strategies for accumulating global power were dual – first, the generation of new forms of regulation across “transnational connectivities,” and second, the recuperation of “historical inequalities generated by earlier phases of imperialism”^[63] such as “older colonial legacies” surrounding racial categories.^[64] As Foucault reminds us, however, the word legacy can conceal more than it reveals. We press such connections and recuperations to identify which features of earlier imperial forms were most durable and then ask why.^[65] In the present day, such connections are made not only through the traces of past imperial circuits, but also through new transnational routes and global networks.

EMPIRE BEYOND EUROPE

We are not alone in questioning European models of empire and their late nineteenth century templates. The burgeoning field of studies of empire that take as their vantage point the Qing rather than British empire,^[66] that move from St. Petersburg through the Americas to the Russian Steppe rather than from Amsterdam to Batavia,^[67] or that start in Korea, Manchuria, or Taiwan and look to Japan do not just rein in European models.^[68] These vantage points reset our temporal clocks at the same time that they redirect our geographic attention. The Qing empire is historically deep, cotemporaneous with not just modern Dutch and French empires, but with early modern Spanish empire in the Americas.^[69] This temporal stretch of empire demands a rethinking of colonialism’s “modern” roots, as Laura Hostetler and Irene Silverblatt respectively argue for Qing China and Spanish Peru.^[70] Geographic shifts generate new questions about imperial practices and effects. How does our understanding of the civilizing mission change upon recognition that the civilizing mission is as Chinese a marker of empire as it is a European one?^[71] Does the politics of sympathy that so characterizes the benevolent projects of European colonial reforms produce similar distributions of sentiment or wholly different ones in other locales?^[72] In posing these questions, our goal is not so much to provincialize Europe or a European form of empire^[73] as it is to push our clarifications of imperial formations outside and inside Europe.
Attention to imperial formations during their moments of transition is also on our agenda. Empires may be simultaneous or successive, i.e., geographically adjacent such as Portuguese Macau and British Hong Kong or temporally successive such as Burma under the British and the Japanese. In such imperial configurations, cooperation appears as valued a strategy as comparison and competition. We clearly see this in Tibet, where cooperation, comparison, and competition were all tactics “against empire, not just of it.”^[74] British imperial reach in Tibet turned into American imperial shepherding, both of which engendered Chinese imperial action; on the anti-imperial side, non-colonized Tibetans resident in India drew on pan-Asian anti-imperialist models (from India, China, and Japan) to critique British rule there.^[75] New work on such multiplicities of empires includes Korean experiences in writing history between successive periods of Chinese and Japanese reign,^[76] Mongolian experiences of a split community between independent Mongolia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC),^[77] simultaneous Indian experiences of rule by the British, French, and Portuguese,^[78] and Eritrean and Somali experiences under Italian, British, and Ethiopian rule.^[79]
What changes as empires shift? As Sudan, for example, transited from Ottoman rule to shared Egyptian and British colonialism, with brief interludes of Belgian and French rule,^[80] the Sudanese people (themselves a diverse population) lived with and through these changes that were not of their own making. Complications and contradictions not only plague imperial rule, but get played out between metropole and colony. For the Sudanese, Egyptian anxieties surrounding its status as “colonized colonizers” had real effects felt in everyday life, in administrative decisions, as well as in relations between the two countries today.^[81] The crafting of an everyday of empire is a joint but not shared project, one that continues beyond any supposed “end” of empire. Certain imperial dispositions and categories more easily outlast the legal and political forms of empire then others. Turning to this particularly shifting ground of empire, to an exploration of how colonized peoples maneuvered within and between empires, suggests a new set of questions. How did ordinary people conjugate the dislocative tense of empire? To whom did it matter when street names changed but property lines did not? What imprint did successive empires leave upon a population? As with Sudan, Tibet’s twentieth-century history is one of multiple empires – British, Chinese, and American.^[82] For both Tibet and Sudan, our histories are written in and of the geopolitical haze generated by a century or more of competing (and at times cooperating) imperial intervention. In both cases, current political situations require an analysis of empire in the present tense as well as in the past imperfect.
In Taiwan, a similar politics of dislocation has had a different set of consequences. Drawn into the imperial realm of the Qing empire, colonized by Japan, and claimed by the Peoples’ Republic of China, Taiwan’s independence is not widely recognized, nor is Taiwan a member of the United Nations.^[83] This erratic genealogy is not alone in unsettling attachments to and estrangements from communities in and out of Taiwan. The very categories of empire and colony are similarly disruptive to contemporary Taiwanese reckonings of imperial pasts. Neither Japanese nor Qing colonialism in Taiwan was recognized as such by European states. Ironically, despite Japan’s efforts at global political significance through colonial rule in Korea,^[84] Japanese colonialism was not considered equal to European colonialism by Western viewers. As a consequence, “decolonization” was not applied in the Japanese context. With no explicitly named decolonization process for the Japanese empire as there was for European ones,^[85] there was also no public discourse on empire and its aftermath in either Taiwan or Japan (nor for Taiwan and Qing China).^[86]
In China, as elsewhere, imperial vocabularies have a particular politics. Successive polities – Chinese, Mongol, Manchu/Qing – are unproblematically labeled “empires.” Twentieth-century China, however, can neither comfortably be considered “colonized” in the time of European empire nor “colonizer” as the People’s Republic of China. Tani Barlow explains this trend as one generated as much by claims of both successive Chinese regimes and multiple European empires to exception status, as by Cold War academic politics (as played out in the “Fairbank School” of China scholars).^[87] To define China as neither colonized nor colonizer reproduces the idea that colonial empire is a European domain. A new generation of scholars argues, however, that twentieth-century China was not outside the European imperial sphere, that is not “outside [of] the “real” colonial world.”^[88]
Colonial histories rarely play out as originally intended. Peter Perdue contends that the Qing emperors ironically laid the groundwork for current tensions of national and racial difference in the Peoples’ Republic of China.^[89] Despite the pan-Qing adherence to a model of universal culturalism, Perdue argues that added together, different policies of each emperor contributed to the fashioning of a “racial definition of the state and the people it ruled.”^[90] This contradiction within the Qing empire has its parallel in the visible complications and contradictions of the British colonial project in Qing China.^[91] In his studies of British imperial “pedagogy” in China, James Hevia maintains that China was not peripheral to European colonizing or globalizing forces.^[92] Where Hevia claims that China was an important part of the European colonial world, and Perdue contends that Qing China was an imperial power (and not just a “Chinese” empire habitually set apart from others), Laura Hostetler maintains that Qing China was a colonial power as well as an expansionist imperial one.^[93] How might we analyze these parallel British and Chinese colonialisms? Was the “colonial” of Western activities in nineteenth and early twentieth century China the same as that of the Qing empire, which ruled from 1644 through 1911? Is it that familiar features of administration and organization – the naming and managing of difference, the claims to exceptional status, the strategies of comparison – mark each? Or is it not so much this similarity that matters as it is the deployment of these features, the means through which they are put to specific ends?
The Manchu Court’s interest in European knowledge systems complicates received historiography of Chinese-European interactions.^[94] The Kangxi Emperor’s techniques and philosophies of rule were neither Manchu nor Chinese nor best understood as European. Instead, Hostetler suggests that Qing practices of geographic and ethnographic mapping are best understood in a temporal continuum – as early modern, as opposed to indigenous or modern.^[95] Assigning a temporal classification to these practices places Qing and European imperial technologies within the same analytical and historical realm, rather than within a binary or derivative cultural or geographic framework. Qing China was not isolated from the rest of the world, but as with other imperial formations of the time, participated in, responded to, and shaped similar world forces.
Such specific histories should direct how we write about empire and what we do and do not assume about its shared features. As the national form increasingly “captured” history,^[96] imperial histories became nationalized in manners that obscured specific aspects of or even specific imperial formations altogether. The nation “erases” empire in service to new strategies for managing difference – highlighting national unity, for example, rather than imperial variation among a state’s population.^[97] Moreover, the historiographies one must write with – and against – are rarely confined to any single empire. As Fernando Coronil demonstrates, current articulations of US imperialism are often contingent on the claims and effects of other imperial formations.^[98] One such effect was the enabling of mid-twentieth century US imperialism by the period of European decolonization.^[99] For both the US and the PRC, the anti-colonial and anti-imperial rhetoric associated with decolonization deflected charges of imperialism at the same time that it facilitated new imperial projects.^[100] Yet, not all anti-imperialism generated a new imperialism. In the Soviet Union, Adeeb Khalid sees not a socialist empire, but a “activist, interventionist state that seeks to sculpt its citizenry in an ideal image.”^[101] Khalid’s argument that common Soviet citizenship builds his case against Soviet empire is parallel to other arguments that citizenship is not possible within empire.^[102] Carole McGranahan takes a different stance – that while it may rarely be a genuine privilege of empire, citizenship “does not rule out colonization.”^[103]