Anthropologists have long discussed the ways in which their discipline has been consciously and unconsciously entangled with the colonized populations they study. This self-interrogation began with Michel Leiris’s account of a French ethnological expedition across Africa in which he had participated in the 1930s.^[1] Other disciplines, notably geography and political science, have also examined the involvement of their fields with empire.^[2] With a very few exceptions, however, historians of sociology have failed to examine this aspect of their discipline’s development.^[3]
This does not mean, however, that sociologists have been uninvolved in empires. In fact, sociologists have studied, criticized, and advised empires since the discipline’s intellectual beginnings in the nineteenth century. Auguste Comte, often seen as the founder of modern sociology, discussed colonialism in his Cours de philosophie positive. Several of the nineteenth-century predisciplinary founders of sociology were directly involved with empire, including John Stuart Mill, who worked on colonial native policy for the British East Indies Company, and Alexis de Tocqueville, who developed colonial policies for Algeria. Sociology emerged as an academic discipline in the same decade as the European scramble for Africa (the second wave of global colonialism), U.S. overseas expansion in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, and the development of European spheres of influence, treaty ports, and coastal colonies in China. Few attentive contemporaries, one might think, could fail to speculate about the reasons for this wave of conquest, the looming dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the crumbling of the Qing Dynasty in China, or the rivalries pushing Europe toward war.
In fact, most of the founders of sociology as an academic discipline in the decades leading up to World War I were involved with historical and contemporary empires in one way or another, and each subsequent phase of sociology’s disciplinary development has been connected to ongoing developments in imperial politics. Among the founders of German sociology, Max Weber and Franz Oppenheimer analyzed traditional land empires, Alfred Weber discussed modern European colonialism, and Leopold von Wiese wrote extensively on colonial India and Ceylon. During World War I, Max and Alfred Weber participated in practical planning aimed at the creation of informal German hegemony over Central Europe (Mitteleuropa).^[4] In France a large proportion of academic sociologists were connected to colonialism as an analytic object or a research setting. The first international “congress of colonial sociology” was held in Paris in 1900.^[5] The leading Dutch sociologist from the founding period, S. R. Steinmetz, analyzed indigenous “customary law” in European colonies.^[6] Several of the founders of academic sociology in the United States were involved in the Anti-Imperialist League, an organization described by Chicago sociologist Albion Small as a precursor of the American Sociological Society.^[7] And almost all of the early disciplinary founders of British sociology were involved in one way or another in Britain’s imperial ventures.
Sociological interest in colonialism continued to expand after 1914 in France and Germany while declining in the United States and disappearing altogether in Britain. American sociologists speculated about the “atavistic” elements thought to have driven Germany’s imperialist aggressiveness in World War I, and these analyses were given a new lease on life after Hitler’s rise to power.^[8] Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois argued that German bellicosity was rooted in British and French efforts at “relegating Germany to a second place in colonial imperialism,” and that Germans’ support for Hitler had been strengthened by the loss of the German colonies after 1919.^[9] In France after 1918 the leading heir of Durkheimian sociology, Marcel Mauss, coordinated his teaching and institution-building closely with French colonial interests. In the French colonies there emerged a galaxy of research institutions, many of them centered around sociology (rather than anthropology, as was usually the case in comparable British colonial research settings). As a result of these intellectual and academic preconditions, several generations of French sociologists oriented their research toward colonized societies. The increased interest in imperial phenomena after 1918 is more perplexing in the German case, since Germany lost its entire overseas empire in the war. After 1933, many of the sociologists who stayed in Nazi Germany turned their attention to applied policy research, contributing to ethnic cleansing in occupied Europe and developing plans for a renewed German colonial empire in Africa.^[10] Others theorized the emerging Nazi empire as a form of continental imperialism or an eastern-oriented Grossraum or “greater space.”
The period since 1945 has seen the rise of several new strands of imperial theory and research in sociology. French sociologists’ interest in colonialism and decolonization reached an apotheosis in the two decades after the war. French efforts to reform colonial governance called on the services of sociologists. New studies of continental land empires were stimulated by the recent experience of Nazi imperialism and ongoing Soviet expansionism. Sociologists in the United States and Europe were involved in rethinking the passage from colonialism to informal U.S. hegemony and “under-development.”^[11] American policies of informal empire undergirded the theories of modernization and development that dominated U.S. social science thinking about global sociology during the 1950s and 1960s; those same theories were subsequently criticized for their complicity with American imperial foreign policy.^[12] Modernization theorists discussed nonwestern countries emerging from colonialism without taking account of their political and economic subordination to Europe and the United States, but at the same time they provided a blueprint for the noncolonial form of U.S. imperialism that was being extended to a global scale. New waves of sociological research on colonialism appeared in the United States at the end of the 1950s, in the early 1970s, and again after 2001.^[13] Recent issues of the periodicals “Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales” (France), “Political Power and Social Class” (United States), and “Sociology” (UK) have featured historically oriented research on empires by sociologists.
But if colonialism, imperialism, and traditional empires have been studied throughout the entire history of modern sociology, the levels of interest have not been steady over time or identical in each of the national academic fields. What explains cross-national differences and the historical waxing and waning of sociological interest? Although we might assume that the recent emergence of a sizable subfield of historical sociological work on empire is a direct response to ongoing geopolitical developments in the real world, this explanation would be too simple. The current boom in imperial studies among U.S.-based sociologists actually began during the 1990s, at a time when the United States finally seemed to be retreating from its previous imperialist posture. The sociologists’ imperial turn was more closely related to theoretical developments in neighboring disciplines such as anthropology, history, and the humanities, and also to the changing demographics of recruitment into sociology, with more graduate students from postcolonial countries. European sociological fields also reveal disjunctures between geopolitics and sociologists’ interest in empire. German sociologists became more, not less interested in colonialism after Germany lost its overseas empire, and many turned to research on British or French colonies.^[14] Most British sociologists (except those recruited directly into sociology from anthropology such as Peter Worsley; see below), ignored colonialism completely during the 1950s and 1960s, just as the British empire was violently falling apart. During precisely the same period, nearly all of the leading French sociologists published books and articles on empires and decolonization; this is true inter alia of Raymond Aron, Pierre Bourdieu, Georges Balandier, Roger Bastide, Jacques Berque, Rene Maunier, Albert Memmi, Paul Mercier, Alfred Métraux, Paul Mus, Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Soustelle, and Germaine Tillion. These French sociologists’ interest in the ongoing imperial events of their own era is just as puzzling as British sociologists’ relative lack of interest in the same events.
How can we define and delimit sociology? Goudsblom and Heilbron distinguish usefully between the periods of the formation of sociology as an intellectual discipline (1830–1890) and as an academic discipline (1890–1930). This suggests that sociology existed as a field before it had specific professorships or courses of university study. Their distinction also indicates that we need to extend our analysis back to at least 1830. But who is included in this domain? We cannot base our decision on criteria such as the possession of a specific academic degree or the occupation of specific institutional positions. This is especially true for the first seven or eight decades of sociology as an academic discipline. All of the founders of academic sociology before 1914 came from other disciplines; even in the 1920s there were very few professorships with the word “sociology” in the title in Germany and France. Everywhere except the United States, sociology degrees and departments were rare until the second half of the twentieth century.
Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of semiautonomous fields offers a solution to the problem of delimiting a disciplinary field.^[15] Like any other field, an academic discipline can best be understood through a historical reconstruction of its genesis, starting with its founders or nomothets – the founders of the scientific nomos. We can then reconstruct the expansion of the field as new members are recognized and admitted, first by the founders and later by members of the second generation who were themselves recognized by the founders, and so on. This moving horizon of recognition of some and nonrecognition of others provides us with a sociologically realistic criterion for determining membership in the field. There is no formal methodological rule or chronological cutoff point that can illuminate the ongoing processes of genealogical reconstruction through which new figures are included by subsequent generations as disciplinary founders or members while others are expunged from the field’s history.^[16] Informal practices of inclusion and exclusion may be reinforced by formal institutionalization and codification, for instance, by requiring a specific scholarly diploma. Only through a complete intellectual and institutional history can we ever hope to understand the real boundaries of sociology.
I will focus in the rest of this article on France and the United States, where sociology first emerged as an academic discipline, and on the country that had the largest global empire at the moment when disciplinary sociology arose, Great Britain. For reasons of space, I defer discussion of German sociology to a later article.^[17] I consider the three main ways in which sociologists have related to empires: as analysts, critics, and advisers.^[18]

I. SOCIOLOGY AND EMPIRE IN THE UNITED STATES

William Graham Sumner of Yale, who is often credited with teaching the first course titled “sociology” in the United States in 1875, was vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League in 1899 and later president of the American Sociological Society. Like a number of British sociological critics of empire, including Herbert Spencer and J. A. Hobson (see below), Sumner believed imperialism was antithetical to industrialization and democracy. The burdens of imperialism, he argued, included “the adoption of militaristic measures which seriously threaten the existence of free republican government and industrial democracy.”^[19] In an essay called “Earth Hunger,” written in 1896, Sumner argued that “the people of the civilized nations of Europe [had gone] out to the ends of the earth only to exploit them” and to “exterminate the aborigines,” creating a “system of extortion, oppression, and greed.”^[20] Comparing modern imperialism to the Roman empire, which he called “a grand system of exhaustion,” Sumner mobilized the venerable trope of Roman decline.^[21] Colonization by settlers, as in North America, and the system of indirect rule in which “the natives” maintained their own “customs and institutions,” were both preferable to land-grabbing “for the sake of exploiting its riches and then leaving it in order to spend the product in European luxury.”^[22] In an essay called “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” Sumner traced the origins of metropolitan racism and religious intolerance to overseas imperialism. The failure to “assure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to negroes inside of the United States,” he warned, did not bode well for America’s new colonial subjects in the Philippines, pointing to a connection that was later discussed by W. E. B. Du Bois.^[23]
Sumner’s views were not hegemonic among American sociologists in the 1890s. The most prominent American disciplinary founder who openly supported U.S. imperialism was Franklin Giddings, the longtime chairman of Columbia University’s sociology department. Like many nineteenth century founders of sociology, Giddings posited a “racial struggle for existence,” which he thought gave rise automatically to race prejudice.^[24] During the Spanish-American War, Giddings initially aligned himself with the Anti-Imperialist League. By the end of 1898, however, Giddings had already switched to the pro-imperialist side in his article “Imperialism?” and then in his book “Democracy and Empire” (1900), where he defended “the wonderful phenomenon of democratic empire” and urged the United States to create an empire like the one Britain had “already brought to a wonderful perfection.”^[25] Giddings couched his imperialism in terms of value-free science, and argued that “at this particular stage in the development of the United States, territorial expansion is as certain as the advent of spring after winter.” Colonialism was imperative, he continued, “if the civilized world is not to abandon all hope of continuing its economic conquest of the natural resources of the globe.” The countries of those “inferior races” should be “held as territorial possessions, to be governed firmly” under the “intelligent direction” of “white officials” who were “appointed and directed by the home governments of the northern nations,” including the United States.^[26]
Another sociologist whose academic career started in the 1890s, Edward A. Ross, conducted research in much of the colonized and nonwestern world, including China, India, southern Africa, Central and South America, and Oceania.^[27] Ross is best known nowadays for his early eugenicist racism and his opposition to Asian labor immigration.^[28] His book on a six-month research trip through China in 1910 was organized around the themes of the “race mind” and “race fiber” of the Chinese and the “yellow peril.” At the same time, Ross insisted that there was nothing “queer at all in the working of the Oriental brain” and believed that modern education and Christian missions were rapidly modernizing China.^[29] Ross later claimed to have “lost faith in Race as a key of social interpretation” and to have envisioned “a future when race differences will figure for less in men’s minds than they do now.”^[30] In the 1920s and 1930s, he reported on forced labor in Portuguese Africa for the League of Nations and supported “Oriental resistance to Western aggression,” including the movement for self-government in India.^[31] None of this amounted to a sustained analysis of empire, but it demonstrates that U.S. sociologists have been divided amongst themselves on the question of imperialism since the 1890s and that sociological interest in empire did not disappear after World War I.
The most original and sustained analysis of colonialism by any American sociologist was carried out by Du Bois, who held a position as a sociologist at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910 and again from 1933 to 1943. Du Bois later recalled that the years of his first teaching appointment were “above all ... the era of empire,” but that at that time he did not yet have a “clear conception or grasp of the meaning of that industrial imperialism which was beginning to grip the world.”^[32] Du Bois systematically connected overseas colonialism to the oppression of blacks in the United States. In 1900 he described the Spanish-American War as having “gravely increased some of our difficulties in dealing with the Negro problems” in the United States.^[33] Du Bois also saw the two world wars as opportunities for releasing Africa and Asia from colonial domination. In a 1915 “Atlantic Monthly” article called “The African Roots of War,” he began to develop an economic explanation of the system he called “industrial imperialism” as a system of extreme exploitation of colored labor that yielded “unusual returns,” that is, profits at a higher rate than could be squeezed from white labor. Du Bois saw colonialism as creating the “doctrine of the natural inferiority of most men to the few” and as being itself further reinforced by this racism.^[34] In 1940 he wrote that

“The history of our day… may be epitomized in one word – Empire; the domination of white Europe over black Africa and yellow Asia, through political power built on the economic control of labor, income and ideas. The echo of this industrial imperialism in America was the expulsion of black men from American democracy, their subjection to caste control and wage slavery.”^[35]

Of course Du Bois was well aware that Euro-American racism predated the modern era, but he believed that what he called “the Color Line” had been “drawn as at least a partial substitute for this stratification” during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.^[36] Du Bois singled out as key events in this transformation the end of post–Civil War reconstruction, the Berlin Congress and the scramble for Africa, and the rise of Japan as a “yellow” threat to Euroamerican supremacy.^[37] Du Bois recognized the emergence of a racialized aristocracy of labor, arguing that white European and American workers were being incorporated into a community of interests with the middle classes and bourgeoisie by being allowed to share in the wealth generated by exploiting the “darker nations of the world.”^[38] The “vast power of the white labor vote in modern democracies has been cajoled and flattered into imperialistic schemes to enslave and debauch black, brown, and yellow labor.”^[39] Indeed, the colonial state was itself “totalitarian,” he claimed in 1945, anticipating Hannah Arendt’s famous thesis in The Origins of Totalitarianism about the prefigurative role of European overseas colonialism for continental fascism.^[40] In addition, colonialism underdeveloped the colonies, turning them into the “slums of the world” and ruining indigenous culture.^[41] Finally, and especially relevant in the context of this article, Du Bois argued that the social sciences themselves were being “deliberately used as instruments to prove the inferiority of the majority of the people of the world, who were being used as slaves for the comfort and culture of the masters.”^[42]
Another early colonial critic was Robert Park, the leading figure at the University of Chicago Sociology Department after 1914. Less familiar than Park’s urban sociology is his work as publicist and secretary of the American branch of the Congo Reform Association and his pamphlets and articles critical of King Leopold’s African colony. Park called for colonial reform rule through industrial education along the lines being developed at the Tuskegee Institute by Booker T. Washington.^[43]
Sumner, Giddings, Ross, Du Bois, and Park were all born before 1870 and all began teaching before World War I, and therefore lived through the political struggles about U.S. colonialism at the turn of the century. Ross and Du Bois continued to write about imperialism throughout the interwar period. But few of the American sociologists whose careers began between 1918 and 1940 were interested in questions of empire.
The topic of empire only reemerged haltingly at the end of the 1930s. One pioneer in this period was the black Trinidadian-American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox (born 1901), who earned a sociology PhD from Chicago in 1938 and published Caste, Class and Race in 1949 and The Foundations of Capitalism in 1959. Both books followed Du Bois in connecting metropolitan race relations and overseas imperialism within a broadly Marxist analytic framework.^[44] Duke sociologist Edgar T. Thompson wrote a Chicago dissertation with Robert E. Park on the plantation in 1932 and conducted comparative research on plantations, race relations, and intermarriage in Hawaii, Rhodesia, and South Africa starting in the late 1930s. In 1953 Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills briefly discussed empire and obliquely acknowledged the shift to a “more modern” form of informal imperialism, writing that “one power may seek to expand its military area of control by establishing naval and air bases abroad without assuming overt” control over “foreign political bodies.”^[45] Mills’s Listen Yankee (1960) was a direct transcription of Cuba’s struggle against U.S. imperialism.^[46] And modernization theory, which encompassed an influential approach to informal empire, began to emerge soon after the war in Parsons’s Department of Social Relations at Harvard.^[47]
The most significant theory of empire that emerged in the early 1960s was Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system theory. Wallerstein was more familiar with the French social science scene than most American sociologists in this period, and as we will see below, French sociology was intensely focused on colonialism. Wallerstein wrote a PhD dissertation on the anticolonial movements of Ghana and Ivory Coast. In 1966 Wallerstein edited “Social Change: The Colonial Situation”, which included translations of Frantz Fanon and Georges Balandier.^[48] Wallerstein contributed to a French volume in 1971 that was specifically focused on the discipline of sociology and empire.^[49] Wallerstein introduced the term “world-system” for the first time in his 1967 book “Africa: The Politics of Unity”, as part of an attempt to comprehend the failure of postcolonial African nations to become democratic. Between 1967 and 1970 he wrote the first volume of “The Modern World-System”. Although not exclusively a theory of empire, his new “world-system theory” did provide a unique account of traditional empires and modern colonialism. Specifically, Wallerstein argued that there were two kinds of world-system (defined as an intersocietal division of labor): world-economies and world-empires. The latter is “a structure in which there is a single political authority” for the entire world-system, whereas the world-economy is organized politically as a plurality of competing sovereign nation-states.^[50] Wallerstein also began to rethink the role of colonialism, especially in Africa. Waves of colonial annexation and decolonization were explained in terms of the ebb and flow of hegemonic centralization within the group of “core” states. When a single hegemon dominates the core economically and politically, it tends to enforce free trade and eschew colonialism, but when there is no hegemonic power, each core national state throws up protectionist barriers and tries to secure exclusive access to markets and raw materials in the periphery by setting up colonies.^[51]
With these few examples, however, sociological research in the United States continued to have a domestic focus until the end of the 1960s.^[52] Even when American sociologists looked outside the United States and conducted comparative cross-national research they tended to treat each nation-state as a closed, independent unit rather than focusing on imperial power relations among states.^[53] Political sociologists tended to disregard power relations among nation-states and focused on dynamics within countries. An example from this period of cross-national sociology ignoring relations of domination and subordination among states is Seymour Martin Lipset’s influential “Political Man”, which is still used in political sociology classes.^[54]
After 1970 this began to change. Elbaki Hermassi’s 1971 Berkeley sociology dissertation analyzed the effects of colonialism on nationalist movements in French North Africa. Hermassi criticized modernization theory for ignoring external determinants of social change such as “crusades, wars, conquest, and international trade and pressure” and emphasized the differing length of the colonial occupation, the social class identity of the agents in charge of colonial rule, the prevailing native policies, and the strength of the autochthonous state.^[55] Bernard Magubane, an exiled South African who received a PhD degree in sociology from UCLA in 1967 and taught in various U.S. sociology departments, published important studies of colonial Africa and apartheid South Africa in the 1970s.^[56] A number of Wallerstein’s students and followers extended his theory to the study of different sorts of empires, including nonwestern ones.^[57] The first volume of Michael Mann’s “Sources of Social Power”, published in 1988, began its analysis with ancient empires before moving forward chronologically to modern nation states.^[58] Historical sociology, which emerged as a large subfield within U.S. sociology in the 1980s and 1990s, provided a space for analyses of colonialism and traditional land empires.^[59] Since 2001, the historical sociology of empires has boomed.^[60]
If we examine American sociological handbooks, dictionaries, and textbooks, we find a similar historical fluctuation between emphasizing empire and ignoring it. Giddings devoted a great deal of space to empires and colonies in his widely used 1915 textbook “Elements of Sociology”.^[61] Park and Burgess’s “Introduction to the Science of Sociology”, the most influential textbook during the interwar period, included a bibliography of works on colonialism.^[62] Cooley’s 1933 “Introductory Sociology” also included a discussion of imperialism.^[63] The first American sociological dictionary, which appeared in 1944, included entries for the words “colonization,” “colonize,” “colony,” “empire,” and “imperialism.”^[64] But after 1945 textbooks avoided the topics of empire and geopolitics. Ogburn and Nimkoff’s “Handbook of Sociology” (1940), the most widely used introduction to sociology produced for the American college text market between 1940 and 1959, avoided any discussion of these imperial topics.^[65] Broom and Selznick’s “Sociology” was the only major textbook in this period to include a lengthy section on colonialism, including a discussion of direct and indirect rule.^[66]
The sociological resurgence of interest in empire after 1968 initially had a Marxist emphasis. This was reflected in the first American encyclopedia devoted exclusively to sociology in 1974, which had an essay on “Lenin’s Theory of Imperialism” along with entries for “imperialism” and “colonialism and internal colonialism.”^[67] The category of economic imperialism became well established in sociological reference works between 1968 and the end of the twentieth century, but political forms of empire and overseas colonialism failed to make an appearance. Only in the most recent sociological encyclopedias do we find separate entries on keywords such as “colonialism” and “empire.”^[68]

II. BRITISH SOCIOLOGY AND EMPIRE

From the nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century Britain ruled over the most extensive global empire that had ever existed in history. The discipline of sociology, by contrast, “hardly existed in the British Isles as an intellectual enterprise or even a series of pragmatic prescriptions” before the 1960s.^[69] Although I cannot address the riddle of the relative slowness of sociology to develop in Britain, it is possible to ask about the imperial engagements of the small number of sociologists who did exist in Britain before 1960. Most of the nineteenth-century British sociological pioneers were involved in imperial ventures in one way or another. John Stuart Mill, often seen as a predisciplinary founder of British sociology, was a “loyal employee of the East India Company for roughly half his life” from 1836 to 1856. Mill’s father had written the highly influential “History of British India”. The younger Mill designed colonial native policies and was “almost single-handedly responsible for the vast correspondence pertaining to the Company’s relations with the Native Indian States.”^[70] Mill is best known as a theorist of liberty, and he believed that England should grant home rule to settlers of “European race” and “her own blood” in colonies like Canada. At the same time, he argued that “the peoples of Asia and Africa… were barbarous and uncivilized and could not govern themselves” and that “in these cases, England must provide a benevolent despotism.”^[71]
By contrast, the most famous predisciplinary founder of British sociology, Herbert Spencer, was a vigorous anti-imperialist despite his overall political conservatism. Rather than analyzing imperialism’s sources or its different modalities, Spencer focused on its effects on the British “homeland.” Imperialism, he argued, led to a “concentration of power” in the state, and hence to despotism and “militancy” (i.e., militarism); as a result, “liberty is diminished.”^[72] While Mill believed that imperialist despotism would improve the “barbarians,” Spencer thought that imperialism led to the “re-barbarization” of the imperialists themselves. Spencer condemned the “white savages of Europe [who] are overrunning the dark savages everywhere,” writing: “now that the European nations are vying with one another in political burglaries – now that we have entered upon an era of social cannibalism in which the strong nations are devouring the weaker… it is useful to resist the wave of barbarism.”^[73]
The founders of British sociology as an intellectual field between 1890 and 1914 were as divided on the topic of empire as were Mill and Spencer. Benjamin Kidd published “Social Evolution” (1894), which went through numerous printings in England and was translated into five languages.^[74] The book sketched the principles of “the future relationship of the European peoples to what are called the lower races.” In a subsequent book, “The Control of the Tropics”, Kidd praised the British approach to colonialism:

“The white man lives and works only as a diver lives and works under water.… The people among whom he lives and works are often separated from him by thousands of years of development; he cannot, therefore, be allowed to administer government from any local and lower standard he may develop. If he has any right there at all, he is there in the name of civilization. … The standards according to which India must be governed have been developed and are nourished elsewhere.”^[75]

The eugenicists Francis Galton and Karl Pearson were ardent supporters of imperialism, and both participated in the first meeting of the British Sociological Society in 1904. Galton began his career as a traveler in colonial Southern Africa, and claimed in his “Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa” to have worked out the dimensions of a particular “Venus among the Hottentots” from a distance, using sextant, trigonometry, and logarithms.^[76] Pearson initially opposed imperialism during the early 1880s “on the now unthinkable ground that British administration was a costly benefit to far-away backward peoples, which workers at home could ill afford.”^[77] Twenty years later, in the context of the Boer war, Pearson made a full-throated social-Darwinist plea for imperialism. He now criticized Spencer and the liberal Social Darwinists for having “obscured” the issue of evolution by painting it “as the survival of the fittest individual,” rather than “the struggle of tribe against tribe, of race against race.” Pearson provided a violent defense of the right of the “Aryan” or “white man” “going to lands of which the agricultural and mineral resources are not worked to the full” and there to “completely drive out the inferior race.”^[78]
Another early founder of British sociology, Patrick Geddes, was both a critic and a participant in overseas colonialism. For Geddes, imperialism contributed to an “atomized conception of society,” which he “saw as being both mistaken and prevalent in his own time” and as leading to “the deterioration of humans, the environment, and society.”^[79] In a series of lectures on the “sociology of war and peace” given at King’s College, London in 1915, Geddes argued that “the mechanical age… passes on into the Neo-Imperial age, in which the countries of mechanicalized [sic] territory demand extension of territory, by preference in countries of thin population, remote or tropical, or inhabited by peoples unskilled in the use of machinery.” For England, this transition “perhaps took place fully at the time of the Indian Mutiny,” which led to Crown control of India “and the annexation of Cyprus, Burmah and Baluchistan, the veiled annexation of Egypt, together with the Afghan War, the Soudan War, and the British share in the partitioning of Africa.” The driving force behind imperialism, he argued, echoing Hobson, was “the increase of manufacturing power” and the resultant increase in monopolies, which led to “an intense demand for preferential markets” and caused “the world to be ransacked for raw material.”^[80] Geddes described “imperial cities” as draining resources from overseas colonial dependencies and their own national hinterlands.^[81] Each of the European “neo-Imperialisms,” according to Geddes, had “long been repeating the downward evolution of Rome” though a “unitary process” of outward expansion and internal decadence.^[82]
Just as Geddes had lent his support to Home Rule in Ireland, he associated with anticolonial nationalists while in India, including Gandhi and Tagore.^[83] Like many other European intellectuals of his generation such as Romain Rolland, Richard Wilhelm, Hermann von Keyserling, Alfons Paquet, and Hermann Hesse, Geddes developed a critique of the west based on the culture of the east, especially Indian philosophy and religion. Geddes quoted Tagore, arguing that “to the Indian,” the “desolate individualism of nineteenth century European cities” and more generally “our western system seems little different from utter homelessness.”^[84] Geddes argued that colonial authorities had driven “perfectly straight thoroughfares” through the heart of the ancient Indian cities for the same reasons that had motivated the “death-dealing Haussmannising” of Paris-military security.^[85] Willfully ignoring British security concerns, Geddes applied the procedures of “conservative surgery” that he had pioneered in Dublin, attempting to preserve open spaces and antique shrines. Geddes’s proposal for a university in Indore similarly tried to unite Indian traditions with western science.^[86]
Despite his criticisms of imperialism in general and specific practices of colonial government, Geddes’s activities in India and in Palestine implicitly accepted the legitimacy of foreign rule. Geddes participated in the planning of European bungalow compounds in India, signaling his approval of residential segregation. His “notion of a rural environment within an urban setting” in his plan for Tel Aviv resonated with the Zionist Congress’s understanding of agricultural settlement as “the spearhead of the Zionist base in Palestine.”^[87] Geddes’s work in India was promoted by British governors who understood anticolonial rebellion as a product of blight that they hoped urban planning could ameliorate.^[88]
The two most radical anti-imperialists among the founding British sociologists were L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson, “intellectual confreres” who were both New Liberals.^[89] Hobhouse analyzed the “great wave of Imperialist sentiment” at the turn of the nineteenth century and attacked the “lust of Empire… the dream of conquest, the vanity of racial domination, and the greed of commercial gain.”^[90] Hobhouse mocked the idea that imperialism was a “sacred duty to humanity,” writing ironically that “it is often necessary, as in the case of the Bechuana, to deprive the dark man of his land – for landed property is a sad temptation to idleness.”^[91] Like Spencer, Hobhouse believed that imperialism marked a “retrogression towards savagery.”^[92] Colonialism, he concluded, is “a form of government which frankly involves the overthrow of all democratic principles and the admission that they are not applicable except to the white man.” The white man’s claim to rule the black because he is wiser and more capable is essentially the same as the noble’s claim to rule the commonalty for their good.”^[93]
J. A. Hobson is perhaps the most famous theorist of imperialism from this period. He was not formally a sociologist and never held an academic position, but he was a member of the editorial board of “Sociological Papers” (1904–1906), attended the meetings of the British Sociological Society starting in 1904, wrote a biography of Hobhouse and coedited his Festschrift, and was recognized as part of the sociological scene, publishing, for example, in the “Jahrbuch für Soziologie” and the “American Journal of Sociology”. In his autobiography Hobson suggested that he “might wish to claim the title of sociologist” and included a chapter on “the rise of sociology in England.”^[94] Hobson started out in favor of imperialism in the early 1890s but became more critical when Hobhouse persuaded the editor of the “Manchester Guardian” to commission Hobson to undertake a tour of South Africa in1899.^[95] Hobson is best known for his book “Imperialism” (1902, revised in 1938), which argued that imperialism was driven by overaccumulation, underconsumption, and finance capital’s resulting search for new markets and investment outlets overseas. In the second half of the book Hobson developed a more sociological approach, sketching out a rudimentary theory of the hegemonic bloc between different social classes, cemented by jingoistic ideology. The “old Liberal notion” of spreading “genuinely representative government” to the colonies was now “discredited.” Except in the white settler colonies the dominant trend was toward “unfreedom” and “British despotism.” No longer was there “the least intention that… native officials shall in the future become the servants of the free Indian nation rather than that of the bureaucratic Imperial government.” By enlisting the “conquered races” to fight its wars, Britain had set them “at one another’s throats, fostering tribal animosities.” Empire had equally disastrous political consequences for the metropole. The “enmity of rival empires” produced a “constant menace to peace.” Amplifying Spencer’s critique of the “moral degradation” that results from a country’s “reversion from industrial to military ethics,” Hobson argued that imperialism strikes “at the very root of popular liberty and ordinary civic virtues” at home and “checks the very course of civilization.” Governments use “foreign wars and the glamour of empire-making, in order to bemuse the popular mind and divert rising sentiment against domestic abuses” and to distract attention from “the vested interests, which, in our analysis, are shown to be chief prompters of an imperialist policy.” In short, “autocratic government in imperial politics naturally reacts upon domestic government.” The legislative is subordinated to the executive, and executive power is concentrated in an autocracy. Imperialism overawes “by continual suggestions of unknown and incalculable gains and perils the nearer and more sober processes of domestic policy,” demanding a “blind vote of confidence.” The daily life in the metropole is degraded by the cultivation of a military habitus which “unfits a man for civil life” by training him to become “a perfect killer.” Children’s playtime is turned “into the routine of the military drill,” turning their lessons into a “‘geocentric’ view of the moral universe.” Colonials “whose lives have been those of a superior caste” return to the metropole and corrupt it. If the sources of the “incomes expended in the Home Counties and other large districts of Southern Britain be traced to their sources, it would be found that they were in large measure wrung from the enforced toil of vast multitudes of black, brown, or yellow natives, by arts not differing essentially from those which supported in idleness and luxury imperial Rome.”^[96]
During the interwar period there was only a single new professor of sociology in Britain, Morris Ginsberg. Ginsberg advanced from assistant to lecturer at the London School of Economics and in 1930 he succeeded Hobhouse, his former teacher and co-author, as the Martin White Professor of Sociology. But Ginsberg did not work on imperial topics.^[97] After World War II, the British colonial empire imploded and, in some places, exploded. Sociology slowly expanded, but at the same time it turned inward toward domestic issues. As one British sociologist remarks, “the period of sociology’s disciplinary formation was also the heyday of European colonialism, yet the colonial relationship did not figure in the development of sociological understandings.”^[98] One of the rare exceptions was Peter Worsley, who received a new chair in sociology at the University of Manchester in a joint Sociology-Anthropology Department in the 1950s. As Worsley recalled, most of the sociology teachers at Manchester at this time “had been trained as anthropologists,” and this explained the difference.^[99] Worsley tried to make anthropology more sociological by moving it away from “its traditional focus on ‘tribal’ societies” and by beginning “to tackle problems of development in the Third World.”^[100] A founder of the British New Left, Worsley published on Frantz Fanon and popularized the phrase “Third World” with his 1964 book of that title.^[101] Only very recently have British sociologists turned to the study of empire, colonialism, and postcolonialism, after nearly a century of silence.^[102]
III. FRENCH SOCIOLOGY AND EMPIRE

Sociology was much more densely entangled with empire in France than in Britain and the United States from the outset, and this difference lasted through the 1960s. French sociologists’ interest in imperial phenomena was due initially to the overlap or merger between sociology and cultural anthropology in the Durkheimian school and the importance attached by Durkheim and Mauss to the study of “primitive” societies.” An additional distinguishing feature in the French case was the creation of a vast array of research and teaching institutions focused on and located in the colonies. Sociology was a central discipline in many of these institutions. These French peculiarities led to the emergence of a large group of “ethnologist-sociologists” who carried out research in the overseas colonies and postcolonies and who belonged as much to sociology as to anthropology in disciplinary terms.
The predisciplinary founders of French sociology had also concerned themselves with colonialism. The most important of these field-founding nomothets, Auguste Comte, came of age during the Napoleonic Empire and tutored at least one student who participated in the French expeditionary force to Algeria in 1830.^[103] Starting with his earliest historical essays, Comte described the “advance of civilization” as involving the replacement of “a combination of spiritual and temporal powers,” papal and feudal-military power, by industry and the “positive sciences.” He noted that the discovery of America and the passage to the Indies around the Cape of Good Hope had contributed “a great impulse” to “commerce and manufacture” and that “objects of convenience and luxury [had] also come into use to a proportionate extent.”^[104] In the “Cours de philosophie positive” Comte discussed the early modern colonial system:

“It is an interesting question whether the colonial system on the whole accelerated or retarded the overall development of modern society. On the one hand, it opened new opportunities for the warrior spirit by land and sea, and there was a significant revival of the religious sprit, due to its suitability to the civilization of the backwards populations abroad; and thus the military and theological régime was prolonged, and the time of the final reorganization set further off.”^[105]

Comte had now come to believe that “Catholicism, in its decay, not only sanctioned but even instigated the primitive extermination of entire races” and created a system of colonial slavery, “truly a political monstrosity, existing as it does in the heart of an industrial period.” In countries in which investors became “personally interested in the maintenance of the most oppressive policy” in overseas colonies, there was an increase in “retrograde thought and social immobility.”^[106] Comte was not an outright anti-imperialist like Diderot and some other French Enlightenment thinkers. Like Durkheim and other sociologists later in the nineteenth century, Comte used evidence from contemporaneous nonwestern cultures as proxies for earlier stages of European development. But while this framework positioned Africans and other colonized people as primitives, it was premised on the idea of a universal human nature and assumed that all cultures followed a common evolutionary path. The colonial system not only promoted “the policy, then very common, of systematically destroying the races of men, in despair of assimilating them successfully,” but had simultaneously undermined this policy by demonstrating to Europeans that positive science and industry were “destined to include the whole human race.”^[107]
Alexis de Tocqueville, who has also been canonized as a founding father of French sociology, wrote extensively on colonialism in Algeria, India, and North America. But while some readers of “Democracy in America” have been led to believe that Tocqueville opposed “every system of rule by outsiders no matter how benevolent,”^[108] this was far from the case. In 1833 Tocqueville made the first of two visits to the Algerian colony, after which he wrote a detailed essay and numerous parliamentary reports to the Chamber of Deputies. Tocqueville began his essay by insisting that France could not abandon the colony without signaling its own “decline” and “falling to the second rank.” Writing at a moment when some 70,000 French troops were deployed in the colony, Tocqueville argued that the only way to subjugate the Algerians was to “fight them with the utmost violence and in the Turkish manner, that is to say, by killing everything we meet”: “all means of desolating these tribes must be employed.” He proposed creating an army “of natives in France’s service” in order to cut down on French losses and also to prevent the emergence of a large class of French military heroes returning home and taking on “distorted proportions in the public imagination.”^[109] French domination of the colony would require the creation of a large settler community. He defended an approach that would later be called “associationist,” in which the French would preserve Algerian cultural difference and create a dualistic legal system. Recanting his earlier vision of French and Arab Algerians eventually fusing into “a single people from the two races,” Tocqueville now insisted that “the fusion of these two populations is a chimera that people dream of only when they have not been to these places.”^[110] During the 1840s Tocqueville began studying British methods of conquering and governing India. His resulting “Notes on India” confirmed his unwavering support for European colonialism.^[111]
Other predisciplinary founders of French sociology entered the discussion of empire. Frédéric Le Play, a third nineteenth-century French protosociologist, bemoaned the decline in the French propensity to emigrate and colonize new lands.^[112] Le Play’s ideal “stem-family” system, according to which all but one son were excluded from inheritance, “depended crucially on the possibility of settlement and cultivation, by the remaining sons, of new lands” – that is, of territories “that formerly remained subject to abandonment and barbarism.”^[113] Like Durkheim, Le Play also exploited the French colonial presence in Northern Africa by “procuring family monographs of Arabs, Kabyls, and the fellahs, rural and urban, of Egypt.”^[114] René Worms, founder of the Institut International de Sociologie, presided over the Sociology and Ethnography section of the annual French Colonial Congress starting in 1907. Worms also edited the Revue international de sociologie, which published extensively on imperial topics.^[115] The Revue’s issue for August–September 1907, for example, carried essays on French Indochina by a colonial judge, an administrator of colonial civil services, a member of a commission on delimiting the border between the French colony and Siam, and a colonial missionary.
The universally recognized founder of French academic sociology, Émile Durkheim, did not discuss or theorize ancient or contemporary empires, geopolitics, or political questions in general (other than his wartime polemic against German expansionism). Although Durkheim wrote seventeen reviews on African topics in “Année sociologique”,^[116] he completely ignored or bracketed the colonial context of the studies in question. Durkheim’s “Division of Labor” ignored the fact that modernization in nonwestern societies often “took the form colonialism, imperialism, and ‘culture contact’ with societies which had already attained economic, military, and technological superiority.”^[117] Durkheim’s Suicide had nothing to say about the ways in which “the uprooting of ‘primitive’ societies by ‘higher’ types of civilization made the ‘primitive’ man… prone… to anomic suicide,” even though this effect of imperialism had been discussed by French authors since Quatrefages.^[118] Durkheim did comment in his lectures on moral education on the tendency of the European colonizer to be seized by a “veritable intoxication, an excessive exaltation of self, a sort of megalomania,” due to the absence of “moral forces which he respects” and “the inferiority he imputes” to the colonized. “Consequently,” Durkheim continued, “nothing restrains him; he overflows in violence.”^[119] None of these passing comments were ever developed into a systematic analysis of empire. Nonetheless, the study of supposedly primitive societies was integral to Durkheim’s comparative method.^[120] According to Victor Karady some 45 percent of the articles in Durkheim’s journal “L’Année sociologique” before 1914 were on “ethnological and exotic” topics.^[121] The journal’s review section also included the current colonial literature and historical studies of ancient empires.^[122]
An important French peculiarity was that colonizers and academic experts construed their research on colonized subjects as “sociological” in nature. Both of the contending groups in the field of Maghreb studies, for example, “self-consciously presented themselves as sociologists, and asserted their intellectual connections to the Durkheim school.”^[123] This stood in contrast to the dominant tendency in Britain, where research on colonized populations was usually categorized as anthropological.^[124] There was thus a back-and-forth between colonial activities and sociology that was unparalleled in other countries. An influential specialist in Algerian folk Islamic practices at the École des Lettres in Algiers, Edmound Doutté, produced a “sociology [that] was a curious amalgam of Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’ and the ‘Année Sociologique’.”^[125] One of the leading Arab specialists from this period, Robert Montagne, was assigned to direct the Sociological Section of the Native Affairs Bureau (Direction des Affaires Indigènes) in the French colonial state in Morocco in 1917 and carried out research in Algeria on Kabyle tribal structure.^[126] Montagne went on to hold a chair at the College de France in “the history of the expansion of the Occident.”^[127] The College de France had another chair in Muslim Sociology and Sociography that was “created in 1902 with funds from the Governor General of Algeria and the protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco.” The first person named to this post in 1903 was Alfred le Chatelier, a former colonial official and amateur student of Islam. From 1906 to 1926 Le Chatelier edited the “Revue du Monde musulman”. In contrast to the learned tradition of French Orientalism, which was “resolutely hostile to the study of contemporary topics,” the “Revue du Monde musulman” focused on “contemporary Islamic societies from the Philippines to Morocco.”^[128] Many of the teachers at the Paris École coloniale (Colonial School) were former colonial officials, and during the interwar years faculty from the Ethnological Institute (see below) taught at the École coloniale. Students circulated between the more applied and the more scientific institutions. Durkheim’s “Année sociologique” reviewed texts by colonial explorers, officials, and missionaries.
Sociology remained closely linked to ethnology in France until well into the post-1945 period due to the powerful, lasting influence of Durkheim and Mauss. As Lévi-Strauss noted, “in Durkheim’s and Mauss’s work, sociology and anthropology cannot be separated.”^[129] Another strand of the Durkheimian empire–sociology nexus was represented by Georges Davy, a member of Durkheim’s original group who co-authored the book “From Tribe to Empire: Social Organization Among Primitives and in the Ancient East” with the Egyptologist Alexandre Moret. Davy and Moret used Durkheim’s theory of totemism to make sense of the centralization and monopolization of power in ancient Egypt. Henri Berr, the historian closest to the original Durkheim school, wrote the forward to Davy and Moret’s book, which he framed as a study of “imperialism” – a phenomenon that was itself “inspired by the ‘will to growth’ – a brutal will.” Their central argument, according to Berr, was that “the enlargement of societies is accomplished by violence.”^[130]
Marcel Mauss was the most influential teacher of French sociologists and ethnographers during the interwar period. Mauss’s own writing relied heavily on ethnographic material generated in colonial contexts, but he did not analyze the impact of imperialism on the social processes he studied or the evidence he used. Mauss’s activities were enmeshed in colonialism in many other ways. As early as 1906 Mauss provided instructions for the ethnographic study of native populations in French colonies.^[131] At the same time, he helped to create the Institut d´Ethnologie in 1925, together with Paul Rivet and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. At the Ethnological Institute and at the École pratique des hautes etudes, where Mauss had held a chair in the “history of religion and uncivilized peoples” since 1901, he taught most of the leading ethnographer-sociologists who came of age in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of Mauss’s students maintained a commitment to the “Année Sociologique” and many accepted his idea that ethnography should be purely descriptive in order “to provide the kind of information useful to a comparative sociology.”^[132]
The Ethnological Institute was dedicated to the memory of Durkheim and was the first French institution to offer certificates in ethnology.^[133] The institute’s express mandate was to study the French colonies.^[134] It overlapped to some extent with the national École coloniale, although it sought to approach colonial problems more scientifically. The Ethnological Institute received its principal funding from the colonies, even if its teachers “remained resolutely detached from the actual work of colonizing” and did not generally seek to place their students in colonial service.^[135] Nonetheless, Mauss tried to convince his government interlocutors that “sociological studies could be the best guides for administrators of the colonies,” writing that “colonial policy may be the area in which the adage ‘knowledge is power’ is best confirmed.”^[136] In a letter to the French Resident General of Morocco in 1925, Mauss noted that the Ethnological Institute “was at the disposal of colonial governments and protectorates for any information concerning expeditions (French or foreign), the study of indigenous races, the conservation and study of monuments and collections, or the study of social facts.”^[137] Half of the Ethnological Institute’s advisory council consisted of “representatives from either the Ministry of Colonies or the colonies themselves.”^[138] In 1938 the Ethnological Institute moved into the newly built Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man), which received about half of its budget from the colonies and was described as a colonial museum by its director.^[139] The majority of the institute’s students worked in colonial contexts.
During the interwar years, sociologists in France were much more focused on colonialism and empire in France than were sociologists in Britain and the United States during the interwar years. This difference was due in part to the power and prestige of the Durkheimian school and the availability of resources for sociological work in the colonies. In addition to the Parisian institutions already mentioned, the Académie des Sciences Coloniales was founded in 1923 with a separate sociology section. Learned societies such as the Société des Océanistes (founded 1927) and the Société des Africanistes (1931) sponsored lectures and journals on colonial topics. An expanding array of research centers located in the colonies also provided opportunities for sociological work. The largest of these was the University of Algiers, founded in 1909 through the fusion of four Grandes Écoles. The University’s Law School (École de Droit) taught courses in indigenous “customs” and “customary law” as well as Islamic Law, while the École Supérieure des Lettres emphasized historical studies of the Orient. The École française d’Extrème Orient was created in 1898 in Hanoi, modeled on the French schools in Athens and Rome.^[140] Its most famous associate was the Orientalist and sociologist Paul Mus, discussed below. The Académie Malgache, founded in 1902 in French Madagascar, included sociology among its foci.^[141] The Scientific Mission in Morocco (Mission scientifique du Maroc), created in 1904, published a book series called “Archives marocaines” as well as the above-mentioned “Revue du Monde musulman”.^[142] In 1919 the entire Scientific Mission was transformed into a “Sociological Section” inside the colony’s Directorate of Native Affairs.^[143] An Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines was also created in Rabat in 1920, which included a sociological section.
Institutes in sub-Saharan Africa also promoted sociological research. The École française d’Afrique in Dakar received temporary fellows funded by the Paris École Coloniale. A Comité d’études historiques et scientifiques de l’Afrique Orientale Française (A.O.F., French West Africa) had already been created in 1915 “to coordinate and centralize research under the supervision of the Governor-General” in the humanities and the sciences.^[144] This committee was the forerunner of the Institut français d’Afrique noire (French Institute of Black Africa), or IFAN, created in 1936.^[145] IFAN’s purpose was to coordinate and stimulate scholarly research in French West Africa and in Africa as a whole in the service of French colonialism, to publish research results and create museums, libraries, archives, and scientific collections, and to offer courses in France and Africa.^[146] The main disciplines promoted by IFAN were ethnology and sociology, followed by history, geography, and various natural sciences.^[147] Although much of the research on indigenous societies continued to be carried out by colonial officials, IFAN’s resources also benefited scientists, professors, archivists, curators, and holders of advanced degrees, who were eligible for fellowships of two or three years at the École française d’Afrique in Dakar. Several well-known sociologists were associated with IFAN after 1945, including Georges Balandier and Paul Mercier.
The first French sociologist to analyze colonialism as a system was René Maunier, who promoted a field he called “colonistics” (la colonistique). Maunier initially taught criminal law and political economy at the Khedivial law school in Cairo, starting in 1911. Between 1920 and 1926 he lectured on “Algerian sociology” at the University of Algiers. Maunier was then awarded a chair in Colonial Law at the University of Paris Law School (Faculté de droit). His studies of North African gift exchange were located firmly in the tradition of Durkheim and Mauss.^[148] Maunier also made several independent contributions to the sociology of colonialism. He began his three-volume magnum opus, Sociologie coloniale (The Sociology of Colonies), by noting that he would focus on the “human” aspects of colonization, which had hitherto received less attention than the economic dimensions.^[149] For this purpose Maunier conceptualized colonization as a Durkheimian “social fact” involving “contact” between two “hitherto separated” societies. On one side were “the conquerors, governors, and exploiters” from the more developed societies; on the other side were “the dominated, the governed or the colonized,” who were “reduced to a position of legal or actual tutelage.”^[150] Colonization was defined in terms of occupation and government by foreign conquerors.^[151] Although Maunier’s definition of colonialism did not emphasize the centrality of racism or the colonial “rule of difference,” he recognized that colonialism was always also a form of imperialism, which he defined as “the doctrine of domination.” Empires always involved “one administration ruling over a domain which aspires to know no bounds.”^[152] Maunier adumbrated a theory of imperial overstretch, which he attributed partly to Ibn Khaldun, and he noticed that “the colonies of one period become colonizers in the next, and so on.”^[153] He was one of the first social scientists to discuss the rising anticolonial movement between the world wars, writing that “colonization itself organized the space of Algerian nationalism and gave it its main idea.”^[154] During World War II Maunier argued that U.S. hegemony over the western hemisphere was coming to resemble programs of Grossraum in which Germany would dominate Central Europe without directly ruling or colonizing it.^[155]
Maunier also proposed a precocious analysis of reciprocal imitation between colonizer and colonized, or colonial mimicry. Despite the colonial system’s inherent resistance to cultural “mixing,” Maunier recognized the pervasive cultural movement across the boundary between ruler and ruled. Maunier put the phenomenon of colonial “mixité” at the center of his colonial sociology. In developing this analysis Maunier was articulating a message about colonial métissage and hybridity that was emerging less explicitly in the work of people like Jacques Soustelle, Alfred Métraux, Michel Leiris, and Roger Bastide during the middle third of the twentieth century. For Maunier, cultural mixing included not just the “fusion” or “racial and social blending of the two groups” but also the “conversion of the conqueror by the conquered”: “there has been action and reaction between the natives and the Europeans: ‘race contact’ has left its mark, and institutions have been borrowed in both directions.”^[156] Although European commentators on colonized subjects had long focused on their disturbing ability to switch between European and native codes, the premise of the Durkheimian sociological paradigm was the unity of humanity and the idea that primitive societies represented an earlier stage of modern Europe. Hence Durkheim had been almost constitutionally uninterested in the partly westernized or modernized Other and the varieties of syncretism and acculturation that resulted from imperial contact. Similarly, the expeditions sponsored by the Ethnological Institute between the wars tended to be “blind to everything that did not correspond to the image of a preserved Africa,” and avoided describing actual colonial policy.^[157]
During the interwar years other French sociologists and ethnologists began focusing on cultural mixing and emphasizing the historicity of colonized societies. In “L’Afrique fantôme” (1934) and a famous lecture “The Ethnographer faced with Colonialism,” Michel Leiris attacked “the tendency to attach oneself by preference to peoples one can qualify as relatively intact, either out of a love of a certain ‘primitivism’ or… exoticism.” The most “authentic” Africans, “the most interesting, humanly,” Leiris countered, were the ones that ethnographers usually saw as “mere imitators” of western culture.^[158]
One of the first to move in this direction was Maurice Leenhardt. From 1902 to 1926 Leenhardt worked as a Protestant missionary in New Caledonia. He then returned to France, where he deepened his ties to Mauss and academic social science. In the 1930s Mauss began sharing his teaching position at the École Pratique with Leenhardt, who took over all of Mauss’s teaching in 1940 when the Vichy government’s anti-Semitic laws forced Mauss to resign. After 1945 Leenhardt taught the introductory course in ethnography at the Ethnological Institute and in 1947 he was chosen to head a new national research institute in Oceania.^[159] Leenhardt was described by contemporaries as a sociologist due to his use of a sociological vocabulary, his participation in “L’Année sociologique”, and his emphasis on historicity and cultural change in colonized settings. Despite the Durkheimian precedent, sociology in this period increasingly signaled an approach that described dynamic changes in nonwestern cultures in response to colonialism, cultural mixing rather than a linear evolution toward civilization, and active responses to the west, including anticolonial resistance. Leenhardt’s earliest publication was a bachelor’s thesis concerning the messianic “Ethiopian” church movement in Southern Africa, which he interpreted as an early example of resistance through the creative appropriation of the colonizer’s culture.^[160] Leenhardt encouraged the New Caledonians to craft a “civilization adequate to their mentality” rather than abandoning their culture.^[161] In a new preface to “Gens de la Grande Terre” (1937) in 1953, Leenhardt situated New Caledonians’ culture within a historical narrative of colonialism. Following an earlier period of expropriation, cultural decimation, and racism, the colony had become a syncretic society. Acculturation ran in both directions across the colonial cultural boundary in a process Leenhardt called a “jeu de transferts.”^[162]
Leenhardt’s position within the colonial system ranged from supporter to critic to impartial analyst.^[163] He denounced “government anthropology” used to justify colonial policy, criticized forced labor, and held out hopes for a “small-scale, biracial democracy” in New Caledonia. At the same time, he retained an “ideal vision of France as a great nation extending a great civilization to her colonies.” Leenhardt informed on the leaders of a 1917 rebellion in New Caledonia while protecting a number of the movement’s followers from the colonial government. He helped organize the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition.^[164] After 1945 Leenhardt argued for a reformed colonialism guided by ethnographers who “understand the natives and their country in their totality and not according to the sole standpoint of their economic value.” The overarching framework for this reformed colonialism would be the French Union (see below), which offered “the grand idea of citizenship.”^[165]
If many of Mauss’s students began to challenge the Durkheimian methodological preference for cultural purity during the interwar years, specialists in indigenous American and African-American cultures in particular found it difficult to ignore the results of colonial transculturation.^[166] Roger Bastide was an agrégé in philosophy whose work integrated psychoanalysis, history, and ethnology and whose primary disciplinary identification was as a sociologist. Bastide specialized in African religions in Latin America. From 1938 to 1957 Bastide held the sociology chair previously occupied by Claude Lévi-Strauss at the University of São Paulo. Bastide contributed to “Année sociologique” starting with its first postwar issue in 1947; in 1962 he became its general editor (Secrétaire Générale). Bastide’s writing focused on what he called “the interpenetration of cultures” or “cultural interfecundation.” Bastide argued that the “gaps” in collective memory resulting from collective traumas such as the uprooting of African slaves from their homeland were selectively filled by homologous or structurally similar materials in the new culture.^[167] He described the Afro-Brasilian candomblé, a mystical trance, as a coherent African religious system.^[168]
Another of Mauss’s students who moved toward a historical sociology of colonized societies during the interwar years is Jacques Soustelle. Soustelle is best known nowadays as a member of the French Constituent Assembly (1945–1946), minister for the colonies (1945), and governor general of French Algeria (1955). In 1960 he joined the paramilitary OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrète), which led ultimately to his exile from France between 1961 and 1968.^[169] Before 1945, however, Soustelle was a sociological ethnologist of Mexico.^[170] His first doctoral thesis (1937) focused on the Lacandon Indians, the only Mayan group that had remained relatively “untouched and uninfluenced by the Europeans.”^[171] Lacandon religion “had been preserved, entirely intact”; their cultural borrowings from the outside world, he found, were “negligible.”^[172] Soustelle’s second doctoral thesis focused on a partially Europeanized indigenous culture in Mexico, the Otomi, whose culture he described as a “clash of civilizations.” The Spanish conquest had turned the Otomi language into the site of a “surreptitious war being fought beneath the apparently calm surface, in which the more prestigious language gnaws away on its adversary, penetrating it little by little.”^[173] In some regions the Otomi were so Hispanicized that their clothing did “not present any indigenous character at all.”^[174] In 1933 Soustelle analyzed the performance of a dance called “le torito” which imitated the life of the vaqueros and charros and evoked the ancient Mediterranean theme of the struggle between man and bull. The dancers sang in Spanish, which was the language of the métis, even though they barely understood it.^[175] While this seemed at first glance a clear example of natives simply “taking over a set of themes and images borrowed from nonnatives,” Soustelle argued that the Indians’ culture was in fact “an original synthesis” of the two.^[176] The torito dance was an homage to the “Indian Virgin,” Our Lady of Guadalupe.^[177] Indian converts “were not so much renouncing their old beliefs as incorporating them into a new body of faith and ritual,” forging a “Hispano-Indian and Christiano-pagan syncretism.”^[178] Soustelle provided examples of Amerindian syncretism going back to the sixteenth century, such as Mayan human sacrifices that mingled crucifixion on a cross with the rite of ripping the heart out of the living victim.^[179]
French sociological interest in empire reached an apex in the two decades after 1945. There were several reasons for the intense interest in empire during this period. The study of colonized societies perpetuated the prestigious Durkheimian tradition, helping to boost sociology’s status in the competition among the faculties. Research in the colonies came naturally to the large group of scholars who had been trained by Mauss or by his students. French sociologists’ interest in empire was also linked to recent European events and contemporary geopolitics. Raymond Aron analyzed Nazi Germany as a form of empire.^[180] Alexandre Kojève proposed a Mediterranean, French-led Nomos that would encompass Northern Africa and provide a counterweight to American dominance.^[181] Due to the wartime occupation and resistance and the enhanced prestige of the French Communist Party immediately after the war, many intellectuals moved toward Marxism or joined the Party. Most of the founding members of the Centre d’études sociologiques, the main sociological research center in France in this period, were located on the left either as members of the Communist Party or as associates of far left parties or left Catholic groups.^[182] The United States also positioned itself against European colonialism in response to Soviet efforts to cultivate anticolonial movements and postcolonial governments, which also affected some French intellectuals’ thinking.^[183]
The anticolonial movements that swept through the French colonies, culminating in the Algerian War, also concentrated metropolitan attention on the colonies. The debate around the Algerian war drew in many French intellectuals, including the sociologists Raymond Aron, Edgar Morin, Maxime Rodinson, and Pierre Bourdieu. At the height of the Algerian war, Aron decided abruptly to favor Algerian independence, publishing two books on the topic and becoming embroiled in a fierce debate with Jacques Soustelle.^[184] Morin collaborated with filmmaker Jean Rouch on “Chronique d’un été” (1961), the first example of cinema verité and the “first French feature to debate the Algerian war openly,” posing “prescient questions about decolonization,” and linking the Algerian war to the Nazi genocide.^[185]
The colonial focus in this era also stemmed from the ways in which the French state’s efforts to reform the overseas empire drew deliberately on scientific knowledge. During and after World War II France created an array of new research institutes and funding opportunities for colonial sociology. At the center of much of this activity was the Office de la recherche scientifique coloniale (Office of Colonial Scientific Research, or ORSC), created in 1943 and transformed after the war into the Office de la recherche scientifique et technique outre-mer (Office of Overseas Scientific Research and Technology, or ORSTOM).^[186] Between 1946 and 1952, OSTROM created institutes in the French colonies of New Caledonia, Tahiti, Madagascar, Cameroon, Togo, Guiana, and Congo.^[187] An Institut des Hautes Etudes (Institute of Advanced Studies) was created in Dakar in the 1950s. In 1951 the French Overseas Ministry created the Conseil supérieur des recherches sociologiques d’outre mer (Superior Council of Overseas Sociological Research), which had four research committees: economics, linguistics, sociology, and demography. “Sociology” was thus both the overarching designation for the entire domain of colonial research promoted by this committee and one of its four specialized research committees. In sum, sociology was “an integral part of the [French] disciplines interested in Africa” and the rest of the colonized world and to some extent a master discipline for French colonial social science.^[188] The early research of Balandier (born 1920), Paul Mercier (born 1922), Pierre Bourdieu (born 1930), and a number of others was sponsored by government research agencies.
In addition to these institutions exclusively oriented toward overseas research, other more general social science projects provided opportunities for colonial investigations. The purview of the Centre d’études sociologiques, created in 1946, encompassed “contemporary France, including overseas France,” and the Center’s original directing committee included Louis Gernet, Maurice Leenhardt, Paul Rivet, and Marcel Mauss. During the 1946–1947 academic year Leenhardt and Louis Massignon, who occupied the chair of Muslim Sociology and Sociography at the Collège de France, conducted research in the Centre d’études sociologiques on “different aspects of social life in overseas France.”^[189] Roger Bastide lectured at the Centre on “the interpenetration of civilizations” and André Leroi-Gourhan lectured on the Japanese colonization of the Ainu people of Hokkaido and colonial cultural symbiosis.^[190]
As the French state sought to reform colonialism and ward off decolonization it enrolled liberal social scientists in colonial governance, and colonial administrators moved into academic teaching and research. Robert Delavignette shifted back and forth between colonial administration and teaching. In 1951 he began teaching African sociology and politics at the Paris École colonial (now renamed the École national de la france d’outre Mer), defending a federalist devolution of power to territorial assemblies and local bodies in the colonies.^[191] In other cases, social scientists were pulled directly into colonial activity. In 1954 and 1955 Jacques Soustelle, who was now serving as governor general of French Algeria, asked his ethnographer colleague Germaine Tillion to participate in an official investigation of the civilian population of the Aurès region and to take responsibility for education in the colony.^[192] Tillion created a network of social centers (Centres Sociaux) which provided practical education, job training, medical care, and other forms of welfare to Algerian peasants.^[193] Tillion subsequently published “L’Algérie en 1957”, which detailed the extraordinary rise in poverty that she attributed to French colonialism.^[194] Algeria, she argued, had been forced to change too quickly from an “archaic” society into a modern, urbanized one. One budding sociologist who agreed with Tillion’s widely discussed “economic” analysis of the situation was Pierre Bourdieu, who arrived in Algeria for his military service just after Tillion left.
Sociological interest in empires can be tracked in the pages of the leading journals. “Année sociologique” was revived in 1947 and continued the traditional format of devoting the majority of each volume to bibliographic analysis. There was clear continuity with the journal’s earlier emphasis on ethnological topics and its tendency to see ethnography as a “branch of sociology.”^[195] A large amount of space continued to be given over to studies of colonized and postcolonial societies. Between 1947 and the mid-1960s this material was concentrated in a section labeled “Social Systems and Civilizations” (Systèmes sociaux et civilizations), which was initially coordinated by Maurice Leenhardt. Between 1952 and 1964 this section was edited by Pierre Métais, a student of Mauss and Leenhardt and a specialist in New Caledonia, together with Roger Bastide, who also served as “general secretary” of “Année sociologique” from 1961 until his death in 1974. In contrast to the liberal imperialism of most sociologists since Durkheim, contributors to the postwar “Année sociologique” rejected colonialism outright. Starting with the second volume in 1948–1949, the journal included a review section called “Contacts de civilizations; Colonialisme,” coordinated by Maxime Rodinson, who asserted there that French public opinion had “excommunicated” colonialism.^[196] Rodinson’s review of Maunier’s “Sociology of Colonies” took the author to task for overlooking the effect of the “revenge of the colonized” and ignoring Marxist theories of colonialism.^[197] The Durkheimian classicist and sociologist Louis Gernet called for the study of “dependent” societies that had been “affected and more or less shaken by the colonial phenomenon.”^[198] Jean Chesneaux, a historian of China and Vietnam, argued that sociological analysts of colonialism should examine the social backgrounds and interests of colonial officials.^[199] Most contributors now rejected the preference for unmixed primitive cultures, focusing instead on cultural interpenetration and colonial historicity.^[200] Balandier’s concept of the colonial situation was widely adopted by sociologists. By defining the colonial situation in Maussian terms as a total social fact Balandier suggested that colonialism could not be understood as cultural “contact” between discrete societies but was an entirely new, sui generis type of society that was thoroughly co-constituted by coloniality.^[201] Rodinson called for analytic work on the forces shaping colonial politics, and criticized studies that remained trapped in a colonial mindset.^[202] The emphasis on the global South, French (neo)colonies, and ancient and contemporary empires started to disappear from the journal only during the 1980s, along with the extensive book review section that had been introduced by Durkheim.
The first new French sociology journal founded after World War II was “Cahiers internationaux de sociologie” (International Journal of Sociology). The “internationalism” in the title initially referred to the composition of the editorial board. After 1950 the connotations of internationalism shifted as an increasing number of articles addressed colonial and geopolitical topics. The shift was announced by the publication of articles by Georges Balandier on the colonial situation, colonialism in Gabon, the sociology of dependence, and messianism and nationalism in Black Africa. The journal’s colonial emphasis was solidified when Balandier was named editorial secretary of the “Cahiers” in 1954 and editor in chief in 1965. The first issue featuring Balandier as editorial secretary included an article by Albert Memmi on “the sociology of relations between colonizers and the colonized.” In volume 30 (1961) more than half of the articles dealt with colonial topics. The journal’s emphasis on (post)colonialism has continued to the present, and Balandier is still the editor in chief.
Other French sociologists shifted their focus to colonialism after the war. One example is Paul Mus, who spent his childhood in Indochina where his parents worked in the French education system. Mus studied with Mauss and the Indologist Sylvain Lévi and became a leading specialist in Southeast Asian religions.^[203] Mus was employed by the École française d’éxtrême-Orient between 1927 and 1937 and then joined the École pratique des hautes etudes alongside Mauss and Leenhardt.^[204] Mus joined the Free French in World War II and directed the school system in French West Africa from 1941 to 1943.^[205] In January 1945 he was parachuted into southern Laos to help organize French resistance against the occupying Japanese.^[206] In March 1946, Mus accepted an appointment to direct the Paris École Coloniale and at the end of 1946 he was appointed to a chair in “Far Eastern civilizations” at the Collège de France. In 1950 he moved to Yale University as professor of Southeast Asian Civilizations, but continued to publish in French and participate in French debates.^[207]
Mus’s thinking became more sociological as the Vietnamese anticolonial struggle intensified. His prewar work on Buddhist and Sanskritist cosmology was not seen as part of the sociological field despite his connection to Mauss and the Durkheimian background of the Institut indochinois de l’étude de l’homme. Mus began supporting decolonization at the end of the war after a meeting with Ho Chi Minh revealed to him the “awakening of a nation.”^[208] His writing after 1945 analyzed “every fact and every event” from both Vietnamese and French standpoints, showing “how certain forms of mistrust are born which create a barrier of incomprehension between the two groups.”^[209] In a 1946 lecture, Mus explained that the classic Confucian text “The Spring and Autumn Annals” was centrally important in Vietnamese culture and “presents the process of the rise and fall of dynasties and states…. History is a series of renaissances.” Mus concluded prophetically that “every regime decays, every state changes” – French Indochine included.^[210] He insisted that “Vietnam should now be given the responsibility of a major nation” by France and the United States.^[211] In “Viêt-Nam, sociologie d’une guerre” (1952), Mus traced the anticolonial revolution to French mistakes in governing and to the Vietnamese “experimental sense of the political.”^[212] If the French had not brought about the complete “ruin” of “the Confucian balance between the ritualistic state and the autarchic village” – western science and capitalism had done that – French colonialism had “disguised” that “irreparable loss” and prevented Vietnam from finding something with which “to replace it.” The French had “engrafted” on Vietnam a “copy of the Chinese system of exploitation” of the village by the city, “but with a new Occidental twist.”^[213] In 1954 Mus published “Le destin de l’Union française”, his most critical text on colonialism. Mus coined the term “Union française”, which he imagined as a “postimperial entity” that would be a “free and equal ‘association’ between the former colonial state and its ex-colony.”^[214] In a chapter on the patronizing way the French treated the Vietnamese, Mus imagined how his countrymen might react if a hypothetical American administration in France in 1945 installed a sculpture of an American giant “taking the hand of an infantile France” to help it escape its backwardness.^[215]
The shift among French social sciences to treating colonized societies as fully historical undermined the conventional definition of ethnology as the collecting of facts about primitive societies and sociology as the science that arranged these societies into a generalizing evolutionary scheme. Georges Balandier and Paul Mercier were Africanists who called themselves sociologists while conducting field research in African colonies and postcolonies. Their embrace of sociology was motivated by a sense of the intellectual bankruptcy of the disciplinary division of labor in which colonized peoples were sorted out to anthropology, a science that was interested only in “exotic societies” and tainted by its long entwinement with colonialism.^[216] A specifically sociological approach was preferable because it approached both precolonial and colonized societies as being enmeshed in global history rather than as “timeless, repetitive forms and systems.”^[217] Sociology, as Balandier and Mercier understood it, did not look for authentic indigenous societies unsullied by contact with modernity and colonialism, but was interested in cultural mixing, syncretism, domination, and resistance. Balandier substituted the idea of “colonized people reacting against a foreign order” for “primitives enclosed in tradition,” replaced “societies postulated as existing outside of history” with “societies occupied with their contradictions and problems,” and analyzed “a culture looking for its modern definitions” instead of “grand, frozen cultural constructions.” In doing so, sociology “deprived ethnology of its object by erasing its images of the savage and ʿtraditionalʾ man.”^[218]
Balandier and Mercier first explored the historicity of colonial Africa in their joint investigation of the Lebou people of Senegal. The Lebou were ideally suited for an experiment in what the authors called “living sociology” or “sociologie ‘vivante’.”^[219] They were “a well defined group, particularistic and coherent.” Rather than assuming that Lebou cultural coherence was the ethnographic norm, the authors took it as a puzzle to be explained, asking how this community had been able to preserve its cultural integrity in the face of centuries of incursions by Islamic conquerors and French colonialism and proximity to urban centers like Dakar.^[220] Their first answer was that Lebou culture was not, in fact, static and unchanging. The Lebou “filtered and measured outside influences, but they were not closed to them.” The Lebou were adept at playing “a game of conservation and innovation,” for example, by accepting any and all gods that would not “upset the social order, the order of the world.” But conservation was “very different from conservatism.” Borrowed elements were not simply piled on top of the extant culture but were fully integrated into it. Lebou religion was a fully “syncretic system” that combined Islam with a “deformed” version of the traditional religion. Specifically, Islam was borne by men and linked to the idea of power, while the traditional religion was carried by women and associated with fertility. Women were in many respects dominant over men. Lebou syncretism represented not some intermediate step along a linear path of modernization but a unique solution to a complex array of evolving pressures. At the same time, future crises were made more likely by the French colonial presence and the increase in urbanization, class formation, and property.^[221] Balandier and Mercier showed that even this relatively “intact” African culture was fully enmeshed in global history and webs of outside influence.
Mercier began his research career in 1946 as an IFAN fellow in Senegal. From 1947 to 1952 he curated the Museum of Abomey, and between 1952 and 1955 he headed the IFAN sociology section in Dakar, where “he directed an interdisciplinary team of researchers (ethnologists, sociologists, demographers, economists).”^[222] In 1955 he became a fulltime researcher at ORSTOM; in 1959 he was named Directeur d’Études in the social sciences section of the Paris École Pratique des Hautes Études; and in 1970 he became Maître de conférences at the University René Descartes (Paris V). During his time in Africa Mercier identified himself as a sociologist.^[223] His 1951 book “The Tasks of Sociology” (Les tâches de la sociologie) argued that the old distinction between sociology and ethnology was disappearing as a result of the “death of the ‘primitive’,” which had rendered vain ethnologists’ attempt to focus on “‘pure’ cultures, untouched by exterior influences.”^[224] Mercier announced that he “would use the word sociology in preference to ethnology.” His own version of sociology was one that “deals with human groups that have become dependent on or come under the influence of Occidential society” and have thereby entered into a “state of crisis.”^[225] African societies had to be analyzed in the “global context” of colonialism and decolonization, with attention to “the relative size of the European element, the degree of detribalization, the existence of groups other than Europeans and Africans, etc.”^[226] In 1958 Mercier contributed a chapter on the rapprochement between sociology and ethnology and the “interpenetration” of their methods to Gurvitch’s field-defining “Traité de sociologie”. He again concluded that the difference between the two disciplines would entirely disappear as nonwestern populations became less “homogenous as far as their origins and composition” and were differentially affected by “complex and multiple processes of social change,” that is, colonialism and westernization.^[227]
Mercier’s sociology was above all historical. He criticized the application of European “common sense” and Marxist ideas of social class to Africa, arguing that they threatened to “completely distort the perspective in the majority of cases.”^[228] A central difference between colonies and noncolonial societies was the radical opposition between the dominant European group and the rest.^[229] This “binary division of colonial society along racial lines,” he argued, “prevented African society from dividing itself against itself.”^[230] Colonial society was likely to split into two internally homogeneous racial camps, especially in periods of “extreme crisis.”^[231] The “relations of domination characteristic of colonialism” thus constituted “a brake on the appearance of a diversified system of classes.”^[232] Mercier broke with linear models of development, emphasizing “considerable discontinuities in the development of colonial societies” and “multiple determinants, sometimes in contradiction with one another.”^[233] Cultural practices “that seem to be ‘traditional’ in these societies, he argued, in fact represent ‘responses’ to relatively recent ‘challenges’.”^[234] Mercier also criticized the application of European notions of nationalism to Africa. The difference between “tribal” and “territorial” nationalisms resulted from the ways in which colonial powers had “contributed to a crystallization of ethnic units and to a rigidification of moving boundaries as a matter of policy.”^[235]
Mercier’s insightful work is largely unknown outside France, but Balandier is somewhat more familiar. Balandier studied during the war with Leenhardt at the École pratique des hautes études and worked for a year at the Musée de l’Homme, where he earned a diploma and apprenticed himself to Michel Leiris.^[236] In 1946 he assumed a position as ethnographer with IFAN in Dakar. During the next five years he carried out research under the auspices of the ORSC and other institutions in Senegal, Gabon, and Congo. In 1947 Balandier directed the IFAN Center in French Guinée at Conakry, and he subsequently founded and directed the Department of Social Sciences at the Institut d’Études Centrafricaines in Brazzaville. In 1957, as directeur d’études at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Balandier created the Centre d’études africaines. He was elected to a sociology chair in African studies at the Sorbonne in 1962 and changed the chair’s title to “general sociology” in 1967.^[237] Balandier founded the journals “Études guinéennes” (Guinean Studies) and “Informations dans les sciences sociales”, in addition to editing the “Cahiers internationaux de sociologie”.
According to Balandier, he was still under the influence of an ethnology that saw Africa as atemporal and unhistorical when he first arrived in Dakar. But he soon discovered that things were changing rapidly there, and immediately began describing his own work as “sociology.”^[238] A short book Balandier co-authored with sociologist Jean-Claude Pauvert in 1952 treated the “demographic, economic, and sociological aspects” of Gabonese villages.^[239] An article on the “sociology of dependence” in the same year attempted to apply the ideas of Singer and Prebisch on the economics of dependency to colonialism.^[240] Balandier’s original essay on the “colonial situation” (1951) analyzed colonialism as a unique, total social formation that differed from the metropole and from noncolonized nonwestern societies. By invoking the Sartrian idea of the “situation” he suggested something like the “historical individual” in Weber and the German neohistoricism, namely, a complex and overdetermined social totality that could not be reduced to an instance of a general historical process. And by applying Mauss’s idea of the “total social fact” to colonialism, Balandier suggested that the colonial aspects of a society could not be isolated from the rest.
Balandier’s most sustained and original research contributions were his two doctoral theses, “Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire” (Sociology of Black Africa) and “Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires” (Sociology of the Black Brazzavilles), both published in 1955. “Sociology of Black Africa” paved the way for a comparative historical sociology of colonialism and anticolonialism and had a powerful influence on Immanuel Wallerstein. Balandier compared the responses to colonialism by the Gabonese Fang and the Bakongo of the French Congo. Both groups had been subjected to the same colonizer and both had been divided by arbitrarily placed colonial boundaries, but they responded very differently due to their internal dynamics.^[241] The Fang had become “unemployed conquerors” lacking any central leadership. The Bakongo had been involved in the slave trade, and were more rooted in their territory, more hierarchical, and better acquainted with other tribes. The French government attempted to curtail the prominence of Bakongo in the colonial administration during the 1930s but ended up strengthening the modernist elite’s anticolonial opposition, which filled “the ‘political void’ that resulted from the diminished authority of the traditional chiefs.”^[242] As a result they were better able to withstand the shock of colonialism and more oriented toward resistance.^[243] Colonialism, Balandier wrote, has the greatest impact on those aspects of colonized culture that are already vulnerable.^[244] Balandier’s “Sociology of the Black Brazzavilles” was a pioneering urban sociology of sub-Saharan Africa. Balandier focused here on Bakongo urbanites who had resettled in Brazzaville, the largest city in French West Africa. He found that urbanized Bakongo did not abandon their traditional culture or connections to rural countrymen. Strongly oriented toward education, the urban Bakongo developed a “precocious awareness of the inferiority created by the colonial situation.”^[245]
The most famous French sociologist to have worked in and on the overseas colonies is Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu was sent to Algeria in 1955 for his military service, and soon began reading extensively on Algeria. In 1958 Bourdieu published his first book, “Sociologie de l’Algérie”, which was based mainly on reading the existing secondary literature, and took a position as assistant professor at the University of Algiers. From 1959 to 1962 he participated in a group study of the impact of capitalism on Algerian workers and co-authored a book on the uprooting and resettlement of Algerian villagers with Abdelmalek Sayad, a student at the University of Algiers who later moved to Paris and participated in Bourdieu’s research team.^[246] Both of these studies were commissioned by the French government and sponsored by the Association of Demographic, Economic, and Social Research. Bourdieu also published a number of essays on the ongoing crisis in Algeria.
During these years Bourdieu openly criticized French colonialism and unambiguously supported Algerian independence. Nonetheless, the relations between his research and the ideologies that grew out of colonialism are less obvious. In a harsh rejoinder to Leiris, Bourdieu insisted that the “problems of science” had to be separated from “the anxieties of conscience.” But Bourdieu acknowledged Leiris’s main claim that researchers had tended to leave unexamined the colonial context of their work. According to Bourdieu, “no behavior, attitude or ideology can be explained objectively without reference to the existential situation of the colonized as it is determined by the action of economic and social forces characteristic of the colonial system.”^[247] In fact, all of Bourdieu’s work on Algeria between 1958 and 1964 was centrally focused on the effects of colonialism on Algerians. After returning to France, however, he published several studies of Kabyle culture that seemed to bracket colonialism, offering a mythic of view of the “empeasanted peasant” prior to external conquest by the French and even before Islam – a vision of Kabyle tradition as “self-sufficient, localized, and homogeneous.”^[248] Bourdieu later revised his own views somewhat, noting that the works that had been available to him at the time of his research in Algeria tended “to justify the colonial order.”^[249] At the 1974 colloquium on the connections between anthropology and colonialism, Bourdieu lectured on “colonial sociology and the decolonization of sociology” and called for an analysis of the double dependence of the colonial scientist on the colonial state and the metropolitan scientific field and a study of the relatively autonomous field of colonial science – an analysis he himself never carried out.^[250]
Bourdieu’s relationship to the historicity of Algeria is complex. Bourdieu blamed Algerian underdevelopment not on the Algerians’ own shortcomings but on the “shock effect of a clash between an archaic economy and a modern one.”^[251] Bourdieu was able to profit from the emerging historical way of thinking about precolonial and colonized societies inaugurated by Bastide, Mercier, Balandier, and others. In “Sociologie de l’Algérie” he asked how different groups of Algerians reacted to the “clash of civilizations,” to the “the total disruption and disrupted totality.”^[252] Referring to Balandier’s “colonial situation” article, Bourdieu rejected linear evolutionary scales of political development and insisted on the sui generis character of colonial society. The first 90 pages of the book consisted of separate chapters on the Kabyle, Chaoui (Shawiya), and Mozabite (Ibadites) Berbers and the Arab-speakers. Although this was a fairly standard way of dividing up indigenous Algerian society, Bourdieu avoided treating these cultures as existing in an ahistorical “anthropological present.” He described the Kabyle as a fully historical society that had been repeatedly reshaped by repeated episodes of conquest by Arabs and Europeans.^[253] Discussing the Arab-speaking population, Bourdieu argued that few societies “pose the problem of the relations between sociology and history more sharply,” since they had “suffered the most directly and the most profoundly from the shock of colonization.”^[254] Whereas the first edition of “Sociologie de l’Algérie” included a note saying that it was “unfortunate that I cannot analyze the structure of European society” in Algeria, the second edition in 1961 included a discussion of French land annexations and settlements and concluded with a description of the war producing a “tabula rasa of a civilization that could no longer be discussed except in the past tense.”^[255] Bourdieu also published an article in 1961 called “The Revolution Within the Revolution” that addressed the “special form this war acquired because of its being waged in this unique situation,” namely, as a colonial war.^[256] None of this provided a synthetic theory of colonialism but it did historicize the Algerian present.
A dehistoricizing countertendency is revealed, however, by Bourdieu’s reliance on social evolutionary or modernization-theoretical concepts in this work. Bourdieu referred to the “law of unequal rates of change,” according to which some aspects of the cultural system change more rapidly than others, creating “disequilibria.” Colonialism was imagined here as speeding up a linear process of social development. Anticolonialism was described as traditional resistance to the “modern world.”^[257] In this respect, there is little difference between “Sociologie de l’Algérie” and “The Kabyle House or the World Reversed.” In an essay written for the social welfare office of the colonial government in Algiers in 1959, Bourdieu referred to the “original,” “traditional, integral Algerian society” as an “inert” (statique), “systematic totality.”^[258] Bourdieu’s book with Sayad broke with such modernization-theoretical concepts by focusing on the active smashing of indigenous society through violent resettlement and the creation of a specific new form of society that more resembled a Roman camp than a “modern” European society. Nonetheless, even here the authors speak of a “pathological acceleration” caused by colonialism, suggesting that non-European societies were incapable of dealing with acceleration or could “accelerate” on their own. History was seen as moving in a single direction; a balanced (“non-pathological”) process of modernization was one in which economic, cultural, and political subsystems advanced at the same pace.^[259] Bourdieu’s entire model of historical change in traditional societies seems to be based on external impulses. This view of precolonial Algeria as unchanging centered on the idea of the “empeasanted peasant.”^[260] On the other hand, in material added to the English-language book called The Algerians, published in 1962, Bourdieu distinguished between the “traditionalism of the traditional society” and “colonial traditionalism,” the latter defined as “ways of behavior which in appearance had remained unchanged” but which “were in fact endowed with a very different meaning and form.”^[261] Bourdieu’s work was already moving in the more historical direction that it eventually arrived at in “Homo Academicus” (1988), a book that breaks with any residual notions of a simple trajectory from tradition to modernity. The French crisis of May 1968 is explained here by the “synchronization of crises latent in different fields,” the transformation of a “regional crisis” into “a general crisis, a historical event.” This occurs when the “acceleration” produced by a regional crisis is able to bring about a “coincidence” of events which, given the different tempo which each field adopts in its relative autonomy, should normally start or finish in dispersed order or, in other words, succeed each other without necessarily organizing themselves into a unified causal series.^[262] The word acceleration would best be replaced here by Althusser’s language of overdetermination, in which a vast array of “radically heterogeneous” contradictions are fused in crisis into a “ruptural unity.”^[263] After all, some system-wide crises actually slow down the pace of change rather than speeding them up, but these “slowing crises” also work by bringing about a “coincidence” of relatively autonomous fields that normally would not “organize themselves into a unified series.”
A second problem with Bourdieu’s early work on Algeria was a tendency to read cultural hybridity as loss and confusion. Bourdieu concluded in 1958 that the “only real solution” to the Algerians’ crisis was “one that would allow the Algerian to forge a new civilization” that would respect tradition while adapting itself to the “demands of the modern world.”^[264] But he seemed to be mainly repelled by the sorts of cultural métissage that colonialism always produces. In this respect Bourdieu’s analysis strongly recalled the widespread distaste among European colonizers for what Bourdieu called the “cleft habitus.” All modern European colonial states sought to reign in their subjects’ fluid movement between indigenous and European cultural forms and to restrict them to a single constant and uniform definition of their own culture. This effort at cultural stabilization defined the main logic of so-called native policy in European colonies.^[265] Bourdieu’s understanding of colonial cultural mixing could have been improved by a more careful reading of his French contemporaries Balandier, Bastide, Leenhardt, Leiris, Mercier, and Soustelle, who were focused precisely on these issues.^[266] Nevertheless Bourdieu’s photographs from this period suggest that he was aware of the attractions of cultural mixing and the impossibility of value-free science in a colonial setting.
A third problem with Bourdieu’s early work on Algeria is that he did not develop a theory of colonialism or colonial rule. He does, of course, provide scattered comments on the topic. Following Balandier’s idea of the colonial situation as a total social fact, Bourdieu wrote that Algerian society had “suffered the shock of another civilization, a shock that did not make itself felt in a piecemeal or targeted fashion but rather in totality, introducing ruptures not only into the economic order but also into the social, psychological, moral, and ideological orders, totally and radically throwing everything into question.”^[267] But he offered no analysis at all of the colonial state and only a few comments on the French colonizers and settlers in Algeria. In “Le Déracinement”, Bourdieu and Sayad discussed the “vertigo of absolute power” and the “ignorance and distrust” among the colonziers as “the very condition” of the colonizers’ practice.^[268] This absence of a political theory of the colonial state can perhaps be excused, since Bourdieu did not begin analyzing politics at all until much later.
Between the 1970s and the 1990s, the colonial and imperial problematic faded from view in French sociology, but it has reappeared in the past decade. Romain Bertrand, a historian working in a school of political science and using Bourdieusian and Foucauldian concepts, has published studies of the colonial state in Indonesia and interactions between Dutch and Javanes in precolonial Java.^[269] Roland Lardinois, a student of Bourdieu’s, has published studies of colonial science and British colonialism in India.^[270] Yves Dezaley has published on American legal imperialism in the Philippines colony.^[271] Emmanuelle Saada has published on race mixing and other topics in French colonialism.^[272] Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, a sociologist and student of Balandier’s, has published “The Paths of Politics in the Congo”.^[273] What all of this current work has in common is a tie to Bourdieu and/or Balandier.

CONCLUSION

Sociologists have rarely acknowledged their discipline’s contributions to the analysis of empire or its entanglements with imperial politics and categories. Nonetheless, as I have shown here, sociologists have been just as active in these respects as in disciplines like anthropology, geography, and international relations. Part of the oversight stems from the projection of present-day understandings of disciplinary boundaries back into periods in which these boundaries were configured differently or were more fluid. Thus the French sociologists discussed here are often seen as anthropologists nowadays, ignoring their own self-definition and the ways they were seen by their French contemporaries. It would be highly anachronistic to impose the contemporary academic division of labor on our historical material, which in many ways has reverted to the colonial-era configuration in which anthropology deals with “primitives” and sociology with the metropoles.
Such analytic anachronism may be one of the reasons for Connell’s mistaken claim that sociology turned inward after 1920 toward questions of “social difference and social disorder within the metropole.”^[274] Another reason for this assessment is an overemphasis in the literature on sociology in the United States, perhaps due to American sociology’s global dominance in the present. But American sociology was far from dominant in the discipline’s first half-century, from 1890 to 1940. Although most U.S.-based sociologists did indeed “turn inward” after World War I, this was not true of French sociologists. Nor was it true of German sociologists in the interwar years or in Nazi Germany.
As for the present moment, one of the most active areas of research among historical sociologists in the United States, and increasingly in France, is empire. At the same time, sociologists are being lured by the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI), which funds social research in areas directly relevant to ongoing imperial missions.^[275] Sociologists were one of a handful of disciplines invited in 2007 to apply for grants from the Department of Defense for up to $1.5 million per year for work on techniques to “support more effective, more culturally sensitive interactions between the US military and Islamic populations” and for research on Iraqi government documents captured during the invasion of 2003.^[276] Research on the ways sociologists have dealt with threats to their scientific autonomy in past imperial episodes may help them to ward off such threats in the present. It is obvious that some sociologists are able to maintain a degree of independence from their objects of analysis and from the interests of their research sponsors, and this is true even of sociologists working directly for governments or profit-making organizations. In this article I have shown that sociologists have not always been victims of the imperial demands of their governments and that some have become open critics of empire. As Pierre Bourdieu convincingly argued, autonomy is the precondition for any effective and useful political intervention by intellectuals. We need to continue exploring the question of autonomy from empire and ask why some scientists have been able to retain their independence while others have not.^[277]