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]