Ebook
Colonialism and Its Legacy brings together essays by leading scholars in both the fields of political theory and the history of political thought about European colonialism and its legacies, and postcolonial social and political theory. The essays explore the ways in which European colonial projects structured and shaped much of modern political theory, how concepts from political philosophy affected and were realized in colonial and imperial practice, and how we can understand the intellectual and social world left behind by a half-millennium of European empires. The volume ranges from the beginning of modernity to the present day, examining colonialism and colonial legacies in India, Africa, Latin America, and North America.
1 Preface and dedication
2 Introduction
3 Part I: Enlightenment Debates about Empire
4 Chapter 1. Diderot's Theory of Global (and Imperial) Commerce: An Enlightenment Account of "Globalization"
5 Chapter 2. Empire, Progress, and "the Savage Mind"
6 Part II: Indigenous Encounters, Then and Now
7 Chapter 3. Under Negotiation: Empowering Treaty Constitutionalism
8 Chapter 4. Wasáse: Indigenous Resurgences
9 Part III: The world colonialism made
10 Chapter 5. The "World-System": Europe as "Center" and Its "Periphery" Beyond Eurocentrism
11 Chapter 6. The Singularity of Peripheral Social Inequality
12 Chapter 7. After Colonialism: The Impossibility of Self-Determination
13 Chapter 8. Indian Conceptualisation of Colonial Rule
14 Part IV. Colonial and post-colonial reconstructions of political thought
15 Chapter 9. Resistance to Colonialism: The Latin American Legacy of Jose Martí
16 Chapter 10. Subaltern History as Political Thought
17 Chapter 11. Double Consciousness and the Democratic Ideal
18 Chapter 12. Colonialism and the State of Exception
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay on subaltern history rounds up this excellent, both substantial and well edited, collection of essays which surely deserves graduate as well as advanced undergraduate readers.
Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University in Montreal.