The Holocaust "comparability" debate

The question of how to understand the Holocaust has troubled historians since the first knowledge of the war of extermination against the Jews of Europe became widespread in the 1940s. Is the Holocaust unique in human history? Can the crimes of the Holocaust be compared to other periods of genocide in the twentieth century? Is there a connection between Hitler's war on the Jews and German character, German colonialism, or German philosophy?

The most recent iteration of the debate is taking place through a spate of articles, books, and internet contributions by talented scholars like Neil Gregor, Michael Rothberg, Jurgen Zimmerer, Achille Mbembe, Dirk Moses, and others, and the debate has been intense. A. Dirk Moses, author of The Problems of Genocide, frames the debate in a contribution to Geschichte der gegenwert (History of the present; link) that has stimulated a series of excellent responses in the New Fascism Syllabus (link). Moses' article is short and polemical, provocatively titled "The German Catechism" (link). Moses believes that the politics of the Federal Republic of Germany over the past several decades have led to a dogmatic and limiting set of assumptions about how scholars and the public should understand and remember the Holocaust. And he believes this set of strictures makes it difficult to bring forward the facts of genocide and atrocity that were part of the European colonial practice in Africa and other parts of the world. Moses puts his view in these terms:

For many, the memory of the Holocaust as a break with civilization is the moral foundation of the Federal Republic. To compare it with other genocides is therefore considered a heresy, an apostasy from the right faith. It is time to abandon this catechism. (link)

Moses describes the debate as revolving around a "catechism" of beliefs about the Holocaust which, according to some, should never be questioned:

1. The Holocaust is unique in that it involves the unrestricted annihilation of Jews for the sake of their annihilation.In contrast to the pragmatic and limited goals for which other genocides were undertaken, a state here tried for the first time in history to wipe out a people solely for ideological reasons.
2. Since it destroyed interpersonal solidarity in an unprecedented manner, the memory of the Holocaust as a breach of civilization forms the moral foundation of the German nation, often even of European civilization.
3. Germany bears a special responsibility for the Jews in Germany and is obliged to show particular loyalty to Israel: "Israel's security is part of the raison d'être of our country."
4. Anti-Semitism is a prejudice and ideologem sui generis and it was a specifically German phenomenon. It should not be confused with racism.
5. Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. (link)

The discussion of Moses' polemical piece has alternated between general support for Moses' ideas in broad strokes and criticisms of the sharper edges of his piece. On the "support" side is a very thoughtful piece by Neil Gregor (link), including this general remark about the importance of understanding the Holocaust in a broader historical context: "For a long time, the history of National Socialism has made much greater sense to me when understood as European history as well as German history, and I have always thought it important to locate it within wider histories of European colonialism and racial science, to read its ideological drives within the contexts of more generic nationalism, militarism and anti-democratic thought, and to see it as having been incubated by powerful tendencies in not just German, but European histories from the nineteenth century onwards." Gregor also offers a series of thoughtful hesitations about Moses' article, mostly having to do with its categorical and polemical tone.

The heart of the debate has to do with the status of the Holocaust in world history. Is the Shoah historically unique and incomparable to other terrible events? Does it represent a "civilizational break"? Do historians diminish the moral importance of the Holocaust by discussing it in the context of broader historical circumstances and actions in Europe and the world? Is a concern for colonial violence and European racism in Africa, Palestine, or other parts of the colonized world a tacit diminishment of the importance of the Holocaust? Is it possible -- as historians do in the nature of their work -- to analyze the Holocaust in a comparative mode, considering regimes of killings in other parts of the world as well?

A very basic thread of this debate is the relationship between the crimes of the Holocaust by the Nazi regime and the crimes of colonial powers in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. From outside the debate -- and outside Germany -- it seems clear that it is necessary to be able to consider the historical causes of multiple human catastrophes -- as Timothy Snyder does in treating the Holocaust and the Holodomor in the same book (Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin). This effort at placing large events in a historical context and considering their dynamics in comparison to other historical processes is at the heart of the historian's craft. This does not imply one evil is the same as another; it simply reflects a very ordinary moral conviction that it is crucial to honestly recognize the crimes of the past, whoever the perpetrators and whoever the victims.

The fifth item in the catechism is especially politically charged in the context of today's geopolitical realities. It implies that criticisms of the military and governmental policies of the state of Israel are inherently anti-Semitic. And yet this position is plainly fundamentally unacceptable from a moral point of view. It is evident that scholars and citizens alike must be free to express their disapproval and alarm about official actions of the government of Israel in its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied territories, and Israel itself. The equation of criticisms of state policies by Israel with anti-Semitism connects directly with international disagreements about the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS), as well as efforts in Germany and the United States to limit support for BDS. Again, whatever the justice of the demands associated with BDS, it seems evident on its face that a liberal state cannot enact legislation prohibiting support for the BDS movement.

A recent eruption in the controversy about memory and the Holocaust is a debate that arose in Germany in 2020 concerning the writings of Achille Mbembe (link). Mbembe is a noted Cameroonian scholar on post-colonial history, with a long record of highly-regarded scholarship. He has been an outspoken critic of Israel's occupation of Palestine. "The occupation of Palestine is the biggest moral scandal of our times, one of the most dehumanizing ordeals of the century we have just entered, and the biggest act of cowardice of the last half-century" (foreword to Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy). He has expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS) as a response to policies and military / police actions of the state of Israel against Palestinian citizens. The controversy was taken up officially in Germany by Felix Klein, the first Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Anti-Semitism. Mbembe was accused of anti-Semitism for his position on BDS, and he was accused of relativizing the Holocaust, apparently because of his use of the concept of apartheid in application to Israel. Mbembe has vigorously denied the charge of anti-Semitism at all levels.

One of the historians whose work has been at the center of the debate about comparability is Michael Rothberg. His Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization makes the effort to draw own the relationships that exist at multiple levels -- structural and moral -- between the extermination campaign against Europe's Jewish population and the systematic violence and murder that occurred through colonial governance in Africa and elsewhere. The idea of the "multidirectionality" of memory plays a key role in his treatment; instead of comparison, we are invited to consider a range of facts and causes of the evils of genocide, slavery, and mass violence. Here is how he formulates the basic issue in Multidirectional Memory (discussing Walter Benn Michaels' treatment of the parallel facts of US slavery and the Holocaust):

In this passage Michaels takes up one of the most agonizing problems of contemporary multicultural societies: how to think about the relationship between different social groups’ histories of victimization. This problem, as Michaels recognizes, also fundamentally concerns collective memory, the relationship that such groups establish between their past and their present circumstances. A series of questions central to this book emerges at this point: What happens when different histories confront each other in the public sphere? Does the remembrance of one history erase others from view? When memories of slavery and colonialism bump up against memories of the Holocaust in contemporary multicultural societies, must a competition of victims ensue? (kl 154)

Rothberg is a participant is the current debate about historical memory, and his interpretation of the Mbembe affair is especially helpful for readers trying to understand the terms of the debate (link). Here is Rothberg's summary of the circumstances of the affair in Germany:

Mbembe, one of the world’s most prominent theorists of race, colonialism, violence, and human possibility, was slated to speak in August 2020 at a cultural festival in Germany, the Ruhr Triennial. A regional politician, Lorenz Deutsch, decided to try and block Mbembe’s appearance by issuing an open letter that presented a handful of citations from Mbembe’s work mentioning the Holocaust, apartheid, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. On the basis of these short and decontextualized excerpts, Deutsch accused Mbembe of “anti-Semitic ‘Israel critique,’ Holocaust relativization, and extremist disinformation.” Deutsch’s interpretation of Mbembe’s work—which I consider tendentious, partial, and misleading—was taken up and affirmed by a more prominent voice, that of Felix Klein, the German Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and for the Fight against Antisemitism. Although the Ruhr Triennial was canceled because of the coronavirus, Deutsch and Klein nevertheless wanted its director censured and Mbembe disinvited because the latter had allegedly profaned the Holocaust, demonized Israel, and offered support to BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions). BDS, a non-violent campaign that calls for the end of the occupation, the return of refugees, and equal rights for Palestinians, was deemed intrinsically antisemitic in a controversial 2019 Bundestag declaration, despite protests by intellectuals and activists, including many Jewish ones. Mbembe stated that he was not a member of the BDS movement, but even a tangential association with BDS has proven enough to tarnish reputations in contemporary Germany—as the director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, Peter Schäfer, also learned last year. (link)

Rothberg suggests that we would be well advised to reconceive the issues by recognizing that comparison is not the most fundamental issue; instead, the subtext of both historians' debates has to do with responsibility and the denial of responsibility.

The juxtaposition of Historikerstreit versions 1.0 and 2.0—as well as the wide-ranging discussions about Holocaust memory, colonialism, slavery, and Israel/Palestine that continue in Germany and elsewhere—clarifies the need to link memory to solidarity and historical responsibility: that is, to the ethical and political commitments that subtend public forms of remembrance. Beyond comparison lies the implication of the intellectuals who debate comparisons in the histories they dispute. In the simplest terms, we can say that the original Historikerstreit involved a clash among Germans over Germany’s particular responsibility for the Holocaust. In the new discussions, the participants are not all Germans and the histories at stake are more than European. Far from diluting the participants’ implication in historical and contemporary injustices, however, this enlargement of the field of comparison sharpens the question of responsibility. The new Historikerstreit is not a controversy only for Germans and Europeans, but it is not one they can evade either.

Dirk Moses offers a very extensive reply, rebuttal, and reinforcement of his views in a concluding post in the series (link). There is a great deal of developed argumentation in his closing article, and it is worth reading carefully. However, it doesn't become less polemical. If anything, Moses raises the stakes in his polemics, making German white supremacy the key to the German catechism that he attacks. But as numerous contributors to the debate have already shown, the motivations and moral positions of the scholars and thinkers whose work led to what Moses describes as "the catechism" were anything but reactionary and racist.

Plainly these debates are complicated and intertwined with academic, political, and emotional allegiances. Johannes von Moltke's contribution to the New Fascism colloquium is an especially thoughtful effort to disentangle the many threads of the debate (link). Here is a very concise statement of Moltke's position from the end of his article in the New Fascism colloquium:

However, especially in view of the analogy that Moses admittedly furnished by his choice of imagery, it is worth noting that the parallels end right there. For where Moses critiques the catechism in the name of greater differentiation, where Rothberg and Zimmerer call for more multidirectionality and comparison, the far-right advocates for its outright abolition as the only way to free the Germans from the burden of guilt. To them, the problem lies, neither in the singularity thesis nor in the ritualization of Holocaust memory per se, but in their “psychological and political effects on the German Volk.” The purpose of critique, consequently, is not inclusiveness, recognition, or solidarity across multiple identity groups but ethnonationalist retrenchment. Agreeing at first blush with the thesis of a catechism that rules Germans lives, Sellner winds his way to conclusions diametrically opposed to both the letter and the spirit of Moses’s intervention. If for the former the catechism demands to be countered by “inclusive thinking,” the latter sees it only in terms of its “inescapable consequences”: “the exchange of the population through replacement migration as well as the routine, targeted traumatization of indigenous youth.” By which he presumably means “bio-Germans.” Moses, Rothberg, and Zimmerer want a different culture of memory; Sieferle and Sellner want none.

The contributions to the extended series in New Fascism Syllabus are deep and provocative. The series is an important contribution to the large topic of how to make sense of the atrocities of the twentieth century, and a collection of the articles would make an excellent short book. These contributions by leading scholars of genocide and the Holocaust provide a great deal of insight into the difficult question of how to confront evil in history. 

World history

World history is more timely today than ever. “Globalization” is almost a cliché, from “The world is flat” to “the homogenization of cultures” to the “commodification of place.” Everyone recognizes the fact of globalization in the contemporary world. But we need to understand the many ways in which many parts of the world were deeply and systemically interconnected long before the post-World War II wave of revolutions in communications networks, rapid travel, containerized shipping, and military power contributed to the current interconnectedness of most countries and peoples. We need a strong historiography for the global world. And we need better and more detailed understandings of the histories of many of the regions of the world, taken in their own terms.

To be most productive, however, we need to approach the tasks of global history with some fresh thinking. There are several key points that have emerged as fundamental.  The first is to be vigilant about making Eurocentric assumptions about development and change.  Whether in the domains of politics, economics, or culture, it is crucial to avoid the assumption that Europe set the model for developments in key areas of historical change.  New historiography of Eurasian economic development illustrates the power of an approach that avoids Eurocentrism, including Bin Wong (China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience), Ken Pomeranz (The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy.), and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850).

A second is to expect variation rather than convergence. There are many ways that human societies have found to solve crucial problems of coordination, order, production, and the exercise of power. Global historians need to be alert to the development of alternative institutions of politics, economics, culture, or social cohesion in different locales. In particular, it is important to take note of divergences as well as parallels in the political and economic development of great civilizations like those of India, China, Southeast Asia, or West Africa.

Third, it is important to avoid the conceptual schemes of nationalism and states. "France," "Indonesia," and "India" are places with diversity and internal variation, and they each followed distinct rhythms of consolidation as states and nations.  It is often more revealing to look to regions that cross the boundaries of existing states; we learn much by looking at the dynamics of change in regions that are smaller than nation-states (the American South, for example, as an economic and racial regime that had little in common with Northern cities); and it is sometimes the case that we are best off considering the histories of dispersed peoples and activities (Zomia (James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)), diasporic histories (Tai Lands and Thailand: Community and the State in Southeast Asia), bandits (Bandits, Revised Edition)).

Fourth, the way in which we consider historical time sometimes needs more critical reflection. Victor Lieberman's focus on the punctuated patterns of consolidation that took place from Burma to Kiev is one aspect of this reflection; the world's clock was synchronized in a pattern that was quite distinct from the internal patterns of change in each of the affected countries.  And the historian needs to be attentive to both clocks. Likewise, world historians need to be open to considering temporality on a range of scales -- from the months of the Terror to the decades of contention that preceded and followed the French Revolution, to the century and a half that separated the French Revolution from the Chinese Revolution.

Fifth, the global impact of environmental factors needs to be given the emphasis it deserves. Climate change, exhaustion of woodlands, extension of mining and extraction -- all these processes and factors influence human activity at a range of levels, and their impact needs to be assessed carefully on the basis of historical and physical data. Mark Elvin's environmental history of China is a great example (The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China).

Finally, world historians need to pay particular attention to the mechanisms of influence through which places exchanged cultural and economic material in the long centuries from the development of substantial Mediterranean trade in the ancient world to the shipping lanes of the contemporary world. Trade, the diffusion of ideas through cultural contact and migration, the effects of the book trade, the military logic of colonialism, the advent of organized long-distance communication and travel, the creation of international governance institutions -- these mechanisms of social exchange constitute many of the pathways through which global integration occurs, and their dynamics are worthy of close attention by historians.

Significantly, almost all these factors find their way into the work of many recent historians who are taking on the challenge of making sense of the history of the modern world. World historiography is on a very promising trajectory.

The market for ethnicity

John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff have written a complex story of contemporary ethnicity and culture in Ethnicity, Inc.. The Comaroffs are, of course, distinguished cultural anthropologists at the University of Chicago who have done extensive research and writing on Africa. (For example, John Comaroff and Simon Roberts, Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context; Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa: 001.) So their observations on culture and ethnicity in a globalizing world are bound to be interesting.

Here is a nice statement of the way they conceptualize "ethnicity" (referring to Ethnography And The Historical Imagination):

For our own part (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:49- 67), we have long argued that ethnicity is neither a monolithic "thing" nor, in and of itself, an analytic construct: that "it" is best understood as a loose, labile repertoire of signs by means of which relations are constructed and communicated; through which a collective consciousness of cultural likeness is rendered sensible; with reference to which shared sentiment is made substantial. (kl 542)

So ethnicity is semiotic and labile -- or in other words, it consists in socially shared expressions of meaning, and it is especially prone to change and adaptation.

Their central focus in this short book is on ethnicity marketized -- hence "Ethnicity, Inc."  Here is the heart of their insight in the book:

While it is increasingly the stuff of existential passion, of the self-conscious fashioning of meaningful, morally anchored selfhood, ethnicity is also becoming more corporate, more commodified, more implicated than ever before in the economics of everyday life. To this doubling--to the inscription of things ethnic, simultaneously, in affect and interest, emotion and utility--is added yet another. (kl 18)

They document in detail the central idea expressed by the title; the idea that ethnic groups worldwide are looking to commercialize and commodify their indigenous cultures. Even Scotland is looking to brand and market itself -- along with the Shipibo of Peru, MEGA of Kenya, and Contralesa in South Africa. And, of course, this process throws a big handful of sand into the gears of the idea of "cultural authenticity" itself (post). The commodification of ethnic identity to which they refer is illustrated with many examples; for instance, with snippets from marketing materials developed for some of the world's ethnic groups.

Experience the Shipibo Way of Life for yourself in the heart of the Amazon Basin with our Peru Eco-Tourism adventure! Learn how to make Shipibo ceramic artwork, go spear fishing in the Amazon river and much, much more. (the Shipibo Home page from Amazonian Peru (disappeared)) 

The "identity" sector of the North Catalonian' economy represents a new openmindedness [that] will see an expansion based on the culture of the region ... as an alternative to globalisation. (the North Catolonian web page (disappeared)) 

MEGA [Meru, Embu, Gikuyu, Gikuyu Association, Kenya] Initiative Welfare Society is a community organisation formed to foster social/ cultural and economic development of Ameru, Aembu and Agikuyu people of Kenya. It ... is driven by the desire to demonstrate how a community or a region can bring about prosperity by exploiting the cultural richness and entrepreneurial skills and resources of its people ... (MEGA Welfare Society Home Page (disappeared)) (kl 14-46)

And from South Africa they describe Contralesa:

The Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (Contralesa) is the representative voice of ethnicity in the country. It speaks for culture, customary law, and the collective rights of indigenous peoples. Also for the authority of their chiefs and kings, past and present.... Having established a business trust a year earlier in order to join a mining consortium, they were about to create a for-profit corporation to pursue investment opportunities in minerals, forestry, and tourism; formal application had been made to register the company. (kl 77) 

The second thread of argument they engage is the current political and philosophical literature on ethnicity and globalization. Discussing Foucault, Adorno, Montesquieu, and numerous others, they do some careful thinking about where "ethnic identity" stands now in philosophy and theory. They discuss, for example, the juridicalism that has swept through the field in human rights and first peoples (kl 789). (They refer generically to the effort to establish legal rights of property along ethnic lines as "lawfare"; kl 797.)

The commodification of ethnicity plays directly into the argument that identities are socially constructed and performative.  The recreation of "traditional crafts, ceremonies, and dancing" in tourist villages is plainly a Disneyland kind of activity -- even when the performers have some hereditary relation to the earlier practices to which these reenactments point.  The ersatz culture that is performed has little or no resonance with ordinary life in those current groups.

But it also appears that C&C also believe that people have identities as embodied subjectivities -- however labile and socially influenced they may be.  And this implies that it is possible and worthwhile to investigate those subjectivities in their own terms.

There is a final pole to their analysis of ethnicity within the marketplace: the fact that ethnically defined groups are concerned about their property rights in a variety of things: traditional medications, historical land holdings, mineral resources, and even their languages.  This reflects a point about power and politics: a group is more able to sustain itself as a coherent group when it is able to successfully establish rights in important resources.  And these collective rights of ownership may play back into the mechanisms that support the persistence of a subjective group identity.

So it is that we return to where we began, with the articulation--the manifest expression, the joining together--of culture to property, past to future, being to business, entrepreneurialism to ethno-preneurialism. The permanent, unresolved, often aspirational dialectic that connects the incorporation of identity to the commodification of difference looks to be extending in all directions. (kl 2004)

What is unclear to me after reading the book is whether the two parts -- socially constructed performances for a paying public and persistent subjectivity -- are as closely connected as the Comaroffs seem to think. Here, in a nutshell, is how they think the two dynamics are connected:

What conclusions may be drawn from all this? Could it be that we are seeing unfold before us a metamorphosis in the production of identity and subjectivity, in the politics and economics of culture and, concomitantly, in the ontology of ethnic consciousness? (kl 279)

But are the two processes of identity-shift really so closely connected?  Does the fact that economic development policy makers want to brand Scotland really tell us much about whether there is a "Scot identity"? What kind of theorizing and research do we need to do in order to take the measure do what it's like to be a Scot today? What might be included in such a status over a dispersed population of people with some historical ties to Braveheart? Is it a set of collective memories and monuments, a set of emotions of attachment to a standard narrative of Scottish history, or a set of behaviors, habits, and locutions?

In some way it seems as though the commodification of ethnicity is a sideshow, though an interesting one, while the real action is taking place elsewhere. (I don't doubt that they are right in judging that the performances the Shipibo people put on for ethno-tourists have a feedback effect on the ways they think about themselves, and therefore contributes to a degree of shift in the particulars of their ethnic identities.) But there is substantive ethnographic work to be done on the conceptualization and description of these forms of subjectivity themselves, and the ways in which they are influenced and transmitted over time.  Marketization is part of that process -- but it is only one part. And it seems as though the marketing of ethnicity to tourists is a fairly special case.

Think of all the ethnic identities that are continuing to evolve and shift without any involvement of the kinds of commercialization of ethnicity that C&C focus on: the South Asian diaspora in the Midwest, the Burmese community in Minneapolis, the Jewish community in New Mexico or Shanghai. In each case there are complex dynamics of memory, cell phones, traditions adapted to new circumstances, remittances, family conversations, and dozens of other mechanisms through which dispersed communities are maintaining and morphing their ethnicities. There is certainly more to the dynamics of ethnicity in the contemporary world than the commodification that the Comaroffs single out.

(Earlier discussions of diasporic communities and methodological nationalism here and here focus on some of those dynamics.)

Global history?

A question that arises in historiography and the philosophy of history is that of the status of the notion of "global history."  I've addressed the topic several times here in a limited way -- often by making the case for Eurasian history rather than French history or Japanese history (post). There the view is that expanding the scope of vision from the separate nation states of Europe or Asia to the broader panoply of multiple peoples, cultures, and structures is helpful when it comes to understanding the past four hundred years.  But what are some of the more general concerns that make thinking about global history an interesting or important topic?

One important reason for thinking globally as an historian is the fact that the history discipline -- since the Greeks! -- has tended to be eurocentric in its choice of topics, framing assumptions, and methods.  Economic and political history, for example, often privileges the industrial revolution in England and the creation of the modern bureaucratic state in France, Britain, and Germany, as being exemplars of "modern" development in economics and politics.  This has led to a tendency to look at other countries' development as non-standard or stunted.  So global history is, in part, a framework within which the historian avoids privileging one regional center as primary and others as secondary or peripheral. Bin Wong makes this point very strongly in China Transformed.

Second is the apparent fact that when Western historical thinkers -- for example, Hegel, Malthus, Montesquieu -- have turned their attention to Asia, they have often engaged in a high degree of stereotyping without much factual historical knowledge.  The ideas of Oriental despotism, Asian overpopulation, and Chinese stagnation have encouraged a cartoonish replacement of the intricate and diverse processes of development of different parts of Asia by a single-dimensional and reductive set of simplifying frameworks of thought.  This is one of the points of Edward Said's critique of orientalism (Orientalism).  So doing "global" history means paying rigorous attention to the specificities of social, political, and cultural arrangements in other parts of the world besides Europe.

So a global history can be expected to be more agnostic about patterns of development, and more open to discovery of surprising patterns, twists, and variations in the experiences of India (and its many regional differences), China, Indochina, the Arab world, the Ottoman Empire, and Sub-saharan Africa.  Variation and complexity are what we should expect, not stereotyped simplicity.  (Geertz's historical reconstruction of the "theatre state" of Bali is a case in point -- he uncovers a complex system of governance, symbol, value, and hierarchy that represents a substantially different structure of politics than the models derived from the emergence of bureaucratic states in early modern Europe; Negara: The Theatre State in 19th Century Bali.) A global history needs to free itself from eurocentrism.

This step away from eurocentrism in outlook should also be accompanied by a broadening of the geographical range of what is historically interesting.  So a global history ought to be global and trans-national in its selection of topics -- even while recognizing the fact that all historical research is selective.  A globally oriented historian will recognize that the political systems of classical India are as interesting and complex as the organization of the Roman Republic.

Another aspect of global history falls more on the side of how some historians have thought about historical structures and causes since the 1960s. History itself is a "global" process, in which events and systems occur that involve activities in many parts of the world simultaneously. Immanuel Wallerstein is first among these, with his framework of "world systems" (The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, With a New Prologue).  But the basic idea is a compelling one.  An effort to explain the English industrial revolution by only referring to factors, influences, and experiences that occur within England or on its edges (western Europe) is inadequate on its face.  International trade, the flow of technologies from Asia to Europe, and the flows of ideas and peoples from Asia, Africa, and the Americas have plain consequences for the domestic economy of England in 1800 and the development of machine and power technologies. And a "globally minded" historian will pay close attention to these trans-national influences and interdependencies.  This aspect of the interest of global history falls within the area of thinking about the scope of the causal factors that influence more local developments.

An important current underlying much work in global history is the reality of colonialism through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the equally important reality of anti-colonial struggles and nation building in the 1960s and 1970s.  "The world" was important in the capitals of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium because those nations exerted colonial rule in various parts of Africa, Asia, and South America.  So there was a specific interest in gaining certain kinds of knowledge about those societies -- in order to better govern them and exploit them.  And post-colonial states had a symmetrical interest in supporting global historiography in their own universities and knowledge systems, in order to better understand and better critique the forming relations of the past.

Then there is the issue of climate and climate change.  The "little ice age" had major consequences for population, nutrition, trade, and economic activity in western Europe; but the same climate processes also affected life in other quarters of the globe.  So to have a good understanding of the timing and pace of historical change, we often need to know some fairly detailed facts about the global environment.

A final way in which history needs to become "global" is to incorporate the perspectives and historical traditions of historians in non-western countries into the mainstream of discussion of major world developments.  Indian and Chinese historians have their own intellectual traditions in conducting historical research and explanation; a global history is one that pays attention to the insights and arguments of these traditions.

So global history has to do with --

• a broadened definition of the arena of historical change to include Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas
• a recognition of the complexity and sophistication of institutions and systems in many parts of the world
• a recognition of the trans-national interrelatedness that has existed among continents for at least four centuries
• a recognition of the complexity and distinctiveness of different national traditions of historiography

Dominic Sachsenmaier provides a significant recent discussion of some of these issues in Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World.  Sachsenmaier devotes much of his attention to the last point mentioned here, the "multiple global perspectives" point. He wants to take this idea seriously and try to discover some of the implications of different national traditions of academic historiography.  More than half his book is devoted to case studies of global historical research traditions and foci in three distinct national contexts -- Germany, the United States, and China.  How do historians trained and en-disciplined in these three traditions think about the core problems of transnational, global history? Sachsenmaier believes that these differences are real, and that they can be productive of future historical insights through more sustained dialogue.  But he also believes there are conceptual and methodological barriers to these dialogues, somewhat akin the the "paradigm incommensurability" ideas that Thomas Kuhn advanced for the physical sciences.

The idea that in the future, global history may experience more sustained dialogues between scholars from different world regions leads to deeper theoretical challenges than may be apparent at first sight.  Most importantly, there is the question of how to conceptualize "local" viewpoints in today's complex intellectual and academic landscapes. (11)

And he does a good job of articulating what some of these conceptual barriers involve:

In almost all world regions university-based historiography is at least partly an outcome of epistemological discontinuities, outside influences, and shared transformations.... These also had an impact on the conceptions of space underlying world historical scholarship in the widest sense. Prior to spread of history as a modern academic field, forms of border-crossing histories were typically written from a clear perspective of cultural, religious, or even ethical centricity, which means that they tended to be tied to distinct value claims. This situation changed decisively during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when either colonial rule or nation-building efforts had a profound impact on what elements were selected into the canon of academic historiography and many earlier forms of knowledge were rendered subaltern. (13) 

Certain hierarchies of knowledge became deeply engrained in the conceptual worlds of modern historiography. Approaching the realities and further possibilities of alternative approaches to global history thus requires us to critically examine changing dynamics and lasting hierarchies which typify historiography as a global professional environment. (17) 

It will become quite clear that in European societies the question of historiographical traditions tended to be answered in ways that were profoundly different from most academic communities in other parts of the world. (17)

So Sachsenmaier's attention is directed largely to the conceptual issues and disciplinary frameworks that are pertinent when we consider how different national traditions have done history.  What he has to say here is very useful and original.  But he also makes several of the points mentioned above as well -- the need to select different definitions of geography in doing history, the need to put aside the stereotypes of eurocentrism, and the value in understanding in depth the alternative traditions of historical understanding that exist in the world.

Steinmetz on colonialism

George Steinmetz offers a comparative sociology of colonialism in The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa.  More specifically, he wants to explain differences in the implementation of "native policy" within German colonial regimes around the turn of the twentieth century.  He finds that there are significant differences across three major instances of German colonialism (Samoa, Qingdao, Southwest Africa), and he wants to know why. (For example, the Namibia regime was much more violent than the Samoa or Qingdao examples.) This is a causal question, and Steinmetz is one of the most talented sociologists of his cohort in American sociology. So it is worth looking at his reasoning in detail.

One reason this is interesting to me is that it seems to represent a hard case for the perspective of analytical sociology (link, link), with its goal of providing an overarching model of all valid sociological explanations. On its face, Steinmetz's analysis doesn't look much like Coleman's boat -- identify a macro pattern of interest, look for the actors whose behavior gives rise to the pattern, and try to identify individual-level circumstances that cause the pattern through the individuals' actions.  So let's look in a little bit of detail at the explanations that Steinmetz offers.

Here are the guiding research goals for Steinmetz's study.

Social theorists have often treated colonialism as a monolithic object, a uniform condition. Yet even a cursory overview of the historical literature indicates that colonialism is actually an extremely capacious category, encompassing everything from pillage and massacre in the Spanish conquest of the New World to the peaceful coexistence between British rulers and Chinese subjects in late colonial Hong Kong. The colonies that made up the German overseas empire, which lasted from 1884 until the end of World War I, exemplify the enormous variability even within the more delimited category of modern colonialism. This specifically modern variant of European colonialism, as opposed to the early modern (or earlier) forms, is my focus in this book.  I have selected three colonies to illustrate the wide spectrum of colonial native policy, which I will argue below, was the core activity of the modern colonial state.  These colonies are German Southwest Africa, forerunner of modern-day Namibia; German Samoa, precursor of the contemporary nation-state of Samoa; and Kiaochow, a colony that consisted of the city of Qingdao and its surrounding hinterland in China's Shandong Province. (1)

What I try to account for in this book -- my "explanandum" -- is colonial native policy. Four determining structures or causal mechanisms were especially important in each of these colonies: (1) precolonial ethnographic discourses or representations, (2) symbolic competition among colonial officials for recognition of their superior ethnographic acuity, (3) colonizers' cross-identification with imagos of the colonized, and (4) responses by the colonized, including resistance, collaboration, and everything in between.  Two other mechanisms influenced colonial native policy to varying degrees: [5] "economic" dynamics related to capitalist profit seeking (plantation agriculture, mining, trade, and smaller-scale forms of business) and [6] the "political pressures generated by the international system of states. (2)

This book does not attempt to identify any singular, general model of colonial rule.  Indeed, general theory and general laws are widely recognized as implausible goals in the social sciences.  Historians have always preferred complex, overdetermined, conjunctural accounts, but sociologists and some other social scientists have been reluctant to abandon the chimerical goals of parsimony and "general theory." Rather than attempt to use colonial comparisons to fabricate a uniform model of the colonial state, I will seek instead to identify a limited set of generative social structures or mechanisms and to track the ways they interacted to provide ongoing policies. Even though each instance of colonial native policy was shaped by a different constellation of influences, the four primary mechanisms named above were always present and efficacious to varying degrees. (3)

Note that Steinmetz proceeds here in a clearly comparativist fashion (three cases with salient similarities and differences); and he proceeds with the language of causal mechanism in view.  The comparativist orientation implies a desire to identify causal differences across the cases that would account for the differences in outcomes in the cases.  He suggests later in the analysis that all six factors mentioned here are causally relevant; but that the general structural causes (5 and 6) do not account for the variation in the cases.   These structural factors perhaps account for the similarities rather than the differences across the cases. But Steinmetz emphasizes repeatedly that general theories of colonialism cannot account for the wide variation that is found across these three cases.  "The patterns of variation among these three colonies are as puzzling as is the sheer degree of heterogeneity" (19).

So what kind of account does Steinmetz offer for the four key mechanisms he cites?  Consider first factor (2) above, the idea that the specifics of colonial rule depended a great deal on the circumstances of the professional and ideological "field" within which colonial administrators were recruited and served.  (Here is a posting on Bourdieu's concept of "field"; link.)  "Social fields are organized around differences -- differences of perception and practice.  It is difficult to imagine what sorts of materials actors could use in their efforts to carve out hierarchies of cultural distinction if they were faced with cultural formations as flat and uniform as Saidian 'Orientalism'" (45-46).  The idea here is that the particular intellectual and professional environment established certain points of difference around which participants competed. These dividing lines set the terms of professional competition, and prospective colonial administrators as well as functioning administrators needed to establish their program for governance around a distinctive package of these assumptions.

Was the colonial state characterized by common perceptions of distinction and stakes of conflict? German colonial administrators did in fact compete for a specific form of cultural distinction within the ambit of the colonial state, and this struggle guided each individual toward particular kinds of native policy.  ... The colonial stage thus became an exaggerated version of imperial Germany's three-way intraelite class struggle. (48, 49)

This mechanism is a fairly clear one; and it provides a promising basis for explaining some of the otherwise puzzling aspects of colonial rule and native policy.  It derives, fundamentally, from Bourdieu's theories of social capital.  Consider an analogy with current military policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Suppose there are two large ideas of strategy in the air, counter-insurgency and state-building.  Suppose that each of these frameworks of thought has resonance with different groups of powerful political leaders within the government.  And suppose that senior military commanders are interested in establishing their credentials as effective strategists.  It makes sense to imagine that there may be a competition for choosing on-the-ground strategies and tactics that align with the grand strategy the theater commander thinks will further his long-range career success the best.

This mechanism is consistent with an agent-centered theory of explanation: actors (administrators or generals) are immersed in a policy environment in which conflicting ideas about success are debated; the actors seek to align their actions to the framework they judge to be most likely to prevail (and preserve their careers).  No one wants to be the last Curtis LeMay in Vietnam when the prevailing view back home is "winning hearts and minds."  The explanation postulates a social fact -- the prevalence of several intellectual frameworks about the other, several ethnographic discourses; and the individual's immersion in these discourses permits him or her to act strategically in pursuing advantageous goals.

We can often begin to understand why one strand of precolonial discourse rather than another guided colonial practice once we know who was put in charge of a given colony. (54)

So this illustrates the way that factors (1) and (2) work in Steinmetz's explanation.  What about (3)?  This falls in the category of what Steinmetz calls "symbolic and imaginary identifications" (55).  Here Steinmetz turns away from conscious calculation and jockeying on the part of the colonial administrator in the direction of a non-rational psychology. Steinmetz draws on psychoanalytic theory and the theories of Lacan here. But it remains an agent-centered analysis.  Steinmetz refers to elements of mentality as an explanation of the administrators' behavior, and their possession of this mentality needs its own explanation.  But what proceeds from the assumption of this mentality is straightforward; it is a projection of behavior based on a theory of the mental framework of the actor.

The fourth factor in Steinmetz's analysis turns to the states of agency of the colonized.  Here he refers to strategies of response by the subject people to the facts of colonial rule, ranging from cooperation to resistance.

Resistance is located on the opposite side from cooperation. Colonized peoples were able to modulate and revise native policies. By signing up as a native policeman one might be able to temper colonial abuses of power. More frontal forms of resistance could bring a regime of native policy to an abrupt halt and force the colonial state to seek a new approach. (66)

This aspect of the story too is highly compatible with a microfoundations approach; it is straightforward to see how social mobilization theory can be fleshed out in ways that make it an agent-centered approach.

Here is how Steinmetz sums up his account:

The colonial state, I have argued here, can best be understood as a kind of field, one that is structured around opposing principles and interests and around conflict over specific stakes.  Actors in the field of the colonial state competed to accumulate ethnographic capital.  This field's internal heterogeneity and the fact that a field is "a space of possibilities" with an "immense elasticity" meant that colonial policy was never a smooth, continuous process but was prone to sudden shifts in direction. The relative autonomy of the colonial government from the metropolitan state and its independence from other fields in terms of its definition of symbolic capital meant that it was, in fact, a kind of state, even if political theorists have paid little attention to it. Just as it is impossible to generalize about the contents of ethnographic discourse or the policies of the colonial state,neither can one characaterize the "mind of the colonizer" in general terms, except to say that it was as complex and internally contradictory as the subjectivity of the colonized. (517-518)

It should also be noted that a great deal of Steinmetz's account is not explanatory, but rather descriptive and narrative.  He provides detailed accounts of the history and behavior of the colonial regimes in these three settings, and much of the value of the book indeed derives from the research underlying these descriptive accounts.

So Steinmetz's account seems to have several important characteristics.  First, it is interested in providing a contextualized explanation of differences in nominally similar outcomes (different instances of German colonial rule).  Second, it is interested in providing an account of the causal mechanisms that shaped each of the instances, in such a way as to account for their differences.  Third, the mechanisms that he highlights are largely agent-centered mechanisms.  Fourth, the account deliberately highlights the contingency of the developments it describes.  Individuals and particular institutions play a role, as well as historical occurrences that were themselves highly contingent.  And finally, there is a pervasive use of collective concepts like field, ideology, worldview, and ethnography that play a crucial causal role in the story.  These concepts identify a supra-individual factor.  But each of them can be provided with a microfoundational account.  So Steinmetz's analysis here seems to be largely consistent with microfoundationalism.  It diverges from analytical sociology in one important respect, however: Steinmetz does not couch his explanatory goals in terms of the idea of deriving social outcomes from individual-level actions and relations.  Rather, it is for the reader to confirm that the mechanisms cited do in fact have appropriate microfoundations.

(Steinmetz discusses his theoretical approach to colonialism in his interview included in the "interviews" page. Here is an appreciative review of The Devil's Handwriting; link.)

Merchant capital

Karl Marx was very interested in capital -- an abstract concept referring to society's wealth. And he was interested in the persons who owned and controlled capital -- the capitalists. But the primary focus of his lifelong analysis was upon one particular species of capital, what he referred to as "industrial capital." This is the form of wealth involved in the production process -- factories, mines, railroads.  He had less to say about the aspect of capital that designated the exchange process -- what he referred to as "merchant capital" and finance capital. This selective focus reflected one of Marx's main historical opinions -- the idea that history moves forward through the development of the "productive forces," and that industrial capitalists (as well as the industrial proletariat) are the agents of this kind of economic change. Here is a brief description from Capital of the role of merchant's capital in his analysis.

The reason is now therefore plain why, in analysing the standard form of capital, the form under which it determines the economic organisation of modern society, we entirely left out of consideration its most popular, and, so to say, antediluvian forms, merchants' capital and money-lenders' capital. The circuit M-C-M, buying in order to sell dearer, is seen most clearly in genuine merchants' capital. But the movement takes place entirely within the sphere of circulation. Since, however, it is impossible, by circulation alone, to account for the conversion of money into capital, for the formation of surplus-value, it would appear, that merchants' capital is an impossibility, so long as equivalents are exchanged; that, therefore, it can only have its origin in the two-fold advantage gained, over both the selling and the buying producers, by the merchant who parasitically shoves himself in between them. It is in this sense that Franklin says, "war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating." If the transformation of merchants' money into capital is to be explained otherwise than by the producers being simply cheated, a long series of intermediate steps would be necessary, which, at present, when the simple circulation of commodities forms our only assumption, are entirely wanting. (Capital I, Chapter 5)

According to the labor theory of value, only the expenditure of living labor into the production process of a commodity can create new value; so only industrial capital includes a process that creates new wealth. Merchant capital plays no role in the production process, and it is therefore historically unimportant -- or so is Marx's view in Capital.

If we now look back on European history from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, this assessment seems badly wrong as an historical observation. Merchants and their companies played key roles in the establishment of a world trading system; they actively facilitated the race for colonies by the European powers; and often they played a quasi-military role in suppressing resistance by locals in distant parts of the world. So "merchant capital" and companies established for the purpose of international trade seem to have played a key role in the creation of the modern world system.

Robert Brenner undertook to provide a detailed historical account of the role of merchants and their organizations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (1993). This is a departure from Brenner's important contributions to the agrarian changes associated with England's agricultural revolution in the sixteenth century (link), and it is also a much more detailed historical study than his previous works. Brenner is interested primarily in two topics: first, how did commerce evolve in the sixteenth century in England, both nationally and internationally; what were the institutions, organizations, and individuals that emerged as vehicles for pursuing individual and corporate interests by large merchants? And second, how did the emergence of large merchant fortunes and companies interact with the politics of the English state during this early modern period?

To offer a historical analysis of commerce, it is necessary to have extensive commercial data. Appropriately, Brenner's research depends heavily on good information about imports and exports throughout the period. Here is his compilation of London cloth exports 1488-1614:

So aggregation of voluminous historical economic data represents one important portion of Brenner's historical research here. The other important part, however, is at the other end of the scale -- detailed information about many of the individuals who played leadership roles in the commercial and political developments of the period.

Fundamentally the book is about the political power of the merchant class. Brenner makes the point that English commercial interests were deeply dependent upon English political and military strength in the competition for import and export markets.

English merchants found it feasible to establish the new trades in large part because of the weakening hold of Portugal and Spain over their commercial empires, as well as certain other favorable political shifts in the new areas of commercial penetration. Even so, they could successfully capitalize on the openings presented to them only because of the growing political, as well as economic, strength of English commerce and shipping in this period. (5)

The development of England's colonies was particularly important for English merchants:

During the first quarter of the seventeenth century, English traders, for the first time, sought systematically to establish commerce with the Americas. Important City merchants had opened up the new trades with Russia, Turkey, Venice, the Levant, and the East Indies that highlighted the Elizabethan expansion, and in each case, had had recourse to their favorite commercial instrument, the Crown-chartered monopoly company. (92)

This meant, in turn, that great merchants had great political interests, both in terms of military policies of the Crown and in terms of the privileges and monopolies upon which their profits depended.  And much of Brenner's narrative is a careful parsing-out of the deliberate and purposive political alignments sought out by the great merchants and their companies.

The Levant Company's privileges were indispensable for its elaborate system of trade regulation and, in turn, for the reservation of the profits of the trade to a restricted circle of merchants. As members of a regulated company, the individual Levant Company merchants traded for themselves with their own capital, but were required to adhere to rules and policies set by the corporation's general court. (66)

Political alignments were especially important during the century of conflict leading to civil war and revolution.

The political activities and alignments of London's merchant community both expressed and helped determine the character of City and national conflict in the period leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War. From November 1640, London politics and national politics became ever more inextricably intertwined, and ovesears merchants played key roles at both levels.... Civil war became inevitable when City and parliamentary conflicts became fully merged through the consolidation of alliances between the City radical movement and the opposition in Parliament, on the one hand, and the City conservative movement and the Crown, on the other. (316)

An overwhelming majority of company merchants ultimately fell into one of these two allied political categories [of royalist supporters]. But it is difficult to be sure how they were distributed between them ... because surviving evidence on the political orientation of large numbers of citizens is available only for the period beginning in July 1641. (317)

But on the other side:

The traders of the colonial-interloping leadership stood at the head of the City popular movement and played a critical role in connecting that movement to the national parliamentary opposition.  The new merchants' continuing intimate ties with London's domestic trading community (from which many of them had come) put them closely in touch with a City parliamentary movement that was overwhelmingly composed of nonmerchants. Meanwhile, their activities in the colonial field gave them pivotal links with those Puritan colonizing aristocrates who constituted a key component of the national parliamentary leadership. (317)

If we wanted a single phrase to summarize Brenner's task in this work, it is the idea that much of England's politics in the early modern period were influenced or determined by the demands of the commercial sector. The great merchants wielded great political power. And so we need to have a fine-grained understanding of these companies and their networks if we are to understand the coalitions and policies of the period. Contrary to the view put forward by Marx above, merchant capital and its associated actors and organizations were indeed a potent historical factor in modern history.

A recent book by Stephen Bown, Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600--1900, picks up the story of merchant capital from a different angle and with a very different level of resolution. Bown is particularly interested in demonstrating the active (and often violent) role that large merchant companies played in the development of the world trading system and the colonial relationships that emerged from the seventeenth century forward. Bown's central focus is on the individuals and the companies that created the colonial world: Jan Pieterszoon Coen and the Dutch East India Company, Pieter Stuyvesant and the Dutch West India Company, Sir Robert Clive and the English East India Company, Aleksandr Baranov and the Russian American Company, Sir George Simpson and the Hudson's Bay Company, and Cecil John Rhodes and the British South Africa Company.

Bown opens his book with the story of the Dutch efforts in the early seventeenth century to push English and Portuguese traders out of the East Indies (Indonesia).  The central actor of this story is an employee of the Dutch East India Company and an experienced naval admiral, Pieter Verhoeven. The narrative of Verhoeven's assault on the Moluccas is a good place for Bown to begin, because it brings together the themes of armed violence and commercial interest that are the core of his book. Verhoeven's instructions from the board of directors of the Dutch East India Company were explicit:

We draw your special attention to the islands in which grow the cloves and nutmeg, and we instruct you to strive after winning them for the company either by treaty or by force. (10-11)

Bown draws out a story of global competition between nations and trading companies that illustrates the brutality and self-interestedness of colonialism throughout the three-century period he traces. And the chief victims of this violence are non-European peoples from Indonesia to Alaska to South Africa. What the book doesn't provide is what is so evident in Brenner's book -- a detailed understanding of the political and organizational relationships that underlay these military and commercial adventures.

Both books have something to add to our own efforts to understand big business in the twenty-first century. On the evidence offered here, business organizations -- corporations and companies -- have their own interests and agendas, and states have a great deal of difficulty in constraining them to the public good. This is obvious in the failures of large financial institutions to safeguard the interests of the public in 2008 -- the harmful conduct of finance capital, but it was equally evident in the behavior of the Dutch East India Company or Brenner's opening example, the Company of Merchant Adventurers. The hidden hand does not assure us that markets, commerce, and private interest will bring about the common good.

Methodological nationalism

Are there logical divisions within the global whole of social interactions and systems that permit us to focus on a limited, bounded social reality?  Is there a stable level of social aggregation that might provide an answer to the "units of analysis" question in the social sciences?  This is a question that has recurred several times in prior postings -- on regions (link), on levels of analysis (link), and on world systems (link). Here I'll focus on the nation-state as one such system of demarcation.

We can start with a very compelling recent critique of current definitions of the social sciences.  Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller offer an intriguing analysis of social science conceptual schemes in "Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences" (link). (Wimmer's Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity is also of great interest.) The core idea is the notion that the social sciences have tended to conceptualize social phenomena around the boundaries of the nation-state.  And, these authors contend, this assumption creates a set of blinders for the social sciences that makes it difficult to capture some crucially important forms of social interaction and structure.

Wimmer and Schiller characterize the idea of methodological nationalism in three forms:

The epistemic structures and programmes of mainstream social sciences have been closely attached to, and shaped by, the experience of modern nation-state formation....  The social sciences were captured by the apparent naturalness and givenness of a world divided into societies along the lines of nation-states....  Because they were structured according to nation-state principles, these became so routinely assumed and 'banal', that they vanished from sight altogether. (303-4)

A second variant, typical of more empirically oriented social science practices, is taking national discourses, agendas, loyalties and histories for granted, without problematizing themor making them an object of an analysis in its own right.  Instead, nationally bounded societies are taken to be the naturally given entities to study. (304)

Let us  now address a third and last variant of methodological nationalism: the territorialization of social science imaginary and the reduction of the analytical focus to the boundaries of the nation-state. (307)

The three variants of methodological nationalism ... are thus ignorance, naturalization, and territorial limitation. (308)

Their view is a complex one. They think that the social sciences have been trapped behind a kind of conceptual blindness, according to which the concepts of nation and state structure our perception of social reality but disappear as objects of critical inquiry. Second, they argue that there were real processes of nation and state building that created this blindness -- from nineteenth century nation building to twentieth century colonialism. And third, they suggest that the framework of MN itself contributed to the concrete shaping of the history of nation and state building. So it is a three-way relationship between knowledge and the social world.

"Nationalism" has several different connotations.  First, it implies that peoples fall into "nations," and that "nations" are somewhat inevitable and compact social realities.  France is a nation.  But closer examination reveals that France is a social-historical construct, not a uniform or natural social whole. (Here is a discussion of Emmanuel Todd's version of this argument; link).  Alsatians, Bretons, and Basques are part of the French nation; and yet they are communities with distinct identities, histories, and affinities.  So forging France as a nation was a political effort, and it is an unfinished project.

Second, nationalism refers to movements based on mobilization of political identities.  Hindu nationalists have sought power in India through the BJP on the basis of a constructed, mobilized (and in various ways fictional) Hindu identity.  The struggle over the Babri Mosque, and the political use to which this symbol was put in BJP mobilization, illustrates this point.  But "nationalist politics" also possess a social reality; it is all too evident that even fictive "national identities" can be powerful sources of political motivation.  So nationalist politics in the twentieth century were a key part of many historical processes.  (Michael Mann's The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing illustrates this point.)  And, of course, there may be multiple national identities within a given region; so the "nation" consists of multiple "nationalist" groups.  Ben Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism provides an extensive development of the political and constructed nature of ethnic and national identities.

What about the other pole of the "nation-state" conjunction -- the state?  Here the idea is that the state is the seat of sovereign authority; the origin and enforcement of legal institutions; and the holder of a monopoly of coercive power in a region.  A state does not inevitably correspond to a nation; so when we hyphenate the conjunction we make a further substantive assumption -- that nations grow into states, and that states cultivate national identities.

The fundamental criticism that Wimmer and Schiller express -- the fundamental defect of methodological nationalism -- is that it limits the ability of social scientists and historians to perceive processes that are above or below the level of the nation-state.  Trans-national processes (they offer migration as an example) and sub-national processes (we might refer to the kinds of violent mobilization studied by Mann in the Dark Side of Democracy) are either invisible or unimportant, from the point of view of methodological nationalism.  So the methodology occludes social phenomena that are actually of great importance to understanding the contemporary world.  Here is how they suggest going beyond methodological nationalism in the field of migration studies:

Going beyond methodological nationalism in the study of current migration thus may require more than a focus on transnational communities instead of the nation and its immigrants.  In order to escape the magnetism of established methodologies, ways of defining the object of analysis and algorithms for generating questions, we may have to develop (or rediscover?) analytical tools and concepts not coloured by the self-evidence of a world ordered into nation-states.  This is what we perceive, together with many other current observers of the social sciences, as the major task lying ahead of us.  We are certainly not able to offer such a set of analytical tools here. (323-24)

Wimmer and Schiller seem to point in a direction that we find in Saskia Sassen's work as well: the idea that it is necessary for the social sciences to invent a new vocabulary that does a better job of capturing the idea of the interconnectedness of social activity and social systems (for example, in A Sociology of Globalization; link).  The old metaphors of "levels" of social life organized on an ascending spatial basis doesn't seem to work well today when we try to deal with topics like global cities, diasporic communities, or transnational protest movements. And each of these critiques makes a convincing case that these non-national phenomena are influential all the way down into the "national" orders singled out by traditional classification schemes.

A modern world-system?

Source : Minard’s Map of Port and River Tonnage

Immanuel Wallerstein created a huge stir in the 1970s with the publication of The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (1974).  The book is an intellectual masterpiece, synthesizing a vast range of fundamental literature on the economic history of Europe and the world.  You could look at the book as the first serious and extended effort to theorize globalization -- a term that barely existed at the time of publication. Or you could look at it as a general theory of colonialism -- an account of the pathways and influences through which the metropole dominated and exploited the periphery. It is worth looking back at this work today to tease out some of the guiding assumptions about history, sociology, and globalization it reflected.

The concept of "world system" is itself a key component of our current understanding of globalization, in that it captures the idea of causal interconnectedness across the globe among major organizations, firms, populations, and states.  Wallerstein observes that earlier social scientists had usually centered their analysis at the level of the political unit -- the nation-state; whereas his own approach is different:

This book makes a radically different assumption.  It assumes that the unit of analysis is an economic entity, the one that is measured by the existence of an effective division of labor, and that the relationship of such economic boundaries to political and cultural boundaries is variable, and therefore must be determined by empirical research for each historical case.  Once we assume that the unit of analysis is such a "world-system" and not the "state" or the "nation" or the "people", then much changes in the outcome of the analysis. (xi)

But what, more exactly, did he mean by a system?  Did he imagine something analogous to a mechanical system in which the relations among the parts were governed by a few simple laws?  He seems to suggest this possibility when he asks the question, "What do astronomers do?  As I understand it, the logic of their arguments involves two separate operations.  They use the laws derived from the study of smaller physical entities, the laws of physics, and argue that ... these laws hold by analogy for the system as a whole.  Second, they argue a posteriori.  If the whole system is to have a given state at time y, it most porrobably had a certain state at time x" (7).  Here he seems to suggest that social systems are tied together by the working of governing laws -- a particularly unconvincing starting point.

But Wallerstein's practice as a sociologist is far more defensible than this language would suggest.  He was in fact sensitive to causal heterogeneity, contingency, and variation in the systemic relations he meant to capture -- particularity as well as universality.  So he doesn't actually treat the modern world system as if it were analogous to a set of gravitational objects governed by fixed laws of nature.

I think the clue to an answer to his working definition of a system is found in his definition of scope in terms of an "effective division of labor": a set of regions constitute a system in his framework if there is significant exchange and dependence among various of the regions for products, people, knowledge, skills, and resources from other regions.  If Europe, Asia, or the Americas had been "autarkic" in 1700 -- that is, if one or more of these continental regions had been a closed economy and society making no substantial use of products, knowledge, resources, or people from other regions -- then there would not have been one "world system" but rather several independent macro-regional systems.  And Wallerstein explicitly affirms this point late in the book:

By saying that in the sixteenth century there was a European world-economy, we indicate that the boundaries are less than the earth as a whole.  But how much less?  We cannot simply include in it any part of the world with which "Europe" traded.  In 1600 Portugal traded with the central African kingdom of Monomotapa as well as with Japan.  Yet it would be prima facie hard to argue that either Monomotapa or Japan were part of the European world-economy at that time.  And yet we argue that Brazil (or at least areas of the coast of Brazil) and the Azores were part of the European world-economy. (199)

So in postulating the concept of world system as a framework for analysis of the modern period (let's say 1700), Wallerstein is laying a few important cards on the table; he is indicating his judgment that there was significant and necessary exchange among virtually all accessible places on the planet.  There were economically meaningful movements of resources, people (emigrants and slaves), crops (cotton, sugar), finished products, and ideas throughout the system of places defining the system of transport and trade.  This in turn implies that we cannot properly understand the workings of the regional economy without taking into account its exchange relations with other regions -- or in other words, we need to place the regional economy into the system of international division of labor in which it is located.  And in fact, historians like Ken Pomeranz make a substantial case for the empirical accuracy of that judgment (see for example The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy and The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, And the World Economy, 1400 to the Present).

If we begin with this assumption -- the idea of the substantial interdependence of continental regions in the early modern period -- then we are naturally drawn to the question, what were the terms of trade?  Was exchange among regions mutually beneficial, as trade theory would have it?  Or was it extractive and exploitative, as the theory of colonialism would have it?  This is where Wallerstein makes substantial use of the core-periphery framework in his analysis.

The periphery of a world-economy is that geographical sector of it wherein production is primarily of lower-ranking goods ... but which is an integral part of the overall system of the division of labor, because the commodies involved are essential for daily use.  The external arena of a world-economy consists of those other world-systems with which a given world-economy has some kind of trade relationship ... what was sometimes called the "rich trades." (199-200) 

Wallerstein was particularly interested in interconnections between places that were the expression of power and commerce.  Core and periphery are linked by relations of subordination -- military and economic domination, leading to the persistent disadvantage of the latter in favor of the former.  These features define the "general attributes of a colonial situation" (5).

This analysis lays a theoretical and historical foundation for a theory of globalization.  Wallerstein writes late in the book:

One of the persisting themes of the history of the modern world is the seesaw between "nationalism" and "internationalism." I do not refer to the ideological seesaw ... but to the organizational one.  At some points in time the major economic and political institutions are geared to operating in the international arena and feel that local interests are tied in some immediate way to developments elsewhere in the world.  At other points of time, the social actors tend to engage their efforts locally, tend to see the reinforcement of state boundaries as primary, and move toward a relative indifference about events beyond them. (147)

Where has the effort to theorize globalization gone in the thirty-five years since Wallerstein's book appeared? A particularly important contemporary voice on this subject is that of Saskia Sassen.  Her recent A Sociology of Globalization (2007) represents a current cutting-edge effort to provide a vocabulary and set of theoretical premises in terms of which to understand the global interconnectedness that characterizes the contemporary world. And she wants to provide a sociology of these processes -- that is, she wants to provide a theoretical vocabulary and a set of hypotheses about the causal mechanisms that are involved that are adequate to the problem of describing and explaining the workings of this system. One thing this means is providing a framework within which the empirical details and structures of global networks can be investigated.  Another key point in her approach is her attention to differentiation across institutions and mechanisms.

A deeply important part of her analysis is her effort to overturn the assumption of "linearity" and hierarchy among levels of analysis -- the line of thought that assumes that neighborhoods are encompassed by cities, which fall within regions, which fall within states, which fall within international relations.  She argues repeatedly and effectively that this linear scheme doesn't work for today's global relationships.  The local neighborhood may be implicated in extra-national relations of immigration, crime, and trade that make it a global place.  More importantly, what she calls "global cities" have crucial relationships at many levels in these supposed hierarchies -- local, national, and supra-national.  So the question of scale cannot be defined within a simple hierarchy of relationships of locality, nationality, and globality.  (Significantly, Wallerstein opens his treatment of the modern world system by wrestling with this issue -- a discussion that he frames in terms of the idea of the appropriate unit of analysis in considering colonialism.)

Sassen is particularly interested in the networks of communication, finance, and service organizations that constitute the fabric joining what she calls "global cities" (link; see also an earlier posting on regional interdependence). But in this book Sassen broadens considerably the angle of view in order to consider social networks at many levels of scale, including sub-national as well as supra-national.

Sassen makes an important point about international economic power that has a Wallerstein-like feel to it but that would probably not have been true in 1700 or 1970.  This is her view that there has been an important process of "de-nationalization" that has removed traditional powers of the state and placed them in the scope of international economic and finance institutions that are significantly controlled by large economic actors and firms. We sometimes refer to this process as one of "liberalization"; Sassen makes the point that the construction of the new supra-national regulatory regimes is an extended historical process that can be studied in detail.  She refers to the result of this process as the global corporate economy.  One of Wallerstein's key arguments is that nations in the periphery were dominated and controlled by an economic system run by European nations. Sassen argues for the reality of a world system of regulatory arrangements that subordinates the sovereignty of even previously hegemonic nations to a non-democratic set of institutions and rules that implicitly favor one set of economic actors over others.  But Sassen's inference from this fact about international economic power is less about north-south exploitation and more about the rising likelihood of global exploitation of all ordinary citizens by powerful extra-national economic forces that are beyond the reach of democratic processes (what she refers to as the "democratic deficit").

Sassen's book warrants a close reading.  It proposes a significantly different way of conceptualizing the meaning of globalization, and one that will suggest many new research agendas.

(The Minard trade map above is borrowed from the fascinating blog Cartographia.  The blog has many great discussions of some very interesting maps.)