Historical sociology, international relations and connected histories

This article addresses three recent developments in historical sociology: (1) neo-Weberian historical sociology within International Relations; (2) the 'civilizational analysis' approach utilized by scholars of 'multiple modernities'; and (3) the 'third wave' cultural turn in US historical sociology. These developments are responses to problems identified within earlier forms of historical sociology, but it is suggested each fails to resolve them precisely because each remains contained within the methodological framework of historical sociology as initially conceived. It is argued that their common problem lies in the utilization of 'ideal types' as the basis for sociohistorical analysis. This necessarily has the effect of abstracting a set of particular relations from their wider connections and has the further effect of suggesting sui generis endogenous processes as integral to these relations. In this way, each of the three developments continues the Eurocentrism typical of earlier approaches. The article concludes with a call for 'connected histories' to provide a more adequate methodological and substantive basis for an historical sociology appropriate to calls for a properly global historical sociology

Connected Sociologies

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This book outlines what theory for a global age might look like, positing an agenda for consideration, contestation and discussion, and a framework for the research-led volumes that follow in the series. Gurminder K. Bhambra takes up the classical concerns of sociology and social theory and shows how they can be rethought through an engagement with postcolonial studies and decoloniality, two of the most distinctive critical approaches of the past decades

Why are the white working classes still being held responsible for Brexit and Trump?

Why do we persist in holding the 'white working class' accountable for Brexit and Donald Trump's win, when the evidence suggests it was the backing of the white middle classes that secured them? Gurminder K Bhambra (University of Sussex) argues that a pervasive 'methodological whiteness' has distorted social scientific accounts of both these elections. It has enabled commentators to offer economic disadvantage as an explanation ..

The current crisis of Europe: refugees, colonialism, and the limits of cosmopolitanism

‘Cosmopolitan Europe’, the normative commitment that is widely understood to undergird the project of the European Union, is under threat as never before. This is manifest perhaps most prominently in Europe’s collective failure to respond to the crisis for refugees. As people flee war and destruction, we, in Europe, debate whether now is the time to give up on our human rights commitments. France is under a state of emergency and the UK in the process of withdrawing from the European Union and its associated institutions (including the European Convention on Human Rights). Voices have been raised against the burdens, financial and social, placed upon us by those we see as Other, with few public voices calling for Europe to remember its traditions of hospitality and stated commitments to human rights. In this article, I discuss the growing distance between the claims and practices of European cosmopolitanism, its roots in our shared colonial past, and the implications for the future

Identity politics and the need for a ‘tomorrow’

Recent years have witnessed a general backlash against identity politics, both in the academy and the public sphere. This paper recognises the problems in identity politics as arising from an apparent difficulty in conceptualising identity separately from notions of fixity and exclusion. It argues that politicised identities could, instead, be premised upon an explicit affirmation of the provisionality of political identity that is oriented to a “tomorrow “ in which the identity will no longer be required

European Colonial Entanglements: Questions of Historical Sociology and Progress

The European project of modernity is usually associated with the development of nation-states (of citizenship bound to territoriality as Weber put it), but is better understood as founded through colonial endeavours, that is of empires rather than nations. In this context, the ‘modern’ is, in fact, the ‘colonial modern’, where territoriality involved domination and preferential inclusion for ‘domestic’ populations within a racialized political community across borders. This has implications for how we think about sociology and its associated concepts and categories. In this contribution, I question the association of Europe with progress and seek to demonstrate how the very structuring of our discipline makes it difficult to account for illiberal practices both within and outwith the continent. Whereas ethno-nationalism is usually perceived as a feature of postcolonial ‘new’ nations, we can also understand it to be a feature of Europe after (and through) empire. A ‘connected sociologies’ approach that recognizes Europe’s constitution through colonialism would provide us with more adequate resources for dealing with the problems that currently face us.&nbsp

Brexit, Trump, and ‘methodological whiteness’: on the misrecognition of race and class

The rhetoric of both the Brexit and Trump campaigns was grounded in conceptions of the past as the basis for political claims in the present. Both established the past as constituted by nations that were represented as ‘white’ into which racialized others had insinuated themselves and gained disproportionate advantage. Hence, the resonant claim that was broadcast primarily to white audiences in each place ‘to take our country back’. The politics of both campaigns was also echoed in those social scientific analyses that sought to focus on the ‘legitimate’ claims of the ‘left behind’ or those who had come to see themselves as ‘strangers in their own land’. The skewing of white majority political action as the action of a more narrowly defined white working class served to legitimize analyses that might otherwise have been regarded as racist. In effect, I argue that a pervasive ‘methodological whiteness’ has distorted social scientific accounts of both Brexit and Trump’s election victory and that this needs to be taken account of in our discussion of both phenomena

3 challenges for a reparatory social science

Reflecting on work uncovering the colonial genealogies of foundational works in the social sciences, Gurminder K Bhambra argues for a reparatory social science and highlights three challenges that any reparatory project must face in order to be successful