E3W Literature | University of Texas

Frederick Cooper
Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
University of California Press, 2005
327 + xii pages
$19.95

Reviewed by Samuel Baker

Colonialism in Question is a late-career work of methodological reflection, and as such, an exercise in a genre of academic writing that often fails to satisfy discerning readers. Such works may set out to redefine disciplines or articulate emergent paradigms, but they too often devolve into boundary-policing and score-settling. Yet when such interventions succeed, they succeed massively, and Frederick Cooper’s Colonialism in Question achieves such success. Since establishing his reputation decades ago with a series of tightly focused studies of labor in colonial Africa, Cooper has been steadily widening his lens to consider the world systems in which he has found his objects of study enmeshed. Here he compares, contrasts, and synthesizes approaches to the study of colonialism and empire from across the range of social science and humanities disciplines: from history, his own field, but also from literary and cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology. Cooper persuasively argues for foregrounding specific historical formations of empires and colonies and emphasizing the situatedness of the very words with which these phenomena are rendered. He shows little patience for what he considers unwarranted flights of conceptual association. One might expect that a historian arguing this line would scorn the poststructural and postcolonial approaches mainly incubated in literature and philosophy departments. Yet Cooper proves a remarkably even-handed guide to his whole spectrum of methodologies. Equally hard on cant wherever he finds it, he takes the time to find a lot of it in avowedly modest and empirical work, while acknowledging insights born of speculations, however philosophical, so long as they come to be tested against actual observations. Not all of Cooper’s local assessments are of equal value, and most of his readers will be able to see their way past some of the doubts he raises about their specific fields or approaches; but for a general diagnosis and prescription, it would be hard to improve upon Cooper’s account of an unfortunate abstraction in the conduct of studies of colonialism and his proposal for a new specificity in such studies.

With his insistent complaints about abstraction, Cooper makes a fairly simple point, but it is a point he bears out through complex analyses that ultimately do provide fresh analytical models for colonial and imperial studies. His introduction begins brutally, with a graph that compares the skyrocketing pervasiveness of the word “identity” and the marked increases in the use of the words “globalization” and “modernity” in scholarly articles published in the 1990s with the static popularity of “modernization,” “urbanization,” and “industrialization” across the same period. Yet Cooper does not marshal this evidence to decry jargon as such. Rather, he uses it to urge us to take all the more seriously calls from the vanguard of colonial or postcolonial historians—namely, from Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee—that we should (respectively) “provincialize Europe” and locate, at the heart of colonialism, what Cooper emphasizes is a “politics of difference.” In Cooper’s view, a relentless attention to the concrete details of specific empires and colonial systems makes it possible to grasp the persistence of difference through history and across cultures, precisely because of the manifest failures of such systems to thoroughly ingest the regions and peoples that they nominally control. Hence Cooper’s aperçu that “if Foucault saw power as ‘capillary,’ it was arguably arterial in most colonial contests—strong near the nodal points of colonial authority, less able to impose its discursive grid elsewhere, often little interested in obtaining or dispensing much knowledge about its subjects.” While here as elsewhere in Cooper’s text Michel Foucault becomes something of a strawman to whom Cooper attributes theories of centralized and continuous power that the French philosopher-historian actually took pains to contest, it is certainly the case that soi-disant Foucauldians have been among those most eager to attribute to colonial empires in historical retrospect a complete and integrated dominion that they never could quite exert in historical actuality.

In the central sequence of chapters that forms Part II of his book, Cooper takes on, and takes apart, a series of terms for such dominion: terms that in his view are academic shibboleths rather than truly useful concepts. A chapter on “Identity,” appropriately enough written collaboratively (with Rogers Brubaker), proposes a set of more precise alternatives to that term, among them “identification,” “catagorization,” “self-understanding,” “affinity,” and “commonality.” Cooper’s next target is the “totalizing pretensions” and “presentist periodization” attendant on concepts of “globalization,” a term that has come to name phenomena he prefers to analyze under rubrics of “colonialism,” “internationalization,” “long-distance connection” and “capitalism.” Another term in this set might have been “modernization,” but as Cooper explains in the chapter on “modernity” that rounds out Part II, he cut his scholarly teeth critiquing the modernization mythos promulgated by Walt Rostow and others in the immediate aftermath of postwar decolonization, and has no desire to resuscitate even a strictly delimited version of that concept. Perhaps in part for this reason Cooper’s overarching critique of “modernity” as a concept is less convincing than the critiques of “identity” and “globalization” that precede it, if no less useful. It is certainly stimulating to follow Cooper as he catalogues Western disavowals of modernity on the one hand, such as Bruno Latour’s (actually quite convincing) argument that We Have Never Been Modern (1993), with on the other hand proclamations from around the rest of the world of persistent modernity, concluding on the basis of such evidence that “one is left with a concept”—modernity—“that has played an important role in making claims but does little analytic work.” Yet surely claims for a modern condition, like claims for modernization itself as a tangible process, are founded in the historical sociology of technology, and technological history is not among Cooper’s favored modes of inquiry.

Bracketing technological modernity has its analytical virtues, many of which are on display in the tour de force chapter that begins the third and final section of Cooper’s book. Nothing less than a methodological summa on the treatment of “States, Empires, and Political Imagination,” this chapter finds that “imperial modernity in its Roman and Chinese variants seems to be ancient,” and duly weighs the importance of the Roman precedent for modern European colonialism. Empire itself emerges as a social formation distinct from that of the nation-state, and the French Empire founded by Napoleon becomes for Cooper the paradigm of the modern empire that works—or fails to work—exactly insofar as it coordinates loose alliances of diverse peoples and polities. The famous “imperialism of free trade” attributed to the British world system in the long nineteenth century by Ronald Robinson and Jack Gallagher becomes for Cooper another case study in “the limits that derived from the structure of empire itself.” This idea of empire’s license and limits becomes the basis for the case study that constitutes Cooper’s final chapter, which concerns “Labor, Politics, and the End of Empire in French Africa.” Tracking how the massive railway strikes of the late 1940s forced colonial governments to repudiate “the unity and indissolubility of Greater France” as their “first principle of action,” Cooper shows how the granting of sovereignty to West African peoples represented not simply the end of empire (although it did amount to that) but also a resolution of tensions that had always been internal to the empire’s strength. (How the railroad itself as a technological form might have played into this event is a fascinating topic not taken up by his account.) Cooper then concludes with a limited defense of how the international norms that have emerged in the wake of the age of empire, while obviously imperfectly articulated and realized, provide some basis for progressive collective action. In this defense he calls attention once again to how various empires, each in their own way, forestalled such action not just by way of hegemony and coercion but also by confusing basic issues of what governance is and of how and to what ends people can act in concert. In this light, one appreciates how Cooper, by bringing such clarity to conversations about empire, not only anatomizes the phenomenon but moreover actively works to dissipate its lengthy shadows.