Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History

by Frederick Cooper

In this closely integrated collection of essays on colonialism in world history, Frederick Cooper raises crucial questions about concepts relevant to a wide range of issues in the social sciences and humanities, including identity, globalization, and modernity. Rather than portray the past two centuries as the inevitable movement from empire to nation-state, Cooper places nationalism within a much wider range of imperial and diasporic imaginations, of rulers and ruled alike, well into the twentieth century. He addresses both the insights and the blind spots of colonial studies in an effort to get beyond the tendency in the field to focus on a generic colonialism located sometime between 1492 and the 1960s and somewhere in the "West." Broad-ranging, cogently argued, and with a historical focus that moves from Africa to South Asia to Europe, these essays, most published here for the first time, propose a fuller engagement in the give-and-take of history, not least in the ways in which concepts usually attributed to Western universalism―including citizenship and equality―were defined and reconfigured by political mobilizations in colonial contexts.

Genres: History, Theory, Africa, Politics, Philosophy, Essays, Nonfiction

339 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Frederick Cooper is an American historian who specializes in colonialization, decolonialization, and African history. Cooper received his Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University in 1974 and is currently professor of history at New York University.

Cooper initially studied the labor movement in East Africa, but later moved on the a broader consideration of colonialism. One of his best known conceptual contributions is the concept of the gatekeeper state.

Reviews

[Justin Michael James Dell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This text is unquestionably the product of Frederick Cooper's prodigious erudition; the source material he draws from, and the historiographical issues he addresses, are legion. This survey is undoubtedly a required text for anyone interested in the history of colonialism, the state of the literature on that subject, and some of the contentious questions swirling around academia on this topic in the 21st century.

Cooper admonishes his colleagues and readership to avoid sharply separating and 'packaging' the metropole and the colony in their study of the history of colonialism and its legacy. The truth, he avers, is far more complicated than that. Both colonizer and colonized developed identities in tandem with each other, in response to exigencies and developments in their imperial relationship. The European colonizer was not simply a paragon of Enlightenment liberalism projecting an immutable 'package' of modernity on a passive colonial victim; the colonized responded to European influences by modulating them, using them for their own purposes. What eventually emerged out of this seesaw dialectic, by the 1960s, was the system of nation-states that became the global norm, albeit arrayed in an inequitable relationship to one another, reflecting their imperial provenance. The imperial centre and the periphery made each other.

Reevaluating the history of colonialism requires a reformation of the vernacular in which that subject is dissected and analyzed at the academic level. Cooper makes a modest but thorough contribution to this exigency by disassembling the terms "identity", "globalization", and "modernity", exposing their ambiguity and inadequacy, and suggesting a number of clever alternatives that are consonant with a more nuanced understanding of the trajectory of colonial history and the modern questions to which it is pertinent.

On a critical note, Cooper is not the greatest writer. He has a tendency to compose awkward or disjointed sentences that require rereading. Moreover, the material in this text is quite dense, making for a bit of a slog from cover to cover.

[Eren Buğlalılar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could have been a lot better if Prof. Cooper revised his sentences or had an editor to do it for him.

This is a collection of articles about colonial studies that mainly aim at righting the common wrongs of the field. Many of his recommendations sound quite generic:

- In contemporary history, do not assume a linear transition between empires and nation states.
- Avoid teleology in your historical narrative.
- Some historical categories and concepts may be outdated, but don't let this blind you to the fact that they were once, and may still be, able to inform the social practices of some groups and societies.
- Don't let abstractions become a substitute for local, historical realities. A single colonialism, a single empire and a single globalization do not exist.
- Avoid a globalization narrative that is ahistorical and that is so fascinated with the connections and flows so that the interruptions, disconnections, counterflows are forgotten.
- One single system can have quite different impacts on the different parts of the globe.
- etc.

I think Sebastian Conrad's What Is Global History? is better both in content and style.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Studying colonial history reminds us that in the most oppressive of political systems, people found not just niches in which to hide and fend for themselves, but handles by which the system itself could be moved."

[Elçin Arabacı · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since I read Hayden White’s Metahistory in the early 2000s, I’ve never enjoyed reading a theoretical book this much :) His critiques of the post colonial literature are exactly to the point. Plus, his methodological suggestions are insightful and much useful for the students of history and social sciences. Juicy book!

[Jake La Fronz · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, Colonialism in Question by Frederick Cooper was a bit of a challenging text. I find global histories often to be challenging to follow and understand. Cooper employs a lot of discussion of theories of study which is enlightening, but can also be hard to follow. From the earlier chapters, I gleaned that he intends to discuss the development of colonial studies across disciplinary boundaries such as literature, anthropology, and history. Cooper unpacks and addresses the focus of many colonial studies on concepts such as “identity”, “globalization”, and “modernity” which he claims have been used so often that they have lost their potency / understanding. That is to say that the categories of identity, globalization, and modernity need to be further unpacked and re-understood in newer colonial studies. Cooper also argues that the greatest amount of scholastic interest in colonialism occurred at the time when many people would say that global colonialism came to an end. I think that some scholars would question the idea that global colonialism ended with the breakup of the great European empires. Nonetheless, Cooper raises an interesting point. Why did the development of colonial studies grow so much only AFTER the dismantling of some of the world’s largest colonial empires? One of Cooper’s suggestions is that the critique of modernity aimed at destabilizing the Europe-centered narrative of progress has actually ended up preserving modernity as the defining characteristic of Europe history throughout the colonial period (6). What Cooper means here is that by creating postcolonial or anticolonial studies which focus on the development of the European concept of “modernity”, these colonial studies have come to re-centralize modernity as a development that occurred distinctly in Europe and they have also re-centered Europe in their intended-to-be anticolonial studies. Colonialism in Question suggests that scholars must reimagine the concept of modernity and the study of colonialism with the knowledge that centering modernity might also re-center Europe in the historical narrative.
Another concept that Cooper address is the common understanding that the 18th and 19th centuries can be understood through the development of the nation-state and the national imagination (reference to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities). Cooper suggests that we should instead look over a longer period of time (or a different “epoch”) to understand the more varied set of politics that developed during this time both inside and outside of Europe. According to Cooper, many scholars of colonialism have focused their critiques on the European concepts of the Enlightenment, democracy, and modernity. In Cooper’s view, these scholars have given excess weight to the power of these agentless concepts (the Enlightenment, democracy, and modernity). By focusing on critiques of European concepts such as the Enlightenment, democracy, and modernity many scholars of colonial studies have not prioritized the unique actions of diverse groups of people living through their particular colonial situations. Cooper suggests that we need to study colonial history with the understanding that the actions of the colonized have also influenced the course of their own histories, not just the actions of the colonizers.

Key Terms: Empire, Colonialism, story plucking, leapfrogging legacies, doing history backward, the epochal fallacy, Identity, globalization, modernity, modernization, urbanization, industrialization, colonial studies, scholarship, time, space, Enlightenment, democracy, Europe, European, historical analysis, imagination, colonial, interactions, nation-state

[Carryn Leto]

I read this for my Capstone Thesis course. Frederick Cooper requires a dictionary on hand to read his books but I felt proud of myself for getting through it with the ability to understand it. Cooper raises some very important points about the use of generalized terms as tools for analysis in History and how it is not effective. The main argument is that we need to sharpen our tools of analysis to begin to take note of all the possibilities and individual experiences that History involves.

[Jack Raslich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview of African/Asian colonial historiography and concepts, with solid specific histories included.

[Ian Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cooper is absolutely not having it in the best possible way.

[Vivian Blaxell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very meaty introduction. The rest not so much. Perhaps three sentences about almost 80 years of Japanese imperialism and a map purporting to show the reach of the Empire of Japan in 1910 but which leaves out Taiwan and the possessions in Liaoning.

[Jason Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is especially important for those of you who didn't realize that we should be questioning colonialism at all.