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This essay seeks to extend the original gambit of this forum, of thinking possible modes of postcolonial sociology, unto a more relational terrain. It takes as its point of departure the vexed status of history in sociology and the hermeneutic suspicion of comparison in postcolonial theory. Any potential rapprochement between postcolonial theory and sociology must engage with the deeply incongruent status of history and comparison across these fields. I attempt to bridge this divide historically by revisiting an anti-imperial internationalist sociology forged in interwar colonial India. I seek thereby to show what Pierre Bourdieu called a “particular case of the possible” and to participate in ongoing efforts to “provincialize” sociology.

In this chapter I argue that the search for a sociological postcolonial critique of modernity should not restrict itself to academic sociology. In Latin America a strong tradition of essayists has at times assumed genuinely sociological tasks. As I have argued elsewhere (Kozlarek, 2009) the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz should be read in this fashion.In what follows I try to show that what could be termed Paz's sociological critique of modernity is essentially related to his critique of the teleological understanding of modernity that expresses itself in modernization theory. In a second step I argue that Paz's alternative sociology resembles a comparative sociology in which different experiences in the processes of modernizations are compared. Finally, I mention Paz's historical reconstruction of colonial and postcolonial experiences, and close with his description of pathological forms of social interaction that colonialism inscribed in the cultural fabric of everyday life.

The main theme of this special volume is the colonial state and its governmental practices. This chapter introduces and contextualizes the contributions by providing a brief induction to recent developments within the study of the colonial state. It then presents the contributions under three perspectives which represent separate yet interrelated themes relevant for the understanding of the colonial state: practices, violence, and agency. Hereby, we also accentuate the value of a non-state-centric approach to the analysis of the colonial state.

The purpose of this article is to introduce the themed section of History of Education Review on “The History of Knowledge and the History of Education”, comprising four empirical articles that together seek to bring the history of education into fuller dialogue with the approaches and methods of the nascent field of the history of knowledge.

This introductory article provides a broad overview of the history of knowledge for the benefit of historians of education, introduces the four themed section articles that follow, and draws out some of their overarching themes and concepts.

The history of knowledge concept of “arenas of knowledge” emerges as generative across the themed section. Authors also engage with problems of the legitimacy of knowledges, and with pedagogy as practice. In addition, focusing on colonial and postcolonial contexts raises reflexive questions about history of knowledge approaches that have so far largely been developed in European and North American scholarship.

The history of education has not previously been strongly represented among the fields that have gone into the formation of the history of knowledge as a synthetic, interdisciplinary approach to historical studies. Nor have historians of education much engaged with its distinguishing concepts and methodologies. The themed section also extends the history of knowledge itself through its strong focus on colonial and postcolonial histories.

Against the grain of the paradigmatic postcolonial analytics of the colonial state, this chapter presents a non-dichotomous comparison of two regimes within the late 18th century Danish empire, which are commonly presumed to be of essentially different kinds – namely the colonial state in Tranquebar in South East India and the metropolitan government of rural Danish society. By focusing, firstly, on practices of policing and, secondly, on the general technology of power that targeted these significantly different socio-political spheres, it is argued that these regimes were governing according to similar strategies: seeking, on one hand, to deploy societal mechanisms of self-regulation and, on the other, to provide a balance and order to the otherwise chaotic forces of the population. On the basis of a Foucauldian vocabulary of government, it is thereby argued that colonialism, at this time and place, had not yet clearly constituted itself as a particular form of rule.

In the periods, following the First and Second World Wars, colonial states across the British empire underwent waves of reforms that were geared toward improving human well-being, from enhancing social conditions, such as health and education, to expanding opportunities for economic and political engagement. The literature on the colonial state typically traces these state-building efforts to the agency of European colonial officials. However, evidence from a historical analysis of Trinidad and Tobago reveals a different agent driving state reform: the colonized. A local labor movement during colonialism forced the colonial state to construct a number of state agencies to ameliorate the economic, political, and social conditions in the colony, thereby resulting in an increase in state capacity. This study, therefore, provides critical intervention into the colonial state literature by showing that the agency of the colonized, as opposed to just the colonizers, is key to state-building, and specifying the mechanisms by which the subaltern constrained colonial officials and forced them to enact policies that improved colonial state capacity.

As a fountainhead of postcolonial scholarship, Edward Said has profoundly impacted multiple disciplines. This chapter makes a case for why sociologists should (re)read Edward Said, paying specific attention to his warning about the inevitably violent interactions between knowledge and power in historic and current imperial contexts. Drawing on Said and other postcolonial theorists, we propose a threefold typology of potential violence associated with the production of knowledge: (1) the violence of essentialization, (2) epistemic violence, and (3) the violence of apprehension. While postcolonial theory and sociological and anthropological writing on reflexivity have highlighted the former two dangers, we urge social scientists to also remain wary of the last. We examine the formation of structures of authoritative knowledge during the French Empire in North Africa, the British Empire in India, and the American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan during the “Global War on Terror,” paying close attention to how synchronic instances of apprehension (more or less accurate perception or recognition of the “other”) and essentialization interact in the production of diachronic essentialist and epistemic violence. We conclude by calling for a post-orientalist form of reflexivity, namely that sociologists, whether they engage as public intellectuals or not, remain sensitive to the fact that the production and consumption of sociological knowledge within a still palpable imperial framework makes all three violences possible, or even likely.

In recent decades, it has become clear that the major economic, political, and social problems in the world require contemporary development research to examine intersections of race and class in the global economy. Theorists in the Black Radical Tradition (BRT) were the first to develop and advance a powerful research agenda that integrated race–class analyses of capitalist development. However, over time, progressive waves of research streams in development studies have successively stripped these concepts from their analyses. Post-1950s, class analyses of development overlapped with some important features of the BRT, but removed race. Post-1990s, ethnicity-based analyses of development excised both race and class. In this chapter, I discuss what we learn about capitalist development using the integrated race–class analyses of the BRT, and how jettisoning these concepts weakens our understanding of the political economy of development. To remedy our current knowledge gaps, I call for applying insights of the BRT to our analyses of the development trajectories of nations.

This chapter is a collation and review of literature that can be considered to form the terrain of sports studies in India. It attempts two broad tasks: firstly, to aggregate these studies, and secondly, to predict the very possibility of a sociology of sport in India. To this end, this chapter is classified into three separate yet intertwined themes: modernity and nationalism; sub-nationalisms or regional nationalisms; and gender, masculinities, and culture. The first section looks at questions of modernity and nationalism within the Indian context through a close reading of studies on sports like field hockey and cricket. The second section is a critical look at the role of sub-nationalisms in complicating the notion of a singular nationalism, as played out in the domain of football in India. Lastly, the chapter examines questions of gender, especially masculinities, as a consistent yet plural presence in all of these literatures. These themes are neither exclusive nor all encompassing, and the chapter produces them in continuity as well as in rupture with one another. It concludes by speculating upon the possibilities and challenges for a sociology of sport in India, with suggestions for possible methodological interventions.

The seminal literature on state formation proposes a model of “co-opt and expand” to explain the rise of centralized nation-states in modern and early modern Europe. Building on this literature’s distinction between direct and indirect rule, other analysts have expanded the scope of this model to explain patterns of state building in the non-Western world, particularly in the construction of centralized authority in postcolonial and postimperial contexts. According to this literature, the failure of central rulers to co-opt local elites has frequently produced weak states lacking capacities of rule in their peripheries. Using archival materials to examine the Albanian state’s relatively successful penetration of the country’s highland communities during its early decades of national independence, this article suggests that state building can proceed along an alternative path called “co-opt and bind,” in which state builders “bind” peasant communal institutions to the institutional idea of the nation-state to legitimize and implement state building goals. The article identifies three mechanisms used by early Albanian state builders to generate legitimacy and institute political order in its remote communities, including disarmament, the institution of new forms of economic dependency, and the invocation of peasant cultural codes of honor.