Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (review)

Colonialism in Question surveys, interrogates and sharply critiques academic production on colonialism over the past half century, highlighting shifting perspectives, from the across the social sciences to literary theory. Cooper’s concern with how questions are posed and how ideas are framed and re-framed are at the heart of this weighty and challenging book. Questions about rights, citizenship, and personhood could ring quite differently depending upon who posed them. Despite fifty years of trying, we do not always get the questions, let alone the answers, right. Indeed Cooper argues that some efforts to get the question right, the scholar’s position right, and the language right, have actually obfuscated rather than illuminated processes.

Cooper acknowledges the many contentious and productive exchanges the question of colonialism has inspired, but he consistently returns to historians’ concerns with process and language. Throughout Cooper argues that, regardless of the power landscape, linkages, limits and mechanisms for change, choices and the watersheds they could produce were necessarily mutual. Colonialism was articulated, shaped and ‘performed’ in a very large arena and its implications could be as interesting in the metropoles as in the colonies.

Cooper presents his arguments in three parts. The introduction and overview of two decades of colonial studies and interdisciplinary scholarship is followed by an interrogation of concepts (identity, globalization and modernity). The third part, called “The Possibilities of History,” is the most narrative and empirical: “States, Empires and Political Imagination” ranges broadly in time and space and pairs well with both the following chapter “Labor, Politics and the End of Empire in French Africa,” drawing on examples from former French West Africa and the earlier chapter on Globalization. The book draws largely on material from Africa, South Asia, and the colonial experiences of France and Britain, but Cooper also ranges very broadly to make some of his comparative points.

The introduction makes essential points about theoretical clarity, and it is worth the price of the book. Parts of the book are ‘vintage’ Cooper. Indeed, half of the chapters between the introduction and conclusion were previously published. Many scholars will have read the Globalization chapter in its original version, but this version works well in Cooper’s overall context. The same can’t be said for the chapter on identity. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s delightful essay “Is the “Post-“ in “Postcolonial” the “Post-“ in “Postmodern?”¹ taught us that one can actually have fun trying to sort out paradigms and posts. Cooper’s identity chapter lacked his ironic humor and was almost pedantic. He makes many of the points that chapter belabors crisply and convincingly in the introduction.

Having barely survived the identity chapter, I was tempted to skip ‘Modernity.’ Reviewers are not supposed to do that, so I persevered. Although it begins schematically, it quickly improves. Cooper’s familiar irreverence and humor return: “We seem to be living modernization twice, the first time as earnestness, the second time as irony.” (148) Although he acknowledges and appreciates a great range of scholarly contributions, no one from Talcott Parsons to Dipesh Chakrabarty, to John and Jean Comaroff to James C. Scott escapes Cooper’s critical reading unscathed. His closing sentence suggests why he bothered to engage identity, modernity and globalization. Their imprecision undercuts the basic principles of good history:

[My purpose…] is to advocate a historical practice sensitive to the different ways people frame the relationship of past, present and future, an understanding of the situations and conjunctures that enable and disable particular representations, and a focus on process and causation in the past and on choice, political organization, responsibility and accountability in the future.” (149)

This important book was a big reach for students in my undergraduate historiography seminar, but it should be required reading for graduate historiography and seminars in comparative history / comparative empires. Cooper’s footnotes are a treasury of annotated bibliography. He implicitly suggests Georges Balandier’s classic essay, “La Situation Coloniale,” ² as companion reading, and even provides an English translation reference. Scholars will be as impressed and enlightened...