The End of Colonialism? The Colonial Modern in The Making of Global Modernity

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The End of Colonialism? The Colonial Modern in the

Making of Global Modernity
Article in boundary 2 · March 2005

DOI: 10.1215/01903659-32-1-1
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The End of Colonialism? The Colonial Modern
in the Making of Global Modernity
Arif Dirlik
Over the last decade, discourses of globalization and postcoloniality

have diminished the value of the concept of colonialism not only for the
present but for our understanding of the past. The history of the last five hun-
dred years has been reworked as a march toward globality, and the power
relations that shaped global history have disappeared into localized contin-
I am grateful to a number of friends and colleagues for taking the time to read and com-
ment on this article. Their advice and encouragement were much appreciated, even when
not taken: Paul Bové, Chris Connery, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Henry Giroux, Ulf Hedetoft,
Bruce Knauft, Jeff Ostler, Paik Nak-chung, Roxann Prazniak, Neil Smith, and Rob Wil-
son. This article was presented initially as a keynote address at the Faculty-Student Con-
ference ‘‘Rethinking Citizenship: Power, Location, and Resistance,’’ Hampshire College,
March 8–10, 2004; as a seminar presentation in the Department of Anthropology, the New
University of Bulgaria (Sophia), March 31, 2004; and as an invited lecture at the Center
for History, Society, and Culture at the University of California–Davis, April 13, 2004. I am
grateful to participants in these events for their comments and responses, but especially to
the organizers, Professors Vivek Bhandari, Kimberly Chang, and Flavio Risech of Hamp-
shire College; Professor Magdalena Elchinova of the New University of Bulgaria; and Pro-
fessor John R. Hall of University of California–Davis, director of the Center for History,
Society, and Culture.
boundary 2 32:1, 2005. Copyright © Arif Dirlik.

2 boundary 2 / Spring 2005
gencies, deprived of the structural centrality assigned to them in an earlier

historiography.
I would like to make a case here not only for the importance of retain-
ing the centrality of colonialism to the globalizing forces of the past but also
for the fundamental importance of the colonial past in shaping the present.
I have argued in a recent discussion that the concept of ‘‘global modernity’’ is
more appropriate than vaguely conceived notions of globalization for grasp-
ing the problem of modernity in its contemporary phase or appearance.1
I would like to further consider here the relationship of global modernity to
colonial modernity, and to discourses of alternative or multiple modernities
that more often than not give priority to imagined and hegemonic claims of
culture over the forces of historical capitalism that have shaped modernity
globally for the last half millennium.
While I disagree with the implications of these discourses, however, it
is also important, in my opinion, to address the questions they have raised,
most importantly with regard to earlier usages of the term colonialism, which
erased the actions and the subjectivities of the colonized in a one-sided
approach to the construction of the modern world by Euro-American capi-
talism and imperialism. Global modernity presently reveals how important
these voices are, and were, if only in forms that were worked over by the
colonization of the world by capitalist modernity. The term colonial moder-
nity is significant most importantly because it recognizes the voices of the
colonized without dissipating into globalization or postcolonial blurrings the
power relations that have shaped the globe as we encounter it today.
I suggest below that shifts in the understanding and representation of
colonialism are not fortuitous but are bound up with shifts in power globally
between and within nations which favor those groups and classes that were
the products of colonialism, that perceive in the colonial past not obstacles
to modernity but crucibles of their own formation—and of the alternative
modernities for which they speak. While the contemporary world has bro-
ken with the past in significant ways, enabling these shifts, it also bears
upon it the marks of the world of colonial modernity—the modern world, in
other words—of which it is the product. It may be stretching the point to
describe the condition of global modernity as the historical fulfillment of colo-
nial modernity, but the perspective of colonial modernity may nevertheless
enable new departures in the questions we raise concerning the present
1. Arif Dirlik, ‘‘Global Modernity: Modernity in an Age of Global Capitalism,’’ European Jour-
nal of Social Theory 6, no. 3 (August 2003): 275–92.
Dirlik / The End of Colonialism? 3
and the futures to which it may point. At the very least, it is of some help in
explaining a widespread ambivalence regarding the present’s relationship
to its past over questions of globalization versus imperialism, a centered
world of Empire versus a decentered world of civilizations in conflict, and
issues of domination and hegemony in this world. The globalization of colo-
nial modernity may also help account for a sense—shared by some of us—
of the immanence of fascism in contemporary global modernity.
Global Modernity
I understand the term global modernity in the singular, as a ‘‘singu-

lar modernity,’’ to use Fredric Jameson’s phrase, that is nevertheless pro-
ductive of contradictory claims on modernity for which it has come to serve
as a site of conflict.2 My insistence on the singularity of global modernity
arises out of a recognition of some validity to arguments for globalization
and the global commonalities it implies. At the same time, global modernity
as a concept is intended to overcome a teleological (and ideological) bias
imbedded in the very term globalization: the suggestion of tendencies to
global commonality and homogeneity. It recognizes as equally fundamen-
tal tendencies to fragmentation and contradiction that are also products of
globalization and of past legacies that find exaggerated expression in their
projection upon a global scene. Globalization in this perspective implies not
just some naïve expectation of a utopianized global village or, conversely,
an undesirable global hegemony, depending on perspective, but a prolifera-
tion of boundaries globally, adding new boundaries to already existing ones
even as modernity is globalized. Notions of multiple or alternative moder-
nities, in rendering into units of modernity traditions that are themselves
the very products of modernity, in fact universalize the claims of moder-
2. I stress this point in order to distinguish the argument here from approaches to global
modernity in the plural, as in the case of the essays included in the collection Global
Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (Thousand Oaks,
Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995), or ‘‘Multiple Modernities,’’ ed. S. N. Eisenstadt, special
issue, Daedalus 129, no. 1 (Winter 2000). The former volume renders ‘‘global modernities’’
into a stand-in for globalization. The Daedalus volume recognizes the singular origins of
modernity, but some of the contributions nevertheless stress differences based on culture
over the commonalities of modernity. These approaches are problematic, I think, precisely
because of their tendency to sweep under the rug issues of the colonial in modernity in the
name of globalization. For ‘‘singular modernity,’’ see Fredric Jameson, A Singular Moder-
nity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002).
nity by appropriating them as endowments of otherwise vastly different and

complex pasts.3 These claims often are also oblivious to the historicity of
the present and assume that present differences or commonalities may be
read into the future, which is quite problematic. The long historical struggle
against colonialism and unequal power relations has given way over the last
two decades to conflicts over modernity informed by national or civilizational
cultural presence in globality, even as nations and civilizations are rendered
more tenuous in their existence by the globalizing pressures of an expand-
ing transnational capitalism. This is also what renders the past—colonial
modernity—quite relevant to the understanding of the present, with intensi-
fying struggles to reconfigure the relationships of power that have shaped
the world as we confront it today.
If globalization means anything, it is the incorporation of societies
globally into a capitalist modernity, with all the implications of the latter—
economic, social, political, and cultural. While dynamized by the homoge-
nizing and integrative forces and urges of capital, and its attendant or-
ganizational and cultural demands, globalization has complicated further
contradictions between and within societies, including a fundamental con-
tradiction between a seemingly irresistible modernity and past legacies that
not only refuse to go away but draw renewed vitality from the very global-
izing process. Intensified and accelerated interactions between societies—
which justify the discourse of globalization—are surely signs of the modern.
Yet these same relationships render modernity into a site of conflict and con-
tention, raising important questions about its historical and ethical meaning
(or meaninglessness).
Most revisionist studies of modernity and modernization project upon
the past contemporary perspectives of globality and argue that modernity all
along has been global in scope, plural in form and direction, and hybrid not
only across cultural boundaries but also in the relationship of the modern to
the traditional. I do not question these conclusions. I nevertheless suggest
that there is much clarity to be gained from viewing ‘‘global modernity’’ as
a period concept, to contrast it with a preceding period that, for all its com-
3. I have discussed this in a number of places for the case of China, most notably in ‘‘Con-
fucius in the Borderlands: Global Capitalism and the Reinvention of Confucianism,’’ bound-
ary 2 22, no. 3 (November 1995): 229–73. For an illuminating discussion of the manner
in which the assumptions of modernity were internalized into Indian history, see Gyan
Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1999). Prakash’s discussion is particularly relevant here for his
deployment of ‘‘colonial modernity’’ in addressing this issue.
plexities, was indeed marked by Euro-American domination and hegemony.

The nearly unchallenged U.S. domination of the world presently is a con-
tinuation of the power relations of modernity, but it is a world that has been
transformed significantly in its economic and political configurations. For all
the concentration of naked power, this world, when compared to a previous
period of modernity dominated by Euro-America, is decentered ideologically
and organizationally, including in the emergent values and organizations
of political economy, which makes it possible to speak of ‘‘globalcentrism’’
against an earlier Eurocentrism.4 Euro-American centrism is by no means
dead culturally or politically, but it has lost its hegemony, which may be the
most important element in the militarization of U.S. foreign policy.
Modernity has been globalizing all along, but the realization of global
modernity was obstructed by two products of capitalist modernity itself: colo-
nialism and socialism. Decolonization since World War II has restored the
voices of the colonized and opened the way to recognition of the spatial and
temporal copresence of those whom a Eurocentric modernization discourse
had relegated to invisibility and backwardness. Decolonization owed much
to socialism as an ideology and the presence of socialist states. But so long
as socialism persisted as a viable alternative to capitalism, the effects of
decolonization were dissolved into the teleologies of Eurocentrically con-
ceived modernity. The decline and fall of socialism in the course of the 1980s
opened the way to the globalization of capital. It also eliminated socialism
as a crucial obstacle to cultural appropriations—and, therefore, to the pro-
liferation—of modernities, which now find expression in the fragmentation
of a single modernity into multiple and alternative modernities. Question-
ing of Eurocentric teleology in either the capitalist or the socialist guise has
revealed modernity in its full historicity, and ‘‘geohistorical’’ diversity,5 which
is a condition of what I describe here as global modernity.
It was capitalist modernity that produced the societies—as we have
them presently—which now make their own claims on modernity against
Euro-American domination. The disappearance of the socialist alternative
to capitalism may be one important reason for the ascendancy in these
claims of arguments based on cultural autonomy or persistence. But so is
4. Fernando Coronil, ‘‘Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s

Nature,’’ Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 351–74.
5. For ‘‘geohistorical,’’ see Peter J. Taylor, Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Historicity in my usage below is quite the
same as Taylor’s ‘‘geohistory,’’ as I denote by its both temporal and spatial dimensions of
location.
the globalization of capital in the emergence of new centers of corporate

capital, most importantly in East and Southeast Asia, in the increasingly
diverse labor force that staffs transnational corporations, and in the trans-
nationalization of marketing and advertising, which create new cultural fault
lines that call for close management of culture. Culture looms large in con-
temporary scholarship and politics, as it is deployed in a number of capaci-
ties: in opposition to modernity, in explanations of local appropriations of
the modern, or in its newfound significance as an instrument of political and
corporate management. This new situation is a product of modernity, but
it needs to be recognized nevertheless for the new kinds of contradictions
it presents, which differentiate it from a period of Eurocentric modernity.
Global modernity unifies and divides the globe in new ways. It does not do
to emphasize one or the other, as with naïve ideas of global unity expressed
in slogans of globalization or obscurantist notions of conflict that see the
world fracturing along ‘‘cultural’’ divides impervious to all common political
and economic activity, as well as to the pervasiveness of class, gender, and
various spatial divisions that cut across ‘‘cultural’’ boundaries.
The globalization of modernity needs to be comprehended not just
in the trivial sense of an originary modernity reaching out and touching all,
even those who are left out of its benefits, as in the ideological deploy-
ments of globalization, but more importantly as a proliferation of claims on
modernity. These so-called traditions no longer imply a contrast with moder-
nity, as they did in modernization discourse or the domain of backward-
looking conservatism, except in exceptional instances—such as the Taliban,
for instance—but are invoked increasingly to establish claims to alternative
modernities (only rarely, to alternatives to modernity). They point not to the
past but, taking a detour through the past, to an alternative future. They
have taken over from a now defunct socialism the task of speaking for those
oppressed or cast aside by a capitalist modernity and pointing to different
possibilities for the future.
The irony is that these claims to difference in most cases presuppose
a commonality where assumptions of progress and development are con-
cerned—in a fetishization of development, or developmentalism, for which
the sole model is capitalist development, with some local modifications, the
future of which remain highly uncertain. The contradictions these claims
present are very real, and significant culturally and politically. Bolstered by
success in development, assertions of cultural difference proliferate, break-
ing down the universalist presuppositions of Eurocentric models of moder-
nity. But the cultural assumptions of claims to difference are themselves
subject to disintegrative forces in their very mobilization in the cause of

development, as development produces social and cultural forces, including
cosmopolitan classes, that are not easily containable within imagined cul-
tural crucibles. This is what I have in mind when I refer to the universalization
of the contradictions of a capitalist modernity, not just between societies but,
more importantly, within them.
These contradictions also make it increasingly difficult to speak of
colonialism, not only at the present but, by implication, in the histories of
which the present is a product in its own complicated and multidirectional
transformations. Colonialism also loses much of its critical power with the
abolition of the temporal gap between modernity and tradition, which only
a generation ago justified both a progressivist and Eurocentric moderniza-
tion discourse as well as a radical criticism of the colonialist impulses that
informed it. This is not to suggest that those impulses have disappeared
from global politics, but they appear in a far more complicated guise than
they did earlier, a guise that undercuts the ability of colonialism in an earlier
sense to serve either as a historical explanation or a mobilizing political idea.
Global modernity appears at one level as the end of colonialism, a
product of decolonization that has enabled the surge of the formerly colo-
nized into modernity, accompanied by claims to having overcome colonialist
modernity. On the other hand, it may also be viewed as the universalization
and deepening of colonialism, in the internalization by societies globally of
the premises of a capitalist modernity, deeply entangled in colonialism, to
which there is now no viable alternative. This ambiguity opens up the possi-
bility that what we are witnessing presently—from the transnationalization of
capital to human motions to cultural conflict—is not so much decolonization
as it is the reconfiguration of colonialism as capital is globalized, necessitat-
ing the incorporation in its operations of new states that are crucial to global
management and a voice for the classes of its creation who provide the
personnel for that management. It is remarkable that the destructuring and
deterritorialization of earlier regimes of coloniality, rather than put an end to
colonialism, have intensified colonial conflicts—now rephrased as conflicts
over globality, or ‘‘many globalizations,’’ in the phraseology of a recent vol-
ume.6 Earlier colonial structurings of power, including its mappings of both
6. Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity
in the Contemporary World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). The title
refers to the multiplying efforts in the contemporary world to project national/civilizational
values on the global scene. In other words, we are all imperialists now, though we may not
be equally good at the undertaking!
the physical and the social worlds, are still visible in the palimpsest of global
geopolitics. They provide both the context and the horizon of global politics
even as formerly marginalized states and the subalterns of colonial capital-
ism enter the fray.
The End of Colonialism
Colonialism has become increasingly difficult to speak about even as

the term has moved to the center of critical discourse.7 The difficulties of
dealing with colonialism in the present are quite evident in the discussions
provoked by the book Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and their
argument that imperialism has now given way to an abstract Empire, with-
out a clearly identifiable center or boundaries, where empire is as much a
condition of everyday life as it is of a legal order that recognizes no outside.8
The thesis is outrageous against the background of a U.S. imperialism that
respects no boundaries except those of practical power and corporate colo-
nization of the world. And yet few have cared to reject the argument out-
7. Postcolonial criticism has rendered colonialism quite problematic. The concept has
been rendered even more incoherent by the appropriation of paradigmatic postcolonial
concepts (hybridity, borderlands, etc.) for social distinctions that have little to do with colo-
nialism in a strict sense, such as gender, race, ethnicity, etc. The broader the concept
becomes in its compass, the greater the incoherence, and the more remote its relation-
ship to an earlier notion of the postcolonial. The incoherence also has implications for our
understanding of the present. In the works of theorists who are (rightly or wrongly) asso-
ciated with the emergence of postcolonial criticism, such as Edward Said, Stuart Hall,
or Gayatri Spivak, the postcolonial was of importance because of the relevance of colo-
nialism to understanding the present (the ‘‘post’’ implying not ‘‘after’’ but more like ‘‘pro-
duced by’’). This is visible even in the work of Homi Bhabha, whose deconstructive efforts
would contribute significantly to rendering the term meaningless. ‘‘Postcoloniality,’’ Bha-
bha writes, ‘‘is a salutary reminder of the persistent ‘neo-colonial’ relations within the ‘new’
world order and the multi-national division of labour’’ (The Location of Culture [London:
Routledge, 1994], 6). Nevertheless, increasingly from the 1990s, the postcolonial has dissi-
pated into areas that had nothing to do with the colonial and has been rendered into a
literary reading strategy rather than a social and political concept—largely under the influ-
ence of the likes of Bhabha.
8. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2000). I prefer colonial to imperial in this discussion because, in my understanding, while
the two terms share in common the sense of the political control of one society by another,
colonial refers more directly to experiences at the everyday level, including cultural experi-
ences, which are crucial, I think, to grasping the relationship between the present and the
world of colonialism of which it is the product.
right, as I think we are all vaguely aware that something is at work that was
not there before, that this imperialism presupposes a different ordering of
the world than in the days of good old-fashioned imperialism. Thus, James
Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, insistent on the continuity of the present with
the past, nevertheless feel constrained to write:
Using this concept, the network of institutions that define the struc-
ture of the new global economic system is viewed not in structural
terms, but as intentional and contingent, subject to the control of indi-
viduals who represent and seek to advance the interests of a new
international capitalist class. This class, it is argued, is formed on
the basis of institutions that include a complex of some 37,000 trans-
national corporations (TNCs), the operating units of global capital-
ism, the bearers of capital and technology and the major agents of
the new imperial order. These TNCs are not the only organizational
bases of this order, which include the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund. . . . In addition, the New World Order is made up
of a host of global strategic planning and policy forums. . . . All of
these institutions form an integral part of the new imperialism—the
new system of global governance.9
Contemporary ambivalence about imperialism also has implications

for our understanding of past colonialism. The teleology of globalization is
of crucial importance. Postcolonial discourse in the immediate aftermath of
World War II, driven by goals of national liberation, was led to a seemingly
irrefutable conclusion that, in order to have a serious chance of decoloniza-
tion, it was necessary for formerly colonial or ‘‘semi-colonial’’ societies to exit
from, and establish spaces outside of, the capitalist world-system. Whether
we think of globalization as a new kind of imperialism or a postimperialist
stage of modernity, the danger now is in being left out of the world-system,
not in being incorporated into it. This shift also helps account for the dif-
ferences between postcolonial discourse then and now. Most importantly,
from a perspective of the present, the colonialism of an earlier day appears
not as a subjection of one people by another but as one more stage on the
way to incorporation in globality—which is exactly how colonialists viewed
what they were doing when they informed the colonized that they could not
be permitted to stay out of civilized exchanges of commodities or ideas.
9. James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st
Century (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing/ZED Books, 2002), 12.
What the colonialists promoted has become acceptable, it seems, but with
a difference. The formerly colonized, who now wish to join in globalization,
insist on doing it on their own terms rather than be dragged into it as the
objects of colonial power. While there is no shortage in contemporary fun-
damentalisms of an insistence on native subjectivities that have survived
cultural modernity intact, it is subjectivities hybridized in colonial encounters
that provide the most effective medium for the conjoining of the colonial and
the global. The two most prominent expressions of Third World presence
in globality at the present are postcolonial criticism of intellectuals, espe-
cially so-called diasporic intellectuals, and nativist traditionalism, which is
also quite intellectual in its claims but also has broad popularity beyond intel-
lectuals. There are other alternatives that are suppressed or marginalized
by the prominence of these two alternatives. It is important here to underline
how these two alternatives complicate the issue of colonialism.
The novelty of modern colonialism, and its effects on either the colo-
nizer or the colonized, has been in dispute all along. Liberal and conserva-
tive development discourses, most notably modernization discourse, have
for the most part dismissed colonialism as an important aspect of moder-
nity; where they have recognized its importance, they have assigned to it
a progressive historical role.10 Marxists have been more ambivalent on the
question. Lenin’s interpretation of colonialism as an indispensable stage of
capitalism played a crucial part in bringing colonialism into the center of radi-
cal politics globally. Still, while mainstream Marxism has condemned colo-
nialism for the oppression and exploitation of the colonized, it, too, often has
identified colonialism with a progressive function in bringing societies ‘‘vege-
tating in the teeth of time,’’ in Marx’s words, into modernity.11 Third World
Marxists have shared in this ambivalence.12
Nevertheless, if colonialism as a historical phenomenon has always
10. For a recent example of a cavalier dismissal of colonialism, see Gilbert Rozman,
‘‘Theories of Modernization and Theories of Revolution: China and Russia,’’ in Institute of
Modern History (Academia Sinica), Zhongguo xiandaihua lunwen ji (Essays on the Mod-
ernization of China) (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991), 633–46.
11. Karl Marx, ‘‘History of the Opium Trade,’’ in Collected Works, by Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1981), 16:6. It is interesting that in his ‘‘key-
words’’ of modernity, Raymond Williams has no entry for colonialism, although there is one
for imperialism. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
12. See the discussions of capitalism and imperialism by Chinese Marxists in the 1920s
and 1930s in Arif Dirlik, Revolution and History: Origins of Marxist Historiography in China,
1919–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), especially chap. 3.
been in dispute, there was, in an earlier period, some consensus over the
meaning of colonialism.13 Well into the 1970s, colonialism in a strict sense
referred to the political control by one nation of another nation or a society
striving to become a nation. Where a colony had already achieved formal
political independence but still could not claim full autonomy due primarily
to economic but also ideological reasons, the preferred term was neocolo-
nialism. These terms could be broadened in scope to refer also to relation-
ships between ‘‘regions,’’ as in the colonial or neocolonial subjection of the
Third to the First World. While there was some recognition, moreover, that
colonialism was not a monopoly of capitalism because it could be practiced
by ‘‘socialist’’ states as well, the ultimate cause of colonial formations was
installed in the structuring of the globe by capitalism, to which socialism itself
was a response. Hence a common assumption that the way out of the lega-
cies of colonialism lay with some form of socialism, which in practice meant
the creation of autonomous and sovereign economies that could escape
structural dependence on advanced capitalist societies and set their own
developmental agenda.
The issue of colonialism, in other words, was subsumed, for the most
part, under questions of capitalism. To be sure, by the 1960s, questions
of the relationship between colonialism and racism were on the agenda of
postcolonial discourses. This Third Worldism may be the most important
source of contemporary postcolonial criticism. But in the immediate con-
text of national liberation struggles, questions of race appeared more often
than not not as problems in and of themselves but as distinguishing features
of capitalism in the setting of colonialism (the form class relations took in
colonial capitalism, so to speak) that could be resolved in the long run only
through the abolition of capitalism. Anticolonial struggles derived their his-
torical meaning primarily from their contribution to the long-term struggle
between capitalism and socialism. Lenin, much more so than Marx, was
13. My description here of the understanding of colonialism that prevailed during the two
to three decades after World War II will be familiar to most who lived through or study
that period. A cogent illustration of the various points I make may be found in the recent
English-language publication of essays on colonialism by Jean-Paul Sartre, who was one
of the preeminent critics of colonialism during the period in question. These essays, mostly
written in the late fifties and early sixties, were first published in French in 1964. See
Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism, trans. from the French by Azzedine
Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
Sartre’s views were informed by, and in some ways are derivative of, the writings of post-
colonial intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, with whom Sartre had an intimate personal
relationship.
the inspiration behind this view of the relationship between capitalism and
colonialism.
As oppression and exploitation marked the political and economic
relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the relationship ap-
peared culturally as a ‘‘Manichean’’ opposition between the two.14 The oppo-
sition did not obviate a recognition of a structural dialectic between the
colonizer and the colonized. Structurally, economic and political colonial-
ism produced new practices and social formations, including class forma-
tions, that bound the two together; just as colonialism created a new native
class that drew its sustenance from the colonizer, the task of colonization
was rendered much easier by the collaboration of this class with the colo-
nizers. Even where it was possible to speak of a common culture shared
by the colonizer and the colonized in the ‘‘contact zones’’ of the colonies,15
this common culture enhanced rather than alleviated the Manichean oppo-
sition between the two, expressed most importantly in the language of race,
leaving no doubt as to where each belonged economically, politically, and
culturally. In ideologies of national liberation, native groups and classes that
were economically and culturally entangled with colonialism were viewed
not as elements integral to the constitution of the nation but as intrusions into
the nation of foreign elements that would have to be eliminated in the real-
ization of national sovereignty and autonomy.16 These ideas were spelled
out most forcefully in the work of Frantz Fanon, who stands in many ways
at the origins of a radical, critical, and political postcolonialism.
If we are to imagine how ambiguous the discourse of colonialism may
appear to future generations, we need look no further than postcolonial criti-
cism as it has developed over the last decade or so, bringing to the surface
fundamental contradictions in an earlier discourse on colonialism.17 Con-
temporary postcolonial criticism is heir to this earlier discourse in reaffirming
14. Abdul R. JanMohamed, ‘‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial
Difference in Colonialist Literature,’’ Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 59–87.
15. I borrow ‘‘contact zones’’ from Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
16. Chinese Marxists, for example, argued that national autonomy and development could
not be achieved without a simultaneous social revolution that would eliminate the classes,
bourgeois or ‘‘feudal,’’ who were allied to imperialism in their interests. See Arif Dirlik,
‘‘National Development and Social Revolution in Early Chinese Marxist Thought,’’ China
Quarterly no. 58 (April/June 1974): 286–309.
17. For a discussion of the transformation of postcolonial criticism from the 1960s to the
present, see Aijaz Ahmad, ‘‘The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,’’ Race and Class 36,
no. 3 (1995): 1–20.
the centrality of the colonial experience but also parts ways with it in quite
significant ways that ironically call into question the very meaning of colo-
nialism. There were all along Third World voices who were dissatisfied with
the containment of the colonial experience within the categories of capital-
ism and demanded a hearing for the psychological and cultural dimensions
of colonialism to which racism was of fundamental significance.18 These are
the voices that have come forward over the last two decades, when we have
seen a distinct shift in postcolonial discourse from the economic and political
to the cultural and the personal experiential.
The results where colonialism is concerned are quite contradictory.
The shift in attention to questions of cultural identity in postcolonial dis-
course has been both a moment in, and a beneficiary of, a more general
reorientation in Marxist thinking toward a recognition of at least the partial
autonomy of the cultural from the economic or the political spheres of life.
Introduced into the colonial context, this has resulted in a disassociation of
questions of culture and cultural identity from the structures of capitalism,
shifting the grounds for discourse to the encounter between the colonizer
and the colonized, unmediated by the structures of political economy within
which they had been subsumed earlier. The distancing of questions of colo-
nialism from questions of capitalism has in some measure also made pos-
sible the foregrounding of colonialism, rather than capitalism, as the central
datum of modern history.
This centering of colonialism, however, has also rendered the term
increasingly ambiguous and raises serious questions, in particular about
modern colonialism. In many ways, contemporary postcolonial criticism is
most important as a reflection on the history of postcolonial discourses
(a self-criticism of the discourse, in other words), bringing to the surface
contradictions that were rendered invisible earlier by barely examined and
fundamentally teleological assumptions concerning capitalism, socialism,
and the nation, but above all by revolutionary national liberation move-
ments against colonialism, the failure of which has done much to provoke
an awareness of these contradictions. Recognition of these contradictions
also renders the concept of colonialism quite problematic. As Robert Young
writes with reference to Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Memmi:
Sartre’s insight that the Manichean system of racism and coloniza-

tion, apparently dividing colonizer from colonized, in fact generates
18. As Aime Cesaire puts it, ‘‘Marx is all right, but we need to complete Marx.’’ Quoted in
Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), 133.
dynamic mutual mental relations between colonizer and colonized

which bind them in the colonial drama, was further elaborated by
Albert Memmi in his demonstration that the dialectic also involved
what Hegel had called the ‘‘excluded middle’’: the spectral presence
of the liminal, subaltern figures who slip between the two dominant
antithetical categories. Sartre’s response was to emphasize the dia-
lectical aspect of his own account, suggesting that Memmi saw a
situation where he also saw a system.19
The difference between Sartre and Memmi to which Young points may be
symbolic of the shift that has taken place in postcolonial criticism over the
last two decades, with Memmi having the last word—although contem-
porary postcolonial criticism arguably has gone beyond what appears in
Memmi’s work as a qualification and refinement of the concept through
personal experience to an explicit repudiation of systemic understandings
of colonialism. To the extent that colonialism has been disassociated from
capitalism, the understanding of colonialism as a system has retreated be-
fore a situational approach that valorizes contingency and difference over
systemic totality.
I would like to stress here three consequences that have issued from
the reconfiguration of our understanding of colonialism and the world it cre-
ated from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. First, the hybridiza-
tion of colonialism has shifted attention from the irreducible divide in earlier
nationalist thinking between the colonizer and the colonized to those ‘‘con-
tact zones’’ where new cultures were forged, in which the colonizer and the
colonized were partners, if not equal partners. This shift has been accom-
panied by questions concerning anticolonial nation building itself as a colo-
nizing activity. Nation building as a colonizing activity may characterize the
history of nationalism in general.20 It has a particular relevance in colonial
19. Robert Young, preface to Sartre, Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism, xiv. See also
Sartre, ‘‘Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized,’’ in Colonialism and Neo-
Colonialism, 48–53, 51n.
20. I should note here that I am not one of those who celebrates the demise of the nation
in the name of globalization. I think that the nation is still important in resistance to imperi-
alism. Despite a great deal of abstract talk about ‘‘global civil society’’ or ‘‘diasporic public
spheres,’’ democracy is still inconceivable without reference to the nation. Recognition of
the colonial moment in nation building points to a fatal flaw at the very origins of democ-
racy. The colonial (and class) character of the nation-state has been exacerbated in recent
years as states have allied with transnational capital, which has also required the deter-
ritorialization of the state from the nation, exposing the postnational state in its colonial
societies, and in Third World societies in general, where the nation is an

import from the colonizers and may be said in many instances to replay the
policies inherited from the colonizers, sometimes as a cruel parody. At any
rate, the universalization of the nation form is itself a sign of the colonial
restructuring of the globe. Recognition of the nation as a product as well
as an agent of colonialism raises serious questions about the very idea of
colonialism, already blurred by suggestions of its historical hybridization.
Second, the discrediting of earlier notions of colonialism, as well as of
the socialist inspiration that informed anticolonial nationalism in many move-
ments of national liberation, has facilitated an emergent tendency to render
the history of colonialism into a teleology of globalization that is increasingly
projected upon the past, rendering the colonial past into one more phase
of globalization. There is an admirable intention in many efforts at histori-
cal revisionism informed by globalization to overcome the Eurocentrism of
past ‘‘world histories.’’ Nevertheless, the extension of historical agency to
other societies in the making of the modern world also renders them com-
plicit in the making of this world, erasing in the process the relationships of
power that were to define that world—which should be evident, one might
think, simply from looking at maps of the world.21 Without any apparent pos-
sibility of an outside to capitalism in the present, the outsides are also in the
process of disappearing from the past, and spaces defined earlier by colo-
nialism and the struggles against colonialism (read the Third World of an
guise. This recognition points also to the urgency of placing on the agenda of radical poli-
tics the recovery of democracy, which is crucial to the struggle for social, economic, and
environmental justice.
21. For examples, see the essays collected in A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World
History (London: Random House, 2002). The organization of this volume is quite reveal-
ing of the workings of globalization as ideology. The volume is, on the surface, quite cog-
nizant of the problematic nature of the concept. This recognition nevertheless does not
prevent the casting of the discussions in a periodization that renders globalization into a
new teleology. We now have, as a result, a new periodization of world history into four
stages of archaic, proto-, modern, and postcolonial globalization. Equally important is the
mobilization of ‘‘other’’ societies, such as China, as an alibi for globalization by rendering
globalization into a phenomenon that has many regional and national origins. Not surpris-
ingly, colonialism as a force shaping the modern world receives barely a mention in the
discussions. See especially Hopkins’s conceptual introduction, ‘‘The History of Globaliza-
tion—and the Globalization of History?’’ where the question mark serves most importantly
to disguise what the essay seeks to perform (12–44). See also Arif Dirlik, ‘‘Confounding
Metaphors, Inventions of the World: What Is World History For,’’ in Writing World History,
1800–2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (London: Oxford University Press
for the German Historical Institute, 2002), 91–133.
earlier postcolonial discourse) are ‘‘naturalized’’ into a history conceived in

terms of a paradigm of globalization and the emergence of a global moder-
nity defined by capitalism—although the capitalism in global modernity is at
best only an ‘‘absent presence’’ in most such analyses.22 Where claims to
alternative spaces persist, it is for the most part in culturalistically conceived
assertions of ‘‘alternative modernities,’’ which seem to be oblivious to the
most basic problems of teleology presented by naming ambiguous histori-
cal developments after the fact, not to speak of the disguise such renaming
casts upon the power relations that played a formative part, and continue
to do so, in the structuring of the world by the twin forces of capitalism and
nationalism. Until only two decades ago, Chinese Marxist historians’ claims
to autonomous ‘‘sprouts of capitalism’’ in the late-Ming, early-Qing dynas-
ties met with skeptical mirth among most historians of China in Europe and
North America. The claim is now on its way to becoming orthodoxy in a
liberal historiography that has taken up the cause of globalization. The dif-
ference is worth pondering in terms of changing relations of power—in the
arcane world of history writing no less than in the real world of global politics.
The final consequence of the attenuation of colonialism that is rele-
vant here is the waning of revolutions. It is quite apparent that revolutions
are no longer possible to entertain as political events because they are
against the law. The historical understanding of past revolutions follows suit.
Revolutionary histories appear presently as histories of failures—or much
worse. The single power that dominates the world order has renamed as
terrorism any act of insurgency against that order, which also disguises the
colonial nostalgia that drives its own urge to reshape the world in a U.S.
imperial image as well as in the interest of transnational corporations based
in the United States. But the revolutions of the formerly colonial or the Third
World had been renounced already by those who had made them, whose
claims to revolutionary spaces outside global capital appeared increasingly
by the 1970s not as a fulfillment of the utopian promises of revolution but
as imprisonment in perpetual backwardness. Since then, the initiative for
development has passed from the advocates of national revolutionary purity
to those more open to colonial hybridization, whose very hybridity qualifies
them for leadership in national incorporation in global modernity. I think few
would argue that the structures of economic, political, and cultural inequality
22. The foremost example of this ‘‘turn’’ may be Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global
Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Frank’s case
is especially powerful as a symbol of the shift in our thinking, as it was associated earlier
with an analysis of the world to which colonialism was fundamental.
created by colonialism have disappeared from the contemporary world. But

it is equally evident that there have been serious changes since World War II
in participation in these structures—most importantly perhaps in the emer-
gence of East and Southeast Asia in a trilateral reconfiguration of global
power. Most important, at a level closer to the ground, is the transforma-
tion of the personnel of global power, which now transgresses against colo-
nizer/colonized divisions in the operations of capital at the level of both
management and labor, with significant consequences. The complicated
relationship between the operations of global capital and the spatial lega-
cies of colonialism is not easily disentangled and requires closer attention.
A possible point of departure is suggested by Manuel Castells in his dis-
tinction between the ‘‘architecture’’ and the ‘‘geometry’’ of the present world
system, which accounts for lasting structures as well as ongoing shifts.23
How this translates into the analysis of power in the concrete calls for closer
examination.
These three shifts in our thinking have played a major part, I think,
in the willingness at the global level to listen to the voices of the colonized,
which were quite absent from analyses of these problems until the 1970s.
From fundamentalist reassertions of traditions to postcolonial valorizations
of hybridity, there is no question that the formerly colonized are presently
part of the global dialogue on modernity in a way that they were not earlier
either as colonials or as revolutionaries against colonialism. The conse-
quences for discourses of power, culture, and development have been quite
significant: claims to alternative development readily acquire a hearing (at
least partly because the alternative as alternative still confirms the now
globalized faith in development) and justify the reconceptualization of mo-
dernity as global modernity. On the other hand, we need to remind our-
selves that these voices are now speaking in a modern discourse of capi-
talist modernity of which they are the products one way or another.
In fact, such voices were never entirely absent in an earlier world of
colonialism, as is captured in the idea of a ‘‘colonial modernity’’ that was
itself a product of colonialism, but expressed a recognition that the colo-
nizers were not alone in shaping the culture of colonialism. The recognition
of this dialectic may go toward attenuating colonialism as a historical force
emanating from Euro-America that reshaped the world. We can also move
in the other direction and suggest that the contemporary world of global
23. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Boston: Blackwell Publishers,
1996).
modernity, fulfilling the apparently irresistible urge of capital to globalize,

itself represents the recognition of, if not resignation to, an expanded colo-
nial modernity, which is necessary to both the global expansion and the
more efficient working of capitalism. I would like to elaborate briefly here on
the concept of ‘‘colonial modernity,’’ which I understand somewhat differently
than the way it has been deployed in some recent work.
Colonial Modernity
Whatever name we may employ to describe the present, it is hard to

overcome a sense of modernity gone wrong, which inevitably makes one
wonder if it was wrong all along! While this sense may be stronger in some
locations than in others, it is there regardless of where we may look. There
are no longer havens from modernity, backward or progressive. This is the
condition of global modernity. It is the product of the globalization of colonial
modernity.
The idea of colonial modernity has appeared with some regularity
over the last few years, largely as a consequence of postcolonial criticism. It
appears in these writings as a concept intended to overcome the binarism
of the modern and the colonial, one centered in Euro-America and looking
forward, the other covering much of the Third World—the term that came
to denote colonial and semicolonial regions after World War II—and iden-
tified with backwardness. Colonial modernity affirms the contemporaneity
and the complicity of the modern and the colonial, rendering the terms into
two inextricable constituents of a relationship.24 The colonized, rather than
being left out of history by virtue of being colonized,25 as was conceived both
24. ‘‘Colonialism and modernity are indivisible features of the history of industrial capital-
ism . . . to reestablish three points: The first is that ‘modernity’ must not be mistaken for
a thing in itself, for that sleight of hand obliterates the context of political economy. The
second is that once modernity is construed to be prior to colonialism, it becomes all too
easy to assume, wrongly, the existence of an originary and insurmountable temporal lag
separating colonialism from modernity. Thus, the third point is that the modernity of non-
European colonies is as indisputable as the colonial core of European modernity.’’ See Tani
Barlow, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani Barlow
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–20, esp. 1.
25. ‘‘Colonial modernity,’’ at least in some usages, is endowed with normalcy as any other
kind of modernity. Thus the editors of a recent volume on Korean modernity write, ‘‘‘True
modernity’ here would mean that an independent and discrete Korean modernity was
interrupted by the imposition of Japanese colonial rule. Yet this precolonial modernity is
also described using a Western-centered conception of the key elements of modernity. It
in colonial and postcolonial nationalist historiography, now acquire a history

as agents in a colonial modernity they helped fashion with their participa-
tion in its workings. This perspective is neither wrong nor unreasonable. But
it is as partial as the earlier view it has replaced, which valorized not the
hybrid products of colonialism, which it did recognize, but the revolutionary
subject, equally a product of the colonial encounter, who rejected the pos-
sibility of an accommodation with colonialism and sought through the anti-
colonial struggle to overcome bourgeois modernity in general in search of
an alternative—not to modernity as such but to bourgeois modernity. The
alternative modernities that now assert themselves against Euro-American
paradigms of modernity are products of the interaction between particular
colonialisms and precolonial native legacies, which are fashioned into local-
ized modernities by the subjects of colonial modernity. These are now also
the subjects of global modernity, who assert themselves on a global scene
in the ideological spaces seemingly evacuated by a ‘‘provincialized’’ Euro-
America, in tenuous negotiation over the future of modernity that frequently
degenerates into the reassertion of colonial practices.
Colonial modernity in much of this contemporary postcolonial writing
is thus impossible to separate different models of modernity in such a manner’’ (Gi-wook

Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea [Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1999], 382n18). Shin and Robinson stress the unequal power rela-
tions that shaped this colonial modernity, including the unevenness that resulted from it
(11). Their work nevertheless has been received with some resentment in Korea for eras-
ing or downplaying colonialism (I owe this to a personal communication from Professor
Paik Nak-chung). In some discussions of modernity under the aegis of colonialism, the
word colonial itself does not even appear with any prominence. See, for example, Leo
Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–
1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), which deliberately privileges
the colonial modern as the modern. For an elaborate affirmation of the modernity of colo-
nial modernity against its nationalist and Marxist critics who stress its deficiencies (its
‘‘lacks’’), see Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘‘Subaltern Histories and Post-Enlightenment Rational-
ism,’’ in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, ed. Dipesh
Chakrabarty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 20–37. With his own commit-
ment to the postcolonial, Chakrabarty is vague on the coloniality of the modern at the
present. The deployment of ‘‘colonial modernity’’ that comes closest to my argument here
is in Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese
Jazz Age (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). Jones underlines the transforma-
tive power of the colonial, its foundations in political economy, and its persistence even in
its radical or right-wing appropriations for nationalist purposes. He is vague, however, on
its long-term applications, partly because his study stops in 1937, and partly because of
a tendency to merge the colonial into the transnational.
is intended, on the one hand, to reaffirm the modernness of the colonized

and, on the other hand, to undermine Eurocentric claims to a modernity
that can be conceived apart from colonialism. Without questioning either
the historical or the political validity of this impulse, I would like to suggest
nevertheless that the urge to rescue the colonized for history also calls for
some caution against tendencies to a reductionist equation of the modern
and the colonial, which, though inextricably related, nevertheless are not
reducible to one another; to the dispersal of modernity into an endless num-
ber of modernities, which, accompanied by a rejection of totalities, deprives
modernity even of synechdochal unity, depriving it of all meaning; to down-
play structural inequalities that globally shaped colonial modernity; and to
dissolve dialectical interplays between the actors of colonial modernity into
diffuse borderland hybridities that dispense with the necessity of account-
ing for power relations that shape the borderlands and their social, political,
and cultural products.
I would like to suggest that rather than collapse the two terms, it may
be more productive both intellectually and politically to identify the colonial
in the modern, and the modern in the colonial, which may enable both an
avoidance of the teleology of modernization and the somewhat naïve urge
in Third Worldist anticolonialism to overcome the modern. At a time when
reactionary fundamentalism is on the rise globally, some caution is neces-
sary politically in casting the modern into the prison house of the colonial.
On the other hand, an unqualified identification of the colonial as modern—
except in the very specific historical sense of locating it in terms of relation-
ships—obscures conflicts over modernity among the colonials themselves
and may also end up depriving criticism of its ability to deal with reactionary
elements in formerly colonial societies, as all are now qualified as modern
out of historical location, as if modern itself could have no substantial con-
tent aside from such relationships.
Colonial modernity is best viewed as a structural relationship, dyna-
mized by a capitalism emanating from Euro-America, that is a product of
the dialectics between the structuring forces of capitalism that have been
global in scope and reach (not universal or homogeneous for being global)
and the many local forces that have been transformed by capitalism but
that also transform it into many local guises, which then act back upon
Euro-American societies with transformative effects of their own. The term
colonial modern, in its original deployment in earlier, colonial times, was
infused with a sense of power relations that might be useful to recall pres-
ently. Robert Rydell describes ‘‘the ‘coloniale moderne’ sensibility’’ in early-

twentieth-century universal expositions:
Rooted in the exotic fascination with the ‘‘Other’’ cultivated at Euro-

pean fairs before the Great War, coloniale moderne—a conjuncture
of modernistic architectural styles and representations of imperial
policies that stressed the benefits of colonialism to colonizer and
colonized alike—developed from the desire by European imperial
authorities to decant the old wine of imperialism into new bottles
bearing the modernistic designs of the interwar years. More spe-
cifically, the coloniale moderne practice—habitus may be a better
expression—crystallized around efforts by governments to make the
modernistic dream worlds of mass consumption on view at fairs un-
thinkable apart from the maintenance and extension of empire.26
Colonial modernity, in other words, was marked not only by inequali-

ties in power structurally but also by inequalities in the ‘‘hybridization’’ of
those who inhabited the contact zones of colonial modernity. The term colo-
nial modernity was used in specifically colonial situations, but it may be pro-
ductive in hindsight to view it as a defining characteristic of modernity in gen-
eral, even where colonialism, technically speaking, did not exist (as in China
or Turkey, for example). Some of these societies had colonial ambitions of
their own, but efforts to find some kind of equivalence between these world-
empire colonialisms and the colonialism of capitalist or socialist modernity
of the kind associated with actually existing socialisms, with the nation-state
at its center, are not very convincing.27 These were the societies that, fol-
lowing formal decolonization, would be renamed the Third World. Now the
Third World itself has lost much of its meaning, but the global inequalities
that informed the use of the term are still very much with us, even if new
mappings have been superimposed upon earlier delineations of the nations
and regions encompassed by the term.
Aside from the hegemonic relationships produced by Euro-American
26. Robert Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Exhibitions (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1993), 62. The participants in the production of various forms of
art identifiable as ‘‘colonial modern’’ included the indigenous people, colonials of Euro-
pean origin, and Europeans influenced by the exoticism of the colonies. Paul Greenhalgh,
Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World’s Fairs,
1851–1939 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1988), 68–69.
27. For one such effort, see Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and
Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
power, it seems to me that the most important instrument of colonialism in

the modern age was the nation-state, which, as I have argued above, itself
was a colonizing force as an agent of modernization. The colonialism of the
nation-state is even more starkly evident in Third World situations, where
the nation-state has claimed for itself a civilizing mission in bringing moder-
nity to the population it claims as its own. Whether we view the nation in
class, gender, or ethnic terms, or in terms of urban-rural or regional oppo-
sitions, nation building, representing the demands of those who view them-
selves to be the most modernized elements in society, has served as the
most thoroughgoing instrument of the colonization of the world in the name
of modernity that is both extensive and intensive: the colonization of physi-
cal space as well as the spaces of everyday life and the interior spaces of
individuals.
On the other hand, it is also important to note that colonialism also
shaped modernity in its original homelands by practices that were evolved
in the process of the colonial invasion and transformation of the world. Gauri
Viswanathan has shown the impact on literary education in England, includ-
ing the teaching of English, of methods developed with great success teach-
ing colonial subjects in India.28 Susan Thorne has brought out the impor-
tance in the cultural formation of nineteenth-century England of missionary
attitudes and practices that had evolved in the colonies.29 French colonial
officials, bringing to the colonies the most modern methods of governance,
believed ‘‘that the arts of government . . . deployed in the colonies were also
applicable in France.’’ 30 We are already well aware from scholarship on the
Third World, of which Edward Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperial-
ism are seminal examples, of the ways in which conquest of the world has
shaped modern Euro-American learning and its organization—which, for all
practical purposes, is modern learning—and the ways in which this learn-
ing has appropriated for itself the learning of the world, discarding ways of
knowing that do not fit in with its imperial claims to truth. Most fundamentally,
capitalism itself may be incomprehensible without reference to colonialism.
28. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
29. Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in
Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). See also
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination,
1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
30. Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 281.
The history of capitalism is in many ways coeval with the history of colo-
nialism, which, as Fernand Braudel has argued, included the colonization
of Europe itself by a world economy expanding from the Mediterranean in
all directions of the globe. In the uncompromising words of Gayatri Spivak:
In the earlier stages of industrial capitalism, the colonies provided

the raw materials so that the colonizing countries could develop
their manufacturing industrial base. Indigenous production was thus
crippled and destroyed. To minimize circulation time, industrial capi-
talism needed to establish due process, and such civilizing instru-
ments as railways, postal services, and a uniformly graded system of
education. This, together with the labor movements in the First World
and the mechanisms of the welfare state, slowly made it impera-
tive that manufacturing itself be carried out on the soil of the Third
World, where labor can make fewer demands, and the governments
are mortgaged.31
We may have come full circle at present, when it is possible to speak

of the structures and the de-structurations—cultural as well as material—
generated by the colonial past in their deterritorialization from the nation-
state, where motions of capital, commodities, peoples, and cultures have
in turn put into motion national or civilizational claims on modernity, giving
global modernity its fluid appearance. Colonial modernity is still visible not
only in the unevenness of modernity as it appears in static mappings of
the world but also in the persistence of colonial spaces and the power rela-
tions that direct global flows. Capital and production are in the process of
being exported to the Third World, completing the task of economic colo-
nization, now in the name of development and globalization. There is an
apparent redistribution of wealth among the laboring populations even as it
is concentrated simultaneously in the hands of a global elite cutting across
national, regional, or other boundaries of First, Second, and Third Worlds.
The jobs of blue- and white-collar workers are exported from the First to
the Third World, even as former colonials travel home to mother in the colo-
nial spaces that refuse to vanish with talk about globalization. If so-called
globalization does not look like the colonialism of old, it is because the
unevenness and inequality created by colonialisms globally is deterritorial-
ized from the nation, and wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of
31. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and
London: Methuen, 1987), 90.
a global elite. One conservative commentator (Paul Craig Roberts) predicts

that the United States will become a Third World country in twenty years!
Some parts already have. We may recall in this regard that the contempt
for the colonials of nineteenth-century colonialists was also extended to the
oppressed and marginalized at home, including the working populations and
women. On the other hand, we need to note also that the state in countries
such as India and the Peoples Republic of China is by now complicit in the
colonial activities of capital, which provides it not only with new opportuni-
ties for development but also with a means to carry through its own colonial
projects internally and externally.32
The legacy of colonialism is also evident in conflicts over cultural and
political identity. Despite a commonplace tendency these days to invoke
varieties of traditions in claims to separate identities, these traditions now
appear in forms that have been reworked (if not created) by colonialism. The
difference now is not between the colonized and the colonizer, but among
those who have been shaped by the colonial past in different ways and
now mobilize against one another identities that are equally—not identi-
cally—products of colonialism but still subject to the inequalities of cultural
power that are the legacies of the past. What I have in mind here is cogently
expressed in a study by Ulf Hedetoft of the cultures produced by British colo-
nialism not just among the colonials but in Britain as well, which now are
visible in conflicting claims to British citizenship.
It is not only in the identity, and identity-crisis, of the modern English

character that the colonial past makes its presence felt, however. At
the other end of the spectrum, the different forms of British colonial-
ism produced a variety of colonial subjects and identities whose self-
image and conceptions of the world were fully as much the product
of the confrontation with the British as the latter’s feelings of superior
32. I would like to recall here, by way of acknowledgment of an intellectual debt, an article
by Masao Miyoshi, published a decade ago, that stands at the origins of my own think-
ing on issues of colonialism and globalization: ‘‘A Borderless World? From Colonialism
to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State,’’ Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (Sum-
mer 1993): 726–51. Miyoshi undertook in this article a sharp critique of then new trends
in the humanities and the social sciences associated with globalization and postcolonial
criticism, and argued the ways in which these trends served as an alibi for emergent colo-
nialism associated more with the transnational corporation than the nation-state. I agree
with much of what Miyoshi had to say, although it should be clear from the above that I
also have a more complicated approach to the persistence of colonialism than one who
would associate it exclusively or primarily with corporate power.
character were the result of the clash with and suppression of colo-
nial ‘‘barbarians’’; interestingly, however—and embarrassingly for the
British—these colonial products were not all simply left to cope with
their own problems in their ‘‘Third World’’ countries following decolo-
nisation, but some of them reversed the colonial migratory move-
ment and, as a result of the form decolonisation assumed (British
attempts to cling to the spoils of Empire through the Commonwealth),
re-appeared on the British scene as immigrants, would-be settlers
and British nationals.33
Conclusion
In addressing the relationship between capitalism, colonialism, the

nation-state, and cultural modernity, among other things, it makes some
sense to keep these concepts separate analytically while recognizing their
entanglement in the processes that we have come to encapsulate under the
term modernity. It is possible to suggest that colonialism in a trivial sense
is as old as the history of humankind. What distinguishes modern colonial-
ism from earlier colonialisms is its relationship to capitalism and national-
ism, which also guarantees its persistence even after colonialism as a formal
system of international relations has come to an end—with the important
exception of indigenous peoples around the world, who serve as a constant
reminder of the persistence of colonialism.34 The culture of modernity, too,
may be incomprehensible without reference to colonialism, both in its for-
mation and in its diffusion over the world, which were part and parcel of the
same process.
The totality created by these relations needs to be kept in mind in any
serious critique of colonialism. Modernity, as I understand it, is the name we
33. Ulf Hedetoft, British Imperialism and Modern Identity (Aalborg, Denmark: Institut for
Uddannelse og Socialisering, AUC, 1985), 2. Colonialism transformed both the colonizer
and the colonized, Hedetoft shows, but did so in unequal ways that now persist in English
attitudes toward immigrants—the formerly colonized coming home to mother, in other
words. See also the essays collected in Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney, eds.,
Post-colonial Cultures in France (London: Routledge, 1997), especially the editors’ intro-
duction, 3–25. These essays deal with the colonial transformation of French and Maghrebi
cultures, the persistence of colonial difference and inequality after decolonization, and the
relocation of Maghrebis in France, attesting to the persistence of colonial modernity in the
very context that invented the term and the idea.
34. For further discussion, see Arif Dirlik, ‘‘Rethinking Colonialism: Globalization, Post-
colonialism, and the Nation,’’ Interventions 4, no. 3 (2002): 428–48.
have given to the historically changing totality that is the product of these
relationships. An analytical separation of the various moments that have
gone into its making is crucial, nevertheless, to grasping these relationships
as contradictions—relationships of unity as well as opposition. If colonialism
has undermined the best ideals of an Enlightenment utopianism—including
the ideal of cosmopolitan coexistence—by mobilizing them in the service of
world conquest, the same ideals have inspired struggles against colonial-
ism at home and abroad, not to speak of the critical perspectives we bring
to the appreciation of modernity. Those struggles, too, are by now part of an
unfolding modernity.35
There is a great deal to be said for recognizing colonial history as
history, rather than as history gone underground (as in nationalist historiog-
raphy), which indeed may be crucial to understanding colonialism not simply
as a structural concomitant of capitalism or nationalism but as a condition of
everyday life. It is also necessary to recognize the ways in which the colonial
encounters with native societies have produced not only alternative moder-
nities but alternative modernities that have produced their own colonialisms
if only in the form of nation-states. The ‘‘janus-face’’ of the nation-state may
be most clearly visible in colonial states where the nation is indispensable in
warding off one kind of colonialism while it seeks to make possible its resis-
tance by a colonial appropriation of local differences.36 The nation-state, in
other words, did not put an end to colonial history but inaugurated a new
phase within it, playing a crucial role in its globalization—by which I mean,
as I noted above, the proliferation of those participating in colonial activity
who, if they do not form a transnational class, nevertheless share a certain
outlook on the world in common, as may be perceived in the rapid global
spread in the use of ‘‘terror’’ to curtail democracy and social justice.37
35. For a study of anti-imperialist thinking during the Enlightenment (France and Ger-
many), see Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2003). Indeed, as anti-Eurocentrism has become fashionable, and less and
less discriminating in its condemnations, we have lost sight of how much contemporary
critiques of colonialism owe to the complex legacies of the Enlightenment, including their
permutations in other modernities. A cogent example is provided by Dipesh Chakrabarty’s
influential Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). This work, often cited as an alibi for anti-
Eurocentrism, explicitly acknowledges the author’s debt to Marx and Martin Heidegger,
two outstanding heirs to Enlightenment modernity.
36. We owe the term janus-faced to Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1981).
37. The British sociologist Leslie Sklair has been the foremost advocate and analyst of the
The concept of class has gone out of fashion these days, partly be-
cause of the failures of class politics but also because the concept has been
the object of systematic forgetting, not just in conservative circles but among
radicals preoccupied with other concerns such as gender and race. Con-
ditions of globality also challenge the idea of class, as they challenge all
similar concepts that found expression within the context of national poli-
tics and nationally oriented social science. We might want to remember,
however, that in its original formulation, at least in Marxist theory, class was
intended to be an inter- or transnational concept. I think it is important pres-
ently to devote closer attention to the transnationalization of class interests,
so long as we remember that, like any other concept, whether at the national
or transnational level, class is marked by heterogeneity and contradiction,
which express its overdetermination by other categories, from the social
categories of class and gender to spatial categories of place and nation.
National leaderships, otherwise at odds with one another, may nevertheless
share common interests in legitimizing internal colonialism or in labeling
as terror any serious political opposition. Transnational elites, at odds with
the nation-state in their activities and ideologies, may share with national
leaderships common interests in the promotion of ideologies of globaliza-
tion. The turn from radical opposition to colonialism and neocolonialism to
accommodation of colonial practices has found expression over the last
decade in the appropriation by new transnational classes of critical efforts to
deal with the historical problems presented by colonialism, resulting in the
dissolution of problems of inequality, injustice, and destructive oppression
into textual ambivalence over colonialism, and the celebration of hybridi-
ties that in some usages does away with even the ability to distinguish the
colonizer from the colonized. Peter van der Veer writes of the work of one
celebrated and widely influential (mostly in First World intellectual circles)
‘‘postcolonial’’ intellectual, Homi Bhabha, ‘‘Bhabha does not find a contra-
modernity, but precisely a modernity that invites intellectuals from the post-
colony not only to receive and imbibe it as in a Macaulayan project of edu-
idea of a ‘‘transnational capitalist class’’ for over a decade, most recently in The Transna-
tional Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001). His contributions in this regard
would be greatly enriched if he were to attend more closely to the increased (and increas-
ingly important) participation in this class of personnel—including intellectual and cultural
personnel—from outside of Euro-America and outside of corporate structures alone. Such
participation also points to the contradictions within this class and the way culture has
become a medium for their articulation.
cating the natives, but to become agents in its reproduction after the demise
of the colony-metropole divide.’’ 38
In real borders, rather than the abstract borderlands of postcolonial
criticism, oppression and discrimination on the basis of race, gender, class,
and ‘‘Third Worldliness’’ refuse to go away. Indeed, class and Third World
origin may be more significant than ever under the circumstances of trans-
national capitalism. As the author of a recent study comparing the U.S.-
Canadian vs. the U.S.-Mexican border writes,
Similar to developments in other parts of the world, U.S. conditions

for entry are thus becoming increasingly formalized into citizenship
criteria that divide contemporary immigrants into several, hierarchi-
cally defined groups. In comparison to nineteenth-century U.S. law
which openly excluded immigrants on the basis of ethnic and national
origin by barring entire groups of people, today’s immigration policies
(with certain exceptions) stratify migrants according to class, educa-
tional and social background as well as the kind of classed position
into which they will eventually be inserted in the United States.39
38. Peter van der Veer, ‘‘Cosmopolitan Options,’’ in Worlds on the Move: Globalization,
Migration, and Cultural Security, ed. Jonathan Friedman and Shalini Randeria (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2004), 167–78, esp. 171. Bhabha is the foremost (and popular) advocate of
‘‘ambivalence at the site of the colonial.’’ He himself confesses to a ‘‘taste for in-between
states and moments of hybridity,’’ which no doubt endears him to power-holders who would
rather take colonialism out of the picture both in history and in contemporary globaliza-
tion. Bhabha’s contributions to the erasure of colonialism, one suspects, played a crucial
part in earning him a place at the pinnacle of globalizers at the World Economic Forum,
convened in Davos in 2003. For his ‘‘taste,’’ see Bhabha, Location of Culture (London:
Routledge, 1994), 208. For his participation in Davos, see the Web page for the World
Economic Forum, 2003, http://www.weforum.org.
39. Claudia Sadowski-Smith, ‘‘Reading Across Diaspora: Chinese and Mexican Undocu-
mented Immigration Across U.S. Land Borders,’’ in Globalization on the Line: Culture,
Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders, ed. Claudia Sadowski-Smith (New York: Pal-
grave, 2002), 69–97, esp. 79. This article also shows, without stressing the point, that the
differences between the First World boundary between the United States and Canada,
and the First–Third World boundary between the United States and Mexico has been
attenuated considerably, especially since 9/11, as Canada has appeared increasingly as
a First World conduit for Third Worlders headed for the United States. The importance of
class for understanding contemporary migration is very much in evidence in the case of
Chinese (or East Indian migrants, among others). While those with wealth and prestige
may enjoy the benefits of ‘‘flexible citizenship’’ (in Aihwa Ong’s term), those who hail from
the lower social ranks drown at sea, perish in containers, or languish in prisons as they
seek to get smuggled into the United States and Europe. See Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizen-
These very real problems of class inequality and discrimination in

actual borders and global motions of people are suppressed in certain
brands of postcolonial criticism, which foreground the experiences and ide-
ologies of those who, by virtue of privileged access to modernity under con-
ditions of colonial or neocolonial regimes, are better suited than others to
relocate to the equally privileged spaces of cosmopolitanism under trans-
national capitalism. As Aijaz Ahmad puts it, ‘‘. . . the ideological ambiguity in
these rhetorics of migrancy resides in the key fact that the migrant in ques-
tion comes from a nation which is subordinated in the imperialist system
of intra-state relationships, but, simultaneously, from the class, more often
than not, which is the dominant class within that nation—this, in turn, makes
it possible for that migrant to arrive in the metropolitan country to join not the
working classes but the professional middle strata, hence to forge a kind of
rhetoric which submerges the class question and speaks of migrancy as an
ontological condition, more or less.’’ 40 We might add that access to colonial
education—not necessarily restricted to the upper classes Ahmad speaks
of—itself becomes a marker of class privilege under circumstances of colo-
nialism or neocolonialism. It is not very surprising that those who are forged
in the crucible of colonialism, and their take on the present as well as on
the colonial past, should be welcomed with unqualified celebration in First
World institutions of power. It is here that global modernity appears at its
most undisguised as the fulfilment of colonial modernity.
Recognition of colonial modernity as history, rather than some kind
of aberration in time, may be crucial to continued struggles for social justice
and democracy. There is presently a proliferation also of struggles against
the colonialism of states and capital that is worldwide in scope. It may be
that many of us in the contemporary academic and intellectual worlds are
unable to grasp the fears and hopes that drive these struggles, and we fail
to appreciate them as the anticolonial struggles that they are because our
own intellectual and institutional context is both a beneficiary and a constitu-
ship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999);
and Peter Kwong, Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor
(New York: New Press, 1999). For important discussions of the relationship between colo-
nialism, global capitalism, and migration, with emphasis on legal questions, see ‘‘Sympo-
sium: Citizenship and Its Discontents: Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagi-
nation,’’ ed. Ibrahim J. Gassama, Robert S. Chang, and Keith Aoki, special issue, Oregon
Law Review 76, nos. 2, 3 (Summer, Fall 1997), especially the introduction by the editors
and the articles by Tayyab Mahmud and Kunal M. Parker.
40. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 13.
ent of colonial modernity. Visions of postcolonial globalization and diasporic

hybridization, seemingly the antidotes to colonialism in their tolerance for
temporal multilinearity and social diversity, are themselves premised very
much on the legacies of colonialism and distract attention from the necessity
of confronting colonial modernity as a global political and ideological issue.
The world structured by colonial modernity has not ended with the
inclusion among the colonizers of the formerly colonized, either as individu-
als, corporations, or nations—as with the ‘‘coalition of the willing in Iraq,’’
which, however illusory as an entity, claims global legitimacy by virtue of
including within it peoples of all continents and colors, colonizers as well as
their former colonials. On the other hand, decolonization in either a political
and ideological sense carries little meaning when the nation-state is recog-
nized as a colonial institution. To be thorough, in other words, decolonization
cannot be limited merely to an escape from Euro-American colonialism into
some imagined national culture but must go further to question the coloniz-
ing implications of the idea of a national culture backed up by the power of
the nation-state. The urgency of this question should be especially evident
in the present. In its alliance with transnational capital—particularly evident
not just in the United States but in a formerly socialist state such as the
People’s Republic of China—the state seeks to minimize its responsibility
to the society, which is its source of legitimacy, and instead seeks to cre-
ate a global space for the operations of capital (including finance, produc-
tion, labor, and markets), which includes the abandonment of the laboring
population to the vagaries of an uncontrolled global market, regardless of
the color of their collars. It may not be long before citizens become once
again little more than a reserve army of labor—and of perpetual war in the
interests of capital.
As I was putting the finishing touches on this essay, the local paper
in Eugene, Oregon, published on the same day, and on the same page,
two reports that I think are quite pertinent to the issues discussed here.
One concerned the plight of Australian Aborigines and the continued mis-
treatment they receive, most recently at the hands of the John Howard gov-
ernment. The other was a report on urban developments in Beijing, the
People’s Republic of China. The Chaoyang District of Eastern Beijing, long
home to foreign embassies, has been for some time an object of urban
modernization and a place where expatriate entrepreneurs and the newly
rich Chinese elite partake of modern consumption practices, from exotic
restaurants to dance halls staffed by women from Russia. Now the dis-
trict is being named after spots in Manhattan, New York. The developer
tells the reporter, ‘‘In Chinese culture, we don’t have all these iconic names
that symbolize prosperity,’’ describing Park Avenue in particular as ‘‘fashion-
able, and the pinnacle of civilization.’’ 41 Both pieces, each in its own way,
point eloquently to the persistence of colonialism, the one in attesting to the
continued colonization and mistreatment of indigenous people, the other in
showing with eloquent simplicity the limitations on the imagination of civili-
zation in minds colonized by capitalist modernity. These limitations, if any-
thing, have become more visible with the end of formal colonialism and the
globalization of capital.
The recognition of the persistence of the legacies and structures of
the colonial past makes the task of overcoming colonial modernity a far more
difficult undertaking than the anticolonial struggles of a generation ago. The
call for such struggle itself seems much less attractive given the experi-
ences with earlier anticolonial struggles and the headlong rush to the lures
of global markets and a global consumption society. What necessitates it
is the economic, cultural, and political violence inflicted daily on countless
numbers in the name of development and democracy, with disastrous con-
sequences not only for democracy and social justice but for the very condi-
tions of life and livelihood. The recovery of those conditions presents itself
as a task of the highest priority against a contemporary preoccupation with
political and cultural identity that perpetuates the problems it sets out to
resolve. If we are to find our way out of a now globalized colonial moder-
nity, we first need to recognize that it is indeed our historically given point of
departure.
41. The articles, respectively, are Jane Perlez (for the New York Times), ‘‘Australia Said
to Push Aborigines’ Plight Aside’’; and Ted Anthony (for the Associated Press), ‘‘A Brand
New Start of It in China,’’ Register-Guard (Eugene, Oreg.), Sunday, April 18, 2004, A17.
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The End of Colonialism? The Colonial Modern in the

Article in boundary 2 · March 2005

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Over the last decade, discourses of globalization and postcoloniality

boundary 2 32:1, 2005. Copyright © Arif Dirlik.

gencies, deprived of the structural centrality assigned to them in an earlier

I understand the term global modernity in the singular, as a ‘‘singu-

nity by appropriating them as endowments of otherwise vastly different and

plexities, was indeed marked by Euro-American domination and hegemony.

4. Fernando Coronil, ‘‘Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s

the globalization of capital in the emergence of new centers of corporate

subject to disintegrative forces in their very mobilization in the cause of

The End of Colonialism

Colonialism has become increasingly difﬁcult to speak about even as

Contemporary ambivalence about imperialism also has implications

Sartre’s insight that the Manichean system of racism and coloniza-

dynamic mutual mental relations between colonizer and colonized

societies, and in Third World societies in general, where the nation is an

earlier postcolonial discourse) are ‘‘naturalized’’ into a history conceived in

created by colonialism have disappeared from the contemporary world. But

modernity, fulﬁlling the apparently irresistible urge of capital to globalize,

Whatever name we may employ to describe the present, it is hard to

in colonial and postcolonial nationalist historiography, now acquire a history

is thus impossible to separate different models of modernity in such a manner’’ (Gi-wook

is intended, on the one hand, to reafﬁrm the modernness of the colonized

ently. Robert Rydell describes ‘‘the ‘coloniale moderne’ sensibility’’ in early-

Rooted in the exotic fascination with the ‘‘Other’’ cultivated at Euro-

Colonial modernity, in other words, was marked not only by inequali-

power, it seems to me that the most important instrument of colonialism in

In the earlier stages of industrial capitalism, the colonies provided

We may have come full circle at present, when it is possible to speak

a global elite. One conservative commentator (Paul Craig Roberts) predicts

It is not only in the identity, and identity-crisis, of the modern English

In addressing the relationship between capitalism, colonialism, the

Similar to developments in other parts of the world, U.S. conditions

These very real problems of class inequality and discrimination in

ent of colonial modernity. Visions of postcolonial globalization and diasporic

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