Towards A Historical Criminology Of Empire: Figurational Explorations

• In Event: EHC-WG Panel 4: Colonialism and Empire in Historical Criminology

Abstract

This paper represents one element of a bigger project focused on reconnecting the resources of classical comparative sociology with contemporary historical-sociological practice in criminology ( Hughes, Crime, Violence and Modernity, 2021 ; Towards a Criminology of Empire, forthcoming). The specific area of organised controversy addressed here is the often claimed marginal place accorded to imperialism, colonial, racialised violence in the classical sociological tradition and Elias’ civilising process thesis more specifically. I contend that the brief reflections on the logics and mechanisms of imperial conquest and colonial domination in The Civilising Process offer the basis for a largely adequate sociological explanation of these processes, crucially across human history. At the same time, it is accepted that these issues remained underdeveloped in Elias’ own work. The paper then examines a surprisingly neglected body of process-oriented, figurational research-theorising which provides a pioneering exemplar of non-Westerncentric research-theorising. The study is Eric Wolf’s (1982) Europe and the People Without History. The paper highlights the latter’s key theoretical and empirical contributions both to explaining the dynamic, shifting and often brutal webs of asymmetrical interdependencies at work in creation of the modern global order since the 1400s, and in striving ‘to abrogate the boundaries between Western and non-Western history’. In conclusion it is contended that the very best non-Eurocentric, long-term research-theorising in social science (see, for example, Burbank and Cooper, 2010, Kumar, 2017, Hobson, 2021) provide us with antidotes to the prevalent appeal of both blame attribution theories and presentist orientations on colonialism’s current legacies and the crimes and violence of imperialism, past and present. In conclusion, I argue for a genuinely cosmopolitan perspective on empire, crime and violence that navigates us beyond the Scylla of orthodox Eurocentrism and the Charybdis of post-colonial Eurofetishism and provides the basis for a critical realist criminology of empire.

Author

• Gordon Hughes, Cardiff University